By Anne McIntyre, Amy Scott, Brigid McNeill & Gail Gillon
Original article: LINK
Helping young children develop their language skills so they can become good writers is a key goal in early education [LINK].
This study examined six-year-old children’s abilities to tell a story both orally and in writing, aiming to understand how generating ideas and transcription interact in early writing development.
The relationship between speaking and writing
Studies show that teaching oral language skills improves children’s writing skills [LINK]. These skills should be central parts of early literacy education.
Generating writing ideas and oral language
Writing down ideas depends a lot on speaking skills because we need to translate our thoughts into spoken words before we can write them down [LINK]. Studies show that oral language plays a crucial role in helping children write. Oral language skills in kindergarten can predict writing quality in first grade and beyond.
Some research indicates that an ability to tell your writing ideas can predict your later writing success [LINK].
Generating ideas and transcription
Research comparing how children develop their ideas (ideation) and the technical aspects of writing (transcription) in both spoken and written forms is limited. However, it may be the case that improvements in oral skills doesn’t immediately transfer to writing. It may take time for oral language improvements to show up in writing.
Key findings
- The quality of children’s spoken and written stories was similar but not identical. For instance, children used more adverbs in spoken stories, but the number of ideas (measured in what’s called ‘c-units’ which is a way of counting complete ideas) was not significantly different between the two.
- There was a strong positive relationship between the number of words children spoke and wrote. In other words, children who spoke more words also tended to write more words.
- The structure of their stories, sentence complexity, and vocabulary were highly correlated. This means that if a child’s oral story had good structure their written story did too.
- Children’s ability to tell stories orally is strongly related to their ability to write stories.
Implications
Telling and drawing their writing ideas prior to writing them down plays a significant role in children’s early writing success [LINK].