Finds that the proportion of sentence fragments remained fairly consistent across grade levels, with older students making more errors with more complex syntactic structures as they began to elaborate on ideas and use more subordinate elements. (RL)

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)

Examines kindergarten children's use of talk during writing to draw inferences regarding how children use speech to make sense of written language. (HOD)

Recent research on children learning to write, coming from a mix of disciplines (English education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and rhetoric), is described in this volume. The introduction, by Marcia Farr, emphasizes how the research contributes to understanding (1) of research methodology and theoretical frameworks, and (2) of…

Recognizing that oral language plays a critical role in facilitating a child's written language learning, a study examined the nature and function of oral language between child and teacher and child and peer as it accompanied the writing processes and written production of young children. Participants in the study were 36 prekindergarten children…

Noting that young children's initial writing efforts are often dismissed as insignificant scribbling, a study explored children's emerging understandings about written language as indicated by the changes in 47 preschool children's autographs. Throughout a school year children were asked to write their names and draw pictures of themselves.…

Viewing writing as both a form of language learning and an intellectual skill, this book presents essays on how writers acquire trusted inner voices and the roles schools and teachers can play in helping student writers in the learning process. The essays in the book focus on one of three topics: the language of instruction and how response and…

Observations of a 12-year-old boy provide an in-depth look at the writing of a successful adolescent writer, as it developed over a 2-year period. The subject was interviewed once a week in his home. In addition to the information obtained in interviews, his texts were analyzed for formal features. Three factors emerged as particularly…

This is the first of two related documents reporting a study that analyzed the text of 26 student-teacher dialogue journals from a sixth grade class as a developmental link between students' natural competence in oral conversation and their developing competence in written language. The first section of the report discusses (1) the purpose of the…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

This is the second of two related documents that make up the final report of a study that analyzed the text of 26 student-teacher dialogue journals from a sixth grade classroom. The report defines "dialogue journal writing" as interactive, functional writing that occurs between students and teacher on a daily basis about self-generated…

Focusing on the relationship between learning oral language and learning about written language, this book discusses the emergent literacy (EL) of children growing up in a Western, print-oriented society, as well as findings of research conducted during the past 15 years on how children make sense of the way in which literacy works in their…