This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory…

Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and…

In this article, I confine myself to the situation in England that offers a paradigm example of one of the fundamental tensions besetting teaching and assessing writing: the stranglehold of an individualistic view of writing development as opposed to a more socio-cultural perspective. Examining the uses of summative assessment for accountability…

Linguistics is a subject that has remained largely confined to the academy, rather than being integrated into school curricula. This is unfortunate but not surprising, as although some teacher education programs include courses on linguistics, it is not comprehensively integrated into teacher education, so it is largely absent from the curriculum.…

Handwriting currently has a low status and profile in literacy education. This paper examines the situation of current handwriting pedagogy in England and considers why handwriting efficiency has been neglected. The paper goes on to identify a number of studies located in the domains of special needs and psychology which re-evaluate the role of…

Drawing on socio-cultural theory, this paper focuses on children's classroom-based collaborative creative writing. The central aim of the reported research was to contribute to our understanding of young children's creativity, and describe ways in which peer collaboration can resource, stimulate and enhance classroom-based creative writing…

The three children who are the focus of this paper emerged from analysis of KS2 (Key Stage 2, ages 7 to 11 years) writing during the Kirklees Writing Project. This involved a group of six KS2 teachers bringing samples of students' work to evaluation meetings in which key factors of a particular genre were identified and differences in children's…

This article summarizes a small-scale investigation into 10- and 11-year-old children's perceptions of how the attitudes and values of different times in the past are reflected in historical writing for children. The research involved observation, reading and discussion of historical stories written at different times in the past about a…

This paper outlines research which examined the relationship between drama and writing, detailing the method of enquiry, theoretical foundations and emergent findings. The study sought to understand the nature of the support that drama offers children as writers and to identify features of writing which regularly surfaced in drama-related writing.…

Examines a wide range of writing tasks of 11- and 15-year-old students from four regions of England to establish the relative importance of nonstandard dialect as a factor in deviation from standard English norms in writing. (Author/JL)

This paper presents a case study of a young writer, a girl aged between 9 and 10 over the 6-month period analyzed. The writer accessed KidPub, a World Wide Web site that accepts stories submitted by or on behalf of children and young people under the age of 16 and publishes them, giving each story its own Web page. With the help of a mentor, the…

Noting that much has been written about children who have difficulty learning to read but little has been written about children who are fluent early readers, this book explores why some children succeed in reading at a very early age. The book resulted from a 3-year research project that studied the progress of 29 English children before they…

This multi-language collection of autobiographical writing from Sudanese children and young adults who are living in Britain as refugees is illustrated with photographs and children's drawings and includes comprehensive country introductions. In the collection, young people give their accounts of migration and explore how their identities are…

This multi-language collection of autobiographical writing from Ugandan children and young adults who are living in Britain as refugees is illustrated with photographs and children's drawings and includes comprehensive country introductions. In the collection, young people give their accounts of migration and explore how their identities are…

This multi-language (French, English, Kikongo, and Lingala) collection of autobiographical writing by refugees from Zairean children and young adults living in Britain is illustrated with photographs and children's drawings and includes comprehensive country introductions. In the collection, young people give their accounts of migration and…