Discusses efforts at teaching children in kindergarten how to write, indicating that emergent readers can indeed write with scribbles, random letters, numerals, and sometimes words. Discusses their dictation, journal content, writing stages, and developmental trends. (HTH)

Explores the patterns in children's talk about their writing, by means of transcribed conversations during daily writing/sharing sessions in a first grade classroom. Discusses the importance of this kind of talk. (HTH)

Describes how kindergarten children use invented spelling to rewrite Mother Goose nursery rhymes, indicating the phoneme grapheme system the children perceived from spoken language. (HTH)

Reports on a recent study of first grade writing efforts that confirms the importance of scribble in the writing process when it is an accepted language behavior in the classroom. (FL)

Reports on the work being done by Martha King with the writing of primary grade children. (FL)

Observes that children are ready to write when they understand what writing does, when they are interested in writing, when they want to communicate through writing, and when they understand that written symbols represent meaning. (RL)

Relates some of the observations made of a kindergarten classroom over a two-year period in which teachers simulated as many conditions as possible with respect to a natural "learning-how-to-write" situation. (HOD)

Describes a study in which nine-year-old children wrote persuasive letters to two individuals and then participated in an oral task designed to determine their competence in listener adapted communication. (FL)

Considers register (factors that vary in situational contexts and produce differences in meaning intent and meaning exchange) variance with its accompanying language transactions during written language events involving children and adults. Illustrates register variance with the writing and drawing of a four-year-old and a first-grader. (HTH)

Nine first-grade, nine second-grade, and eight third-grade children of migrant farm workers provided the data for a descriptive study of writing development in a bilingual program. (FL)

Sets forth educational inferences drawn from a classroom incident involving a first-grade child and her first story writing experience. (FL)

Argues that by encouraging children in their early writing efforts, adults can help them develop into confident and comfortable writers. (FL)

Presents a model that predicts writing growth in children as a logical outcome of language acquisition. Provides a list of the kinds of language learning underway in the elementary school years and suggests that teachers may use this list to anticipate where and how such learning will influence the writing processes of children. (FL)

A study investigated how children's writing reflects the syntactic complexity, style, and format of their basal readers. Subjects were 116 students drawn from 10 second, third, and fourth grade classrooms in two different schools located near Boston, Massachusetts. A matched group design was used, and students using a form of the "Ginn"…

Children begin school with some very basic ideas about written language and reading. The first is that of sign and message. That a graphic representation, a "sign," conveys meaning is an early and easy concept for children that stems from their visually attending to print in their environment. The realization that spoken language can be…