What Children Do With Early Graphics

8/9/2019 What Children Do With Early Graphics

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What children do with early graphics

In the previous two chapters we observed that children learn about writing not by

acquiring letters one after another but by rst becoming sensitive to the features of

written language. Before children use a selection of letters with any stability, we see

rst a slow revelation of certain grapich principle in the childrens scribbles-

principles such as directionality, e!ibility, generativity, and recurrence. With

repeated writing practice children produce mar"s that more and more closely

resemble the writing they see in the print around them. #his learning proceeds not

letter by letter but feature by feature. But why do children go through this learning

process in the rst place $ what are children trying to get done when they commit

mar"s to paper, considering both the reasons behind the mar"s they select and the

overall communicative purposes. #hen in a later section we will discuss ways that

parents and teachers of young children can aid children in ma"ing a beginning in

writing, by providing appropriate help but not preassure.

%hildren write on their own

#he sign concept, revisited

In chapter & we noted a basic di'erence between pictures and writing. We observed

that writing uses signs to stand for things in an arbitrary way( we must refer to

some previously agreed upon social meanings of written signs in order to interpret

them correctly.

%hildren are capable of ma"ing signs on paper before they develop a concept of the

way the signs things. It is interesting to e!amine childrens early writing to

determine how they thin" writing might represent things. )ome of the most

interesting research into this question has been performed by *milia ferreiro, an

argentine psychologist. In order to understand ferreiros ideas, let us begin with an

illustration. In the *nglish that we adults read and write, we may say that written

gure represent letters that combine into representations of words, which stands for

real or imaginary things. We may illustrate this series of relationship by means of

the diagram in gure +-

)ome children who are new to writing hypothesie relations between writing andlanguage that are di'erent from the relations we described in gure +-.*milia

erreiro wor"ed waith some foure -and ve year /old children in argentina who had

some e!otic notions about how writing represents language.

0ne little boy named 1avier said 2cat could be written oia, while 2"ittens could be

written oai oai oai.


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erreiro concluded that he had the following hypotheses about the relation between

writing and the things represented by writing 3

. Written words for similar things should loo" similar, even though the spo"en

words for those ob4ects may not sounds the same.5. When characters refer to more than one ob4ect, the child uses more

characters to represent them.

erreiro found many children who thought there there might be a concrete

relation between written mar"s and the things they stood for. )he suggested

that there may be a developmental continuum that would have children

loo"ing rst for concrete relations between graphic characters and the things

they stood for without refrence to sound.

6t a later stage, the relation between graphics and language became based

on sound. )pecically, the children put the same number of letters in a

graphic display as the number of syllables in the spo"en word for which the

graphic display stood. #hus, 2chic"enwas written and 2fencepostspeech

sound in either word. 7etters are used as syllable counters only in this sort of

writing.In terms of the diagram in gure +-, ferreiros nding was that children rst- 7oo" for a concrete relation between 6 and % 8see gure +-59.- 6nd only later for a sound relation between 6 dan B 8see igure +-&9.

erreiro gathered her nding from wor" with children who came from both

uneducated and upper-class families in 6rgentina and :e!ico. 6s a group,

the sub4ects from uneducated families probably had less e!posure to print

than children in the ;nited )tates.


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teacher may be motivated as much by writing the childs name so

often, the teacher may be motivated as much by management

concerns as instructional ones. or the child, though, the result is that

his own name is the meaningful printed array that he sees most often

in his surroundings. It is certainly the message most children rst

attempt to write.Writing their own names may teach children several lessons at once.

erreiro notes that the childs own name provides the rst real

challenge to his early hypotheses about the relation of writing to

language. #he child who thin"s the sie of the graphic display should

be related to the sie of the referent must wonder as he loo"s at name

labels why #ed is the biggest boy in the class, while he, 6nthony, is

among the smallest. In a similar vain, the child who relates the

number of characters in a graphic display to the number of syllables in

the word for which it stands will wonder why 2:a-ry has four letters

while 2=eith has ve.#he childrens early hypotheses cannot e!plain the spelling of their

own and their classmatess names. )o they loo" for new hypotheses.

6s we shall see in


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the three, with copying being the ne!t most di@cult, and generating

being the most di@cult process. )ome children trace, then generate.

0thers copy, then generate.:any children trace spontaneously, without being instructed to.

%arlene, age +3+, traced rst, then copied. ?er sample give an

indication of the relative di@culty of the two tas"s 8igure +-A9.>ote in gure +-, however, that she was generating letterli"e graphics

at the same time she produced igure +-A. ?er generated product are

more abundant than those she either traced or copied, but they are not

limited to standart letters. #his conforms to a nding of clays, namely,

that copying may be a shortcut to accuracy, but most children prever

to generate letter forms on their own over copying. ?ersub4ect stayed

at the tas" much longer when they were generating, rather than

copying.

Which strategy is best$ ;ltimately, we want children to be able to write

letters on their own without having to rely on a model of correctlyformed letters to copy. 0n the other hand, they must eventually learn

to produce standard letter forms, not 4ust invented ones. Cenerating

letters is the process children should aim for, but they should pay

attention to the details of standard letters. In our scholls, many

children need to be encouraged to ta"e ris"s-to rely on their own

devices and generate writing even if its 2 wrong.

>evertheless, there are a few children who are less mindful than they

should be of the ultimately conservative nature of the writing system(

that is, that there is a right way to ma"e each letter. #eachers can

safely encourage children to generate, "nowing that they will copy

anyway. With an occasional child it may be necessary to encourage

copying. In our opinion, copying is probably encouraged far more often

than need be.%hildrens own names are usually the rst ob4ects of print to be

traced, copied and eventually generated. But after performing these

feast with their names, children do not hesitate to carry them out with

other words, "nown or un"nown.

#he inventory principle%lay noted that 2until I observed ve year olds closely I had no idea

that they too" stoc" of their own learning systematically. )he was

referring to what she called the inventory principle-the widespread

tendency of beginning writers to ma"e ordered lists of letters or words

they can write. >e!t to writing their own names, then, are listed

inventories as ob4ects of childrens rst writing e'orts.


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1essicas rst compositions consisted of inventories of letters she could

write. #hese were the sole content of her writing for some months.

6nother rst-grade child o'ered inventories when her teacher as"ed

the whole class to write something about a picture. )he did not feel

free to compose on that topic, apparently, so she listed her "nown

words instead 8see igure +-D9.

*ncouraging children to ma"e print6s we said at beginning of this boo", a child who "nows that language

can be written down has made a discovery that must come before she

can ma"e any other advances in writing and reading. )uch a child can

thin" about the medium of her thoughts and messages and not 4ust

their contents( she "nows that language is a thing. Eavid olson

believes that this discovery comes early to children whose parents

read to them from infancy. Indeed, such childrens initial learning about

language may include a budding consciousness that the medium can

be reected on, recorded, and read. or these children, opportunities toe!plore and produce print in preschool and "indergarten will be a

natural e!tension of what they already "now.But what about the other children$ 6lthough we may associate very

early writing e!periences with preschools and "indergartens that serve

the upper middle class, such activities can provide e!periences in

literacy that are at least as essential to children on the opposite end of

the spectrum-the children from families that are poor and overwor"ed,

or unstable or neglectful or dominated by television or lac"ing in boo"s

and people to read them. :aria :ontessori was the rst to advocate

giving children early e!periences with writing before they began toread. 6lthough her program is now fashionable with the well-heeled in

north 6merica, she developed it for the deprived children of rome. 6nd

marie clays study of ve year olds conceptions of written language,

the sub4ect of the previous chapter, was motivated by a need to learn

about and help children who came from the diverse ethnic populations-

some without traditions of literacy-that are served by the schools in

new aeland.

>o, early writing is for the have-nots as much as for the haves. If we do

not already, we should begin to conceive of preschools and

"indergartens as places where all children-especially high-ris" children-can gain rich e!posure to the medium of print, by being read to and by

having opportunities to produce print themselves. ?igh-ris" children

can then be spared the often impossible tas" of learning what print is

all about at the same time the rst-grade program is trying to teach

them to read.#he "ind of encouragement children can prot by is of three types 3


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. ?aving plenty of models of prints at childrens height around

classroom(5. ?aving materials that the children can write upon, and utensils with

which to write( and&. 6s"ing an occasional question, or setting up an occasional

challenge, that will lead the child to emulate print.

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What Children Do With Early Graphics