Understanding Chinese children's complex writing: Global ratings and lower-level mechanical errors

In the present study, we compared models of overall writing quality, in addition to differences in grammatical usage in this writing, between children from Beijing and Hong Kong societies. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) resulted in a five-element scoring system used to tap overall writing quality in the Beijing sample. In addition, Beijing and Hong Kong children showed certain differences in mechanical errors in their writings. For example, Beijing children exhibited fewer errors in word order and misnomers than did Hong Kong children, but Hong Kong children performed better in punctuation usage than Beijing children. Overall, the present study highlighted some patterns in overall writing quality and also common mechanical errors in Chinese writing among Chinese children.