Early+Years+Writers

** What have you learnt about Early Years writers, text types and phases of literacy development through your engagements with early years learners? **

Children, in literate societies, begin their own form of writing from a very early age. They begin to practice their own forms of writing as an imitation of adults around them and the various things they see them write. The beginning stage of writing mostly consists of large, scribble-like lines that the child reads a meaning into.

Many children by the time they reach prep are at the early-emergent stage, able to form various letters or drawings to represent words, and can either write their name, or something that appears similar. Not all prep students are at this stage at the beginning of their education whilst others can be more advanced, working towards the emergent stage in writing.

As the prep year progresses, many students learn more about words and letters with most students moving into the emergent stage of writing. At this stage, children are able to create letter-like shapes. Children are often spatially aware of spacing between words and can string a range of sounds together to resemble certain word and convey a meaning. At the end of the prep year, it is the hope that most prep students would be progressing towards being Early Writers to be ready for Grade 1.

Writing progress from prep onwards does not always work at such a fast pace, with some students still at a developed early stage, or even still at an emergent stage, in grade 2. This was reflected in the writing of our students. From the children interviewed, we observed a great difference in results. A grade 1 student was able to write simple sentences, including familiar words and displayed the ability to spell words phonetically. Three grade 2 students were also interviewed with a great difference in writing abilities from two children still at the emergent stage of writing through to a child at an early writing stage. The two students at the emergent stage demonstrated an ability to convey a simple message with phonemic awareness when spelling. The third grade 2 student demonstrated an ability to write a more complex piece of writing, with more difficult words spelt correctly. However, like the other two grade 2 students, they did not display much grammatical evidence with a lack of capital letters where appropriate.

 The two grade 2 students that ranked as emergent writers demonstrated a similarity in their level of writing. Both students appeared to be at the same stage, spelling unknown words phonemically, with the ability to correctly spell familiar words. Both students are also at a similar level grammatically, with a similar knowledge of punctuation. The third, early writing grade 2 student was similar to the others in her lack of grammatical knowledge but showed a much higher vocabulary through her spelling and the more complex nature of her sentence.

The text types of our students were limited, as the students were only asked to write a something about what happened in the book they read. For this reason, the text type used was a recount as the writing pieces were simply a retelling or summary in the child's own words.

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