Extracted from a doctoral thesis on young children's emergent literacy, this paper describes the literacy development of one five-year-old subject. The paper first describes the subject's home environment, her relationships with family members, and her early reading experience and literacy development. Transcripts illustrating her home reading…

The validity of recent research concerning invented spelling, the developmental stages in children's writing, and whether children will attempt writing before reading and continue writing while learning to read were examined. Five developmental stages in spelling have been identified: (1) the precommunicative stage, involving the use of random…

A study was conducted in which word processing and voice synthesis were used to teach beginning writing skills to kindergarten and first grade students. Subjects, 46 children from two elementary schools enrolled in an early education summer school class in writing, were randomly divided into three groups. One group was taught writing using a…

To determine how children develop schema for text that include increasing sensitivity to text types, text categories, orthographic conventions in words, conventional story beginnings and endings, and text cohesive ties, a study examined the writing of four kindergarten children. The kindergarten had adopted a process-conference approach to writing…

Stressing the importance of understanding child development, this paper first describes the writing of several children in a kindergarten class who represent various levels of emerging literacy. Based on the descriptions of classroom activities, the paper argues that with a developmental perspective the teacher can build instruction on what the…