Writing CLA theories.

Emergent Literacy. 

She identified key principles children seem to adopt in their early writing, ideas are influential as they help parents and educators to recognize that writing skills develop and should be valued long before the child is producing formal texts.

Clays principles of development: 

Recurring - knows limited number of letters and uses them repeatedly. 

Directional - left to right. 

Generating - realises there are a limited number of letters but they can be used in different ways. 

Inventory - packs knowledge together into words they know. 

(Rowdy Dogs Go Insane) 

His research into print awareness, characterises children's early writing as following three principles: 

1. Functional - writing can serve a purpose. 

2. Linguistic - words and letters have directionality. 

3. Relational - connect what they write with spoken words, understand alphabet has meaning. 

(Frank Loves Dogs) 

He identified seven stages of children's writing: 

1. Scribbling - random marks on pages. 

2. Mock handwriting - lines of wavy scribbles that resemble writing. 

3. Mock letters - letter like shapes. 

4. Conventional letters - child's first name. 

5. Invented spelling - cluster random letters to make words. 

6. Phonetic spelling - associate sounds and letters. 

7. Conventional spelling - becomes conventional. 

(Sam Makes Millie Cookies In Peter's Caravan)

Stages of writing development. 

Kroll recognised four stages of development: 

1. Prepatory, 4-7:  Motor skills and principles of spelling required. 

2. Consolidation, 7-9 : Express what can be said in speech, clauses linked with and, colloquial. 

3. Differentiation, 9+: Produce writing for different audiences. Patterns and organisation. Draft work. 

4. Integration, 14+: Understand mode and vary stylistic choices. 

(Proper Children Don't Irritate)

Spelling. 

Gentry proposed five spelling stages that should help teachers to nurture ability, each stage represents something different from the national curriculum, do not correlate with a specific age. 

• Pre communicative: make up own writing, scribbling shows they understand letters have meaning, some letter shapes.
• Semi phoentic: link sounds and shapes, awareness of word boundaries.
• Phonetic: understand that phonemes can be represented by graphemes. 
• Transitional: combine phonic knowledge with memory, awareness of combinations of letters.
• Conventional: knows spelling systems and rules and about word structure. 

(Peter Saw People That Cook) 

The effect of accent and dialect on spelling.  

Found children opt for nonstandard spelling 30% of the time i.e. ‘fing’ instead of ‘thing’ or ‘drand’ instead of ‘drowned’ 

However too many rules could stifle individuality in language in terms of idiolect/ dialect and these cancel out creativity with language and identity. Children are required to learn a spelling that doesn’t reflect the word they say. 

Reading and Writing development.

Frith’s model of acquisition of reading and writing says that children need to learn logographic skills (recognise word patterns as a whole) and alphabetic skills (matching letters with sounds).

If children do not grasp these then they fall behind 

Reading and Writing development.

Frith’s model of acquisition of reading and writing says that children need to learn logographic skills (recognise word patterns as a whole) and alphabetic skills (matching letters with sounds).

If children do not grasp these then they fall behind 

Reading and Writing Development. 

Heath’s work found that middle class kids developed literacy in more formal ways, the parents placed explicit value on books/ literacy activities – these children were more successful in school because the type of literacy they were familiar with conformed more to what was expected of them at school.

On the other hand she found that literacy in other community’s involved oral storytelling more than book reading and these children were less successful in school. Heath argued schools should value different types of literacy taking place at home

Reading and Writing Development. 

Vygotsky said that children seek out ways to make use of symbolic systems whilst engaged in the process of learning.

Writing for the benefit of the teacher is used to help eliminate spelling and grammar errors rather than to communicate information. Z

PD – recurring process where children reach a stage they can attempt with support and then do alone… based on an individual child’s needs rather than attempting to push all children to reach government targets. 

Reading and Writing Development. 

Bruner proposed ‘scaffolding’ where children are active in own development but seek and need outside support to guide them.

Also said that interaction with books is important for creativity because it helps children to recreate the structure, title, accompanying pictures, once upon a time, etc. Books are important to help support writing development. 

Reading and Writing Development. 

Fischer said that children may do what is called ‘mirroring’ because they implicitly extract the statistical regularity that most characters face right and misapply this rule (b  d) 

Genre: Children begin to learn that genres have their own linguistic patterns or specific shapes in terms of discourse structure – once they’ve established genre they can play with it and explore its creative aspects

Rothery found the four distinct groupings that writing fell into

• Observation - Makes an observation and follows it with a comment (I saw a tiger, it was big)
• Recount - Chronological account i.e. a school trip. Perera found that texts can be divided into chronological (rely on action verbs and temporal connectives) and non-chronological (connectives based on causal relationship)
• Report - Factual and objective, not chronological
• Narrative - Story genre. Orientation -complication - resolution - coda (moral). Hardest to achieve due to complexity of the pattern, Children may use ‘I’ to give a creative perspective in the story, May use descriptive adjectives to create a semantic field, Could draw pictures to accompany the text – learn that pictures and text can reflect relationships between sounds and symbols.