How french and German children of preschool age conceptualize the writing system

As a continuation of research carried out by E. Ferreiro, we adopted a socio-constructivist approach to the question of how young children of 5–6 years of age conceptualize the writing system taking into account both their social background and their preschool system of education. Our sample was made up of 308 children of preschool level; 225 French children and 83 German children were asked to write a series of words without the help of a model. p The results we obtained confirmed our hypotheses: the pedagogical activities used in the French infant schools did not help the children to conceptualize the writing system better than the game activities (which had nothing to do with writing) used in the German kindergartens. Furthermore, we found that the socio-cultural background played an important role in both countries. The influence of the prevailing ideas about teaching and learning how to write, based on maturationism and empirism-associationism, are discussed with reference to the constructivist model.