Choosing a writing topic poses a particularly serious challenge for young learners. Topic selection affects all other steps of the writing process. Therefore, the writing topic should be related to a subject that the student knows about, is interested in, and can produce content on. Basing writing on students' immediate environment and experiences…

This study aimed to elucidate the organization and developmental sequences of macro-structure elements in the written narratives of 44 students in Japan, aged 7-11 years and attending the same school, who were deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). A high-point analysis of oral paper puppet play storylines revealed that the students were able to develop…

Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on pedagogical strategies which support the teaching of critical analysis of visual and multimodal texts in a tertiary-level course for Arts students. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes strategies which focus on developing students' abilities to express interpretive critique, as…

This study investigated a new writing task that utilizes drawing to elicit students' language and original thinking. Two forms of pictures were designed and administered to 118 children. One form was conventional and consisted of completed pictures, requiring students to simply describe the pictures in writing. The other form, which was new,…

Writing is a key area of literacy in the early years, however writing receives less research attention than reading despite its impact on students' learning generally, and literacy development specifically. Writing skills have also been shown to be quite stable--good writers in the early years stay good writers in the later years. Therefore it is…

The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of transcription skills, oral language skills, and executive functions to growth in narrative writing between fourth and sixth grade. While text length and story content of narratives did not increase with age, syntactic complexity of narratives showed a clear developmental progression. Results…

A study investigated the roles of particular cultural exemplars and more abstract cultural schemata in the acquisition of genre knowledge. Subjects, 16 kindergarten children, 20 first-grade children, and 18 second-grade children from one intact classroom at each grade level, were interviewed about their knowledge of various textual and structural…

Two studies compared the process of authoring non-linear or linear stories with HyperCard by inner-city primary school students. Found that, with minimal support, primary school students were capable of constructing hypermedia stories with complex non-linear structures and that the use of non-linear structures appeared to encourage the integration…