Managing the written text: the beginning of punctuation in children's writing

This study aims at understanding the use of punctuation in children's early writings in connection with the organisation of the written text. Data are drawn from a larger comparative study in which written stories of Little Red Riding Hood were collected from primary school children who speak one of the three Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The corpus consists of 134 written stories of second grade children from low income families. Different quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented. Results show that all children, in spite of differences in literacy practices, try to make sense of the conventions of a system of writing, including punctuation marks (PMs). Some children seem to assume a ‘graphic principle', while others make sophisticated attempts to distinguish the function of PMs for different types of speech genre. Contrastive textual use of PM seems to be critical also for teaching purposes.     

Comparing fictional,personal, and hypothetical narratives in primary school: story grammar and mental state language

The present study examined the use of narrative categories and mental state words in the fictional, personal, and hypothetical stories written by 150 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades of primary school. There were three main results. First, children were better able to write fictional and hypothetical than personal stories, when considering the total number of narrative categories and the percentages of stories including at least one complete episode. Second, there was clear evidence of differentiation between the three tasks, both in terms of narrative categories and mental state language. Third, the use of mental state words correlated with the frequency of subordinate propositions and the number of narrative categories included in the stories. These findings support the hypothesis of a bidirectional interaction between lexical and syntactic development and suggest that narrative writing involves metalinguistic abilities directly related to the spontaneous use of psychological lexicon. Educational implications are discussed.     

The construction of literate understanding in a literature‐based classroom

This study investigated young children’s developing understanding of three essential features of book language (i.e. autonomy, conventionality, unique grammar) in two curricular genres (i.e. narrative and expository) in a literature‐based, multigrade (1st–3rd) classroom. Each of the 19 participants was asked to compose two written texts (story and report) at beginning, middle and end of the school year. All texts were coded for inclusion of a variety of genre‐specific discursive markers that index the three features of book language. Analyses showed that (a) the children demonstrated emergent understanding of autonomy, limited familiarity with conventionality and an embryonic sense of unique grammar, irrespective of genre; (b) they gained significantly more understanding of the three book‐language features in both curricular genres over the school year; (c) the development of this understanding is genre‐ and feature‐specific, unstable, complex and not consistently associated with children’s grade level. These findings were interpreted from both developmental and pedagogical perspectives. Limitations and directions for future research were also discussed.     

Writing and becoming [a teacher]: Teacher candidates’ literacy narratives over four years

This paper explores narrative inquiry practices in pre-service teacher education program. Written dialogue by teacher candidates provided deep and long term reflection during a 5-year initial teacher education program. This 4-year longitudinal study with 30 teacher candidate participants considers participants’ knowledge formation in becoming teachers, through writing and sharing of letters (with peers) of personal lived educational experiences, and personal stories of theory related to learning, teaching, and teaching practice over a significant period of time. The study discusses letter writing as a narrative inquiry practice in teacher education programs and implications of pre-service letter writing over a significant amount of time.     

Contributions of Emergent Literacy Skills to Name Writing, Letter Writing, and Spelling in Preschool Children

The purpose of this study was to examine which emergent literacy skills contribute to preschool children's emergent writing (name-writing, letter-writing, and spelling) skills. Emergent reading and writing tasks were administered to 296 preschool children aged 4-5 years. Print knowledge and letter-writing skills made positive contributions to name writing; whereas alphabet knowledge, print knowledge, and name writing made positive contributions to letter writing. Both name-writing and letter-writing skills made significant contributions to the prediction of spelling after controlling for age, parental education, print knowledge, phonological awareness, and letter-name and letter-sound knowledge; however, only letter-writing abilities made a significant unique contribution to the prediction of spelling when both letter-writing and name-writing skills were considered together. Name writing reflects knowledge of some letters rather than a broader knowledge of letters that may be needed to support early spelling. Children's letter-writing skills may be a better indicator of children's emergent literacy and developing spelling skills than are their name-writing skills at the end of the preschool year. Spelling is a developmentally complex skill beginning in preschool and includes letter writing and blending skills, print knowledge, and letter-name and letter-sound knowledge.     

Young children's knowledge about printed names

Four experiments examined young children's knowledge about the visual characteristics of writing, specifically personal names. Children younger than 4 years of age, even those who could read no simple words, showed some knowledge about the horizontal orientation of English names, the Latin letters that make them up, and their left-to-right directionality. Preschoolers also had some familiarity with the shapes of the letters in their own first name, especially the leftmost letter. Knowledge of the conventional capitalization pattern for English names emerged later, after a period during which children preferred names in all uppercase letters. When tested with personal names, the kind of word they know best, young children are surprisingly knowledgeable about the visual characteristics of writing.     

To tell a story,to write it: developmental patterns of narrative skills from preschool to first grade

In this 1-year longitudinal study, the authors explored the development of narrative skills between the oral and written form. The authors aimed to assess the predictive power of textual narrative competence on early narrative text writing skills taking into account the impact of spelling ability. Eighty children (M age?=?5.3 years, age range?=?4.9–5.7 years; SD?=?0.29) were followed longitudinally until entering the first grade of primary school. During kindergarten, they were tested with an oral story production task and in first grade with a written story production task. Narratives were evaluated in terms of structure, cohesion and consistency. In the first grade, children were also submitted to a dictation task to evaluate their spelling competence. Repeated measures ANOVAs were performed in order to examine narrative competence development, also considering gender differences, and regression analyses were implemented to evaluate the predictive capability of textual abilities expressed by oral narratives on textual abilities expressed by writing. The results showed some significant differences when scores in kindergarten were compared to scores in primary school. Moreover, the ability to tell well-structured, cohesive and consistent stories predicts the ability to write stories with the same qualities in the sample of participants without spelling difficulty. Instead, the predictive link is not apparent considering those children with difficulties in orthographic ability. This research allows us to reflect about how the medium of writing might interfere, on the basis of the level of mastery, with the opportunity to express narrative skills in the transition from the oral to written code. The central role of writing instrument functionality opens the way to practical implications.     

Name-writing proficiency, not length of name, is associated with preschool children's emergent literacy skills

The goals of this study were twofold: first, to examine whether preschool children's name-writing proficiency differentiated them on other emergent reading and writing tasks, and second, to examine the effect of name length on preschool children's emergent literacy skills including alphabet knowledge and spelling. In study 1, a range of emergent literacy tasks was administered to 296 preschool children aged 4-5 years. The more advanced name writers outperformed the less advanced name writers on all emergent literacy measures. Furthermore, children with longer names did not show superior performance compared to children with shorter names. In study 2, four measures of alphabet knowledge and spelling were administered to 104 preschool children. Once again, the more advanced name writers outperformed the less advanced name writers on the alphabet knowledge and spelling measures. Results indicated that having longer names did not translate into an advantage on the alphabet knowledge and spelling tasks. Name writing proficiency, not length of name appears to be associated with preschool children's developing emergent literacy skills. Name writing reflects knowledge of some letters rather than a broader knowledge of letters that may be needed to support early spelling.     

“Each word shows how you love me”: The social literacy practice of children’s letter writing (1780–1860)

This article draws on hundreds of letters that formed German children’s correspondence with their parents, other relatives, teachers and friends, written mostly between the 1780s and 1850s. Through this study, we see the part literacy played in transformations of bourgeois childhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The article further investigates how children used letters as a means of learning sociability and building relationships within kinship networks. Historians of education have sometimes treated children’s writing as secondary to more authoritative records. Yet we miss something important about the history of literacy education if we disregard children’s writing or use it only superficially. This article considers the genre of children’s letter writing, exploring the conventions and typical subjects which contributed to the social purpose of correspondence. Letter writing is examined as a paedagogic exercise, including the preoccupation with the medium which filled children’s letters and evidence of instruction in letter writing. It demonstrates that letters fostered the participation of middle- and upper-class children in household affairs, kinship networks and cultural spheres connected through school friends and parents’ acquaintances from very young ages. Children’s correspondence documents a lifelong process in the making of class cultures and forging of social ties.     

Improving the writing performance,knowledge, and self-efficacy of struggling young writers: The effects of self-regulated strategy development

Writing is a complex task. Its development depends in large part on changes that occur in children’s strategic behavior, knowledge, and motivation. In the present study, the effectiveness of an instructional model, Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), designed to foster development in each of these areas, was examined. Adding a peer support component to SRSD instruction to facilitate maintenance and generalization was also examined. Struggling, third grade writers, the majority of whom were minority students attending schools that served primarily low-income families, received SRSD instruction focused primarily on learning writing strategies and knowledge for planning and composing stories and persuasive essays. These students wrote longer, more complete, and qualitatively better papers for both of these genres than peers in the comparison condition (Writers’ Workshop). These effects were maintained over time for story writing and generalized to a third uninstructed genre, informative writing. SRSD instruction boosted students’ knowledge about writing as well. The peer support component augmented SRSD instruction by increasing students’ knowledge of planning and enhancing generalization to informative and narrative writing. In contrast, self-efficacy for writing was not influenced by either SRSD condition (with or without peer support).     

The Delicious Alphabet

The Delicious Alphabet is a book consisting of photographs of sweets, drinks and savouries, arranged to correspond to the letters of the alphabet. It grew out of the author's concerns to support emergent reading and writing in ways which acknowledge young children's familiarity with community print. Ann Ketch discusses children's responses to the book and describes the direction her thinking is taking as a result of observing children reading it.     

Are poor Chinese text comprehenders also poor in written composition?

We studied the performance in three genres of Chinese written composition (narration, exposition, and argumentation) of 158 grade 4, 5, and 6 poor Chinese text comprehenders compared with 156 good Chinese text comprehenders. We examined text comprehension and written composition relationship. Verbal working memory (verbal span working memory and operation span working memory) and different levels of linguistic tasks—morphological sensitivity (morphological compounding and morphological chain), sentence processing (syntax construction and syntax integrity), and text comprehension (narrative and expository texts)—were used to predict separately narrative, expository, and argumentation written compositions in these students. Grade for grade, the good text comprehenders outperformed the poor text comprehenders in all tasks, except for morphological chain. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed differential contribution of the tasks to different genres of writing. In particular, text comprehension made unique contribution to argumentation writing in the poor text comprehenders. Future studies should ask students to read and write parallel passages in the same genre for better comparison and incorporate both instructional and motivational variables.     

Markers of cognitive change during the transition to conventional literacy

In the present study I applied theoretical reasoning concerning transitional knowledge to a problem in literacy development. The impetus for the study was the idea that there are times in early literacy development when asynchronous relationships obtain between children's knowledges and strategies about reading (comprehension modality) and their knowledges and strategies about writing (production modality). Integrating their reading and writing knowledges and strategies into more comprehensive and flexible literacy knowledges and strategies is problematic for children during these developmental periods. Yet such an integration is necessary for the acquisition of conventional literacy, which is defined here as being able to write and to read back stretches of extended discourse that are also readable to literate adults with some knowledge of invented spelling. Two asynchronous ormixed-level relationships between the sophistication of children's narrative compositions and their readings of those compositions were hypothesized as indices of transitional knowledge or knowledge reorganization. These relationships consisted of writing behaviors and products that seemed much more sophisticated than children's readings of them belied, and vice-versa. A longitudinal data set composed of 46 children each of whom composed six stories over a two-year period was examined using these indices to select children presumed to be in transition and then to analyze the developmental patterns exhibited by these children. Detecting children who are in transition from emergent to conventional literacy has critical implications for classroom research and instruction. These implications are discussed.     

Practice-based professional development and Self-Regulated Strategy Development for Tier 2, at-risk writers in second grade

In this randomized controlled study, we investigated implementation of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) in story writing by 11 second grade teachers who first collaborated in practice-based professional development in SRSD. Students at-risk for failure in writing were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions in each teacher’s classroom. Teachers implemented SRSD with small groups of students at-risk for failure in writing (referred to as Tier 2 intervention in the Response to Intervention, or RTI, model) in their classrooms; control students at-risk in writing received regular classroom instruction from their teachers. Integrity of strategies instruction and social validity were assessed among the participating teachers. Student outcomes assessed included inclusion of genre elements and story quality, generalization to personal narrative, and teacher perceptions of intrinsic motivation and effort for writing. Teachers implemented strategies instruction with high integrity; social validity was positive. Significant effects were found for inclusion of genre elements and story quality at both posttest and maintenance; effect sizes were large (.89–1.65). Intervention also resulted in significant generalization to personal narrative (effect sizes were .98 for elements and .88 for quality). Teachers reported significantly higher perceptions of both intrinsic motivation and effort (effect sizes were 1.09 and 1.07, respectively). Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

Genres of high-stakes writing assessments and the construct of writing competence

High-stakes writing assessments currently exert a strong influence on the writing curriculum and instruction in schools across the United States. Under these circumstances it is important to examine the construct of writing competence on which these assessments are based, as well as the extent to which this construct supports the goals of secondary education. In this paper we conduct an exploratory analysis of the genre demands of high-stakes writing assessments from three states – California, Texas, and New York – with the aim of discerning, comparing, and evaluating the role that genre knowledge plays in the construct of writing competence measured by these assessments. Our method of inquiry includes both task analysis of the prompts and genre analysis of high-scoring benchmark papers written in response to these prompts. For the analysis of benchmark papers we employed both structural analysis and quantitative counts of key linguistic features to characterize the genres represented in these assessment tasks. Our results suggest a lack of alignment between the genres of the benchmark papers designated as exemplary and the genre demands of the prompts to which they were written. Exceptions to this pattern were most common on the New York assessments, which contextualize writing tasks in tests of subject–matter knowledge. Findings from our exploratory analysis lead us to argue for greater consistency and clarity of expectations in the design of high-stakes writing exams, and for the design of writing tasks that adequately represent the demands of discipline-specific forms of written discourse.     

Relationships between writing motivation, writing activity, and writing performance: effects of grade, sex, and ability

A convenience sample of 618 children and adolescents in grades 4 through 10, excluding grade 8, were asked to complete a writing motivation and activity scale and to provide a timed narrative writing sample to permit an examination of the relationships between writing motivation, writing activity, writing performance, and the student characteristics of grade, sex, and teacher judgment of writing ability. Female students and older students wrote qualitatively better fictional stories, as did students with higher levels of writing ability based on teacher judgment. With respect to writing activity, more frequent writing in and out of school was reported by girls, better writers, and younger students. In a path analysis, grade and sex directly influenced writing activity, while sex, teacher judgment of writing ability, and writing activity directly influenced some aspects of writing motivation. Overall, teacher judgment of writing ability, grade level, and motivational beliefs each exerted a significant direct positive influence on narrative quality, whereas performance goals exerted a significant direct negative impact on quality.     

何顿《自我 无我》中的插用图形

《自我 无我》中的插用图形，可分为替代文字的图形和显示文字的图形两种类型，但它们都具有以形取胜的特征，都与塑造人物有关，并且丰富了文学作品的叙述语言。     

The Story So Far: gender,literacy and social regulation

This article examines ways in which language practices in the classroom — particularly those involved with the reading and writing of stories — are gendered literacy practices. It argues that stories are closely identified with structuring the meanings by which a culture lives, and that popular and familiar stories rely upon dominant versions of femininity and masculinity to be understood or ‘read’. The article suggests that story genres are ‘gendered’ in the way in which they organise sequences of events, in the discursive fields from which they draw, and in the character‐traiting paradigms they prefer. The claim is made that when children write stories they enter into a form of social regulation implicit in the cultural conventions of popular narrative forms. Story‐writing is seen to be a social, ideological activity which often masquerades as personal expression. The article argues that the gendered nature of classroom literacy practices will be more obviously recognised if classroom language approaches are framed from within critical discourse theory and theories of subjectivity; and if the constraints posed by generic conventions and the cultural devaluation of many feminine’ genres, are more deliberately confronted and addressed in the classroom.

Telling fairy stories, even telling good fairy stories very well ... simply doesn't count. The positions of real power and influence in our society necessitate command of genres for which boys’ educational experience provides an appropriate preparation and girls’ doesn't ... girls’ genre competence at primary school is not merely irrelevant but positively disabling. (Poynton, 1985; p. 36)     

Personal Storytelling as a Medium of Socialization in Chinese and American Families

The goal of this study was to determine how personal storytelling functions as a socializing practice within the family context in middle-class Taiwanese and middle-class European American families. The data consist of more than 200 naturally occurring stories in which the past experiences of the focal child, aged 2,6, were narrated. These stories were analyzed at 3 levels: content, function, and structure. Findings converged across these analytic levels, indicating that personal storytelling served overlapping yet distinct socializing functions in the 2 cultural cases. In keeping with the high value placed on didactic narrative within the Confucian tradition, Chinese families were more likely to use personal storytelling to convey moral and social standards. European American families did not treat stories of young children's past experiences as a didactic resource but instead employed stories as a medium of entertainment and affirmation. These findings suggest not only that personal storytelling operates as a routine socializing practice in widely different cultures but also that it is already functionally differentiated by 2,6.