Presents evidence revealing the complexity of young children's language understandings with regard to spelling patterns, parts of speech, and vocabulary; points out that teachers must build upon the language knowledge that children bring to school. (GT)

To see what effects practice--frequent writing without teacher correction--would have on the writing of students in grades one and two in one small elementary school, writing samples were collected from all pupils at each grade level in October and May. Five factors were examined: general impression, length, vocabulary, spelling, and syntactic…