Cognitive demands of writing: comparison of two different situations of production

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the written stories produced by Spanish speaking girls of second grade in primary education. The children attended a private school from Cordoba Province, Argentine. The stories were produced under two conditions with different cognitive demands: a) retelling of an oral story, and b) telling a story from a sequence of pictures. The texts were analyzed considering length, the number of narrative categories recovered (Stein y Glenn, 1979), the employment of cohesion mechanisms and the inclusion of fiction formulae The results showed that the performance was better in the stories produced from pictures. This paper also discusses the cognitive demands of the tasks and their possible pedagogical implications.