Conceptualizations Underlying Emergent Readers' Story Writing

摘要

Children develop knowledge of the writing system from an early age, as they move through a sequence of forms: pseudo-cursive, random strings of letters or pseudo-letters, phonetic and formalized writings. If this sequence is a stage-like hierarchy, it would mean that children discard early-appearing forms such as pseudo-cursive scribble, random letter strings, and strings of pseudo-letters in favor of more advanced, later-appearing forms such as invented and formalized spelling. Research so far does not support such a developmental model. Some studies suggest that as new forms are added to their repertoire, children employ both late- and early-appearing forms of writing side by side, often showing a preference for the early-appearing forms even when later-appearing forms are clearly available. Particularly when children are pursuing more complex tasks such as communicating a message (versus offering single words), they may be more inclined to prefer early developing forms of writing above more advanced invented or conventional (formalized) spellings. In a recent study of kindergartners by Borzone de Manriques and Signorini (1998) the predominant form for writing words indeed was conventional spelling, whereas the predominant form for text writing was letter strings, often made up of a small selection of letters.