Intervening in oral and written language to improve the academic competences of secondary school students

Oral and written language are constantly interrelated in literate communities. In this paper, we examined the repercussions of teaching argumentative oral discourse on the development of argumentative writing and vice versa. The participants were seventh-grade students, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: the Oral-1 group, which received an oral language intervention first, followed by a written language intervention; the Esc-1 group, which received the written language intervention first, followed by the oral intervention, and the control group, who attended regular Spanish Language and Literature classes. We assessed measures of both oral and written argumentative discourse at pretest, posttest-1, and posttest-2 to determine the development of both intramodality and intermodality skills. The results showed that intramodality effects were larger for the written than for the oral language intervention. Both interventions produced intermodality effects. We concluded that the teaching of argumentative discourse should incorporate the bidirectional influences between the oral and written modalities.