Categories of Referential Content in Expository Discussions of Conflict

The paper presents a developmental analysis of expository text construction abilities of Hebrew-speaking school children, adolescents, and adults. Following the operationalized model of information categorization suggested for narrative texts (Berman 1997; Ravid and Berman 2006), the content of a particular sub-genre of expository discourse was characterized based on a taxonomy of content including Generalized Propositions, Descriptives, and Interpretives. The paper explores the distribution of these elements in naturalistic discourse, a data-base of 80 texts written by native Hebrew-speakers of four different age groups (4th, 7th, and 11th graders, compared with adults, see Berman and Verhoeven 2002). Results indicate that, across age-groups, writers construct expository discussions of the topic ‘Problems between People’ based mainly on descriptive information in the form of well-known or socially-shared facts that flesh out general claims. Moreover, with age, speakers tend to convey their stances and attitudes towards their generalized propositions. The study relates these results to the original, comparable analysis of personal-experience narrative texts sharing the same discourse topic that were produced by the same speaker-writers of Hebrew and considers the implications of both these analyses on a more general division into components of text content: a core, an anchor, and a supplement.