By Deborah Wells Rowe
Original article: LINK
This article explores the evolution of understanding regarding young children’s writing abilities. Reflecting on educational practices, researchers and policymakers have previously overlooked the significance of preschoolers’ writing. Contemporary research now recognises early writing as crucial to children’s future writing development. However, despite these advancements in understanding, there remains a noticeable disparity between research findings and the practices recommended by policymakers and observed in many preschool classrooms.
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Children begin to write when they demonstrate an understanding that the marks they make can convey meaning, regardless of their adherence to conventional spelling or letter forms. Preschoolers actively construct foundational understanding and skills about print through early compositional writing experiences. Even children as young as three begin to develop foundational writing skills in composition. They understand that writing can be used to initiate and sustain social interactions and connections with others.
As young children compose and share their own texts, they also demonstrate growing proficiency in various writing processes, such as selecting topics, generating ideas, organising texts according to genre-specific conventions, and even revising their compositions. Overall, contemporary research underscores the importance of providing children with opportunities to create their own texts for genuine purposes, as this enables them to formulate and refine increasingly sophisticated theories about the forms and conventions of writing. Indeed, studies suggest that children with more experience and understanding of compositional features tend to exhibit better writing quality, particularly among 6-7-year-olds.
Engaging in compositional writing activities offers teachers and children an opportunity for meaningful discussions about various aspects of writing, including transcription, genre, structure, revision, grammar, and the use of conventions.
Transcription – Spelling
In the realm of early writing experiences, children are provided with meaningful opportunities to develop their transcriptional skills. For example, they can use and apply their encoding skills (taking the sounds in words and transcribing them as letters in print). When children engage in writing experiences, they undergo a recursive process that involves segmenting the sounds in a word, selecting a letter(s) to represent each sound, and writing those selected letters accordingly.
Studies consistently demonstrate a positive relationship between children’s phonological awareness levels and their ability to transcribe phonetically-informed spellings. Moreover, children who receive instruction in encoding, coupled with adult feedback, outperform their peers on a variety of literacy measures, including word spelling, word reading, phonological awareness, letter name writing, word segmentation, and understanding letter-sound relationships.
These findings also align with meta-analysis research too, indicating that writing experiences and an ability to encode are predictors of children’s later decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling abilities.
Overall, both seminal and contemporary research highlights that teaching children to encode prompts them to see how letters represent sounds in words, leading to improved performance in writing and reading. Indeed, engaging in such activity allows children to integrate and connect key literacy skills essential for early reading development.
Transcription – Handwriting
When children engage in composing their own texts, they are also developing their handwriting fluency — their ability to produce legible letters quickly and automatically.
Research has demonstrated that 5-6 year old’s opportunities to write longer texts is related to their fluency in handwriting and spelling. This relationship is consistent with other findings too, where fluent handwriting is associated with better performance in higher-level composing tasks. Moreover, neuroscience research suggests that handwriting supports preschoolers’ letter recognition and may facilitate reading acquisition by activating brain circuits associated with reading.
It’s evident that opportunities to write also encourages the development of children’s fine motor skills required for fluent handwriting. Engaging in compositional writing tasks necessitates the integration of lower-level handwriting skills with higher-level composing skills, providing children with authentic reasons and motivation to refine their handwriting abilities.
For instance, a study compared literacy outcomes for preschoolers engaged in either reading or writing activities. In the reading condition, adults and children interacted with high-quality children’s books, while the writing condition focused on writing names, segmenting and blending sounds, and discussing letter-sound relationships. Results showed that both groups made progress in receptive vocabulary and listening comprehension, but the writing group also excelled in word reading, word writing, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and orthographic awareness.
Unlike activities focusing solely on transcription, authentic writing activities offer children real-life writerly situations. When children compose their own messages, they simultaneously support their compositional and transcriptional skills and development.
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