Writing Across Writing
Systems
Presented By:
Kayla Romsa
Elisa Jones
Debi Womack
Emergent Writing
Children come into literacy through a gradual
and integrated development.
Literacy develops when children are exposed to
print; written in a language they speak. Also by
having social interactions around print with adult
or older readers and writers.
Research shows that preschoolers not only have
a remarkable knowledge of print, but have
developed some print conventions on their own.
This is true regardless of racial, ethnic and
cultural background and from all socio-economic
levels.
Emergent Writing Continued
Piaget’s (1959) theories describe those
children’s developmental tasks in a schema
framework where new learning must be
assimilated and accommodated.
Some researchers characterize the acquisition
of writing as a “psychogenetic process, in a
Piagetian sense (Ferreiro, 1990). This is due to
the facts that children construct their own
representations and explanations about writing,
that similarities occur in different linguistic
environments, and that the processes children
exhibit appear to be developmentally ordered.
Emergent Writing Continued
How do we integrate:
What we know about development of literacy?
What we observe children doing with their own
writing system?
What we present in classrooms as first- or
second-language literacy instruction?
What is the definition of writing?
Writing includes graphic displays that are
understood as a code for spoken or potentially
spoken messages.
Distinguishing Writing From
Drawing
Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) found that young
children could learn to make several distinctions
between written productions and other graphic
symbols. They distinguished:
*Drawings from writing
*Pictures from print
*Letter from numerals
*Letters from punctuation
*Letters from words
*Print from cursive writing
Distinguishing Writing From
Drawing Continued
Dyson (1984, 1993) studied children’s writing
development as it relates to purpose situated within
social contexts and then defined these contexts as
multiple worlds; the symbolic world, the peer social
world, the official teacher’s world, and the wider world.
Other researchers have begun to discover the principles
that children use in constructing what Ferreiro (1982)
called “children’s theories” about writing and literacy.
Some of these principles are:
*The principle of minimum quantity: How many letters or
symbols must exist for print to say something?
*Internal quality variations: Variety is important. For
instance, can the same letter repeated be readable?
Distinguishing Writing From
Drawing Continued
*Objective differences in writing: How can they create
graphic differentiations for different meanings?
* The phonetization or syllabic hypothesis: Depending
on the language, how do children begin to attempt a
correspondence between the spoken language and the
written symbols?
*The alphabetic hypothesis: Children attempt to use
letters to represent individual sounds (for children
learning alphabetic languages).
This developing knowledge of these graphic features is
the raw material children use to work out their individual
constraints, which seem to be general across writing
systems.
Example
The following was done
by a child who is 2 years
and 10 months old. The
blue represents his
drawing of a circle. The
orange represents a line.
The red represents dots.
The green represents an
“E” and the yellow was
just free drawing.
Writing Systems
According to Pinker (1994), in all known
writing systems, the symbols designate
only three kinds of linguistic structure:
The morpheme
The syllable
The phoneme
Writing Systems Continued
The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in
language. Ex: Are words like kind that can not
be divided without changing the meaning.
The syllable is a unit in speech often longer than
one sound and shorter than a word.
The phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that
can distinguish two words Ex: The words cat and
mat only differ from their beginning sounds
The number of phonemes vary from language to
language English is said to have 44 phonemes:
24 constants and 20 vowels.
Writing Systems Continued
Most writing systems can be classified into
three main types according to the units of
language that they represent:
Logographic
Syllabary
Alphabetic
The logographic writing system
In the logographic writing system, most symbols
represent words or morphemes rather than having a
grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
Chinese is the most widely used logographic writing
system today.
This morphemic writing system appears to have served
the Chinese well, despite the fact that readers are at a
loss when they face new or rare words.
Speakers of many dialects can share texts, although
they may pronounce the words differently.
The syllabary writing system
In the syllabic or syllabary writing system the symbols
represent syllables rather than phonemes.
Japanese is a combination of the logographic and
syllabic system.
Japanese uses two sets of written syllabic symbols, the
Katakana and Hiagana.
Each letter of Katakana is a fragment of a simple
Chinese character, hence the name Kata
(fragment)+Kana (borrowed name)
Each letter of Hiragana (cursive or smooth borrowed
name) is fashioned from a cursive form of a simple
character
The alphabetic writing system
In the alphabetic writing system, the symbols
represent phonemes of the language.
Historically, alphabetic writing systems were the
last to be invented.
Generally assumed that alphabetic writing
evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphics, through
Phoenician writing that represented both
constants only, to Greek writing that represented
both constants and vowels. English, Spanish,
Italian, Vietnamese, and many other languages
use the Roman or Latin alphabetic writing
system.
The alphabetic writing system
Continued
English is an alphabetic language that poses some complicating
challenges for second-language learners.
English orthography relies on representing spoken language
through an alphabetic system that does not closely relate to the
surface sounds of words.
Orthographies may be defined as either shallow or deep, depending
on the ease of predicting the pronunciation of a word from its
spelling.
Shallow orthographies spell words as they sound with high degree
of sound-symbol correspondence. Ex. Spanish and Italians
English is said to have a deep orthography.
English word spelling can reflect morphological relations rather
maintaining a consistent sound.
Language Discourse Differences
• Written text has a style that is different from oral
language.
• Even though oral language is an vital part of the
culture and everyday social life, literacy opens
up larger worlds to readers that may not be
available in a purely oral culture.
• Written language uses vocabulary that is more
diverse and described as “literacy” or “written.”
Learning a Second System of
Writing
Research shows that we transfer our writing
knowledge and skills to a second language.
Clearly if both languages use the same symbols
the problems of learning to write and to identify
the symbols are less difficult.
The problems consist of associating familiar
symbols to a different sound system.
Implications For The Classroom
Transfer of Literacy Process Skills
Outside distinct linguistic skills, there are many
process skills that transfer from literacy in a first
language to a second language.
Literate students will understand that a written
language is a code, and there are certain rules
for decoding and encoding and making
meaning.
They will understand that the written language
varies from the spoken language, but that there
are conventions to help the reader make the
written text sound as much like oral speech as
possible when read aloud.
Transfer of Literacy Process Skills
Continued
Literate students will have strategies for
dealing with a written text and they may
look for physical signs that help them
analyze the nature or genre of the
document.
Transfer of Literacy Process Skills
Continued
If teachers don’t have the basic knowledge
of writing development to understand the
behaviors that children are exhibiting,
literacy behaviors of children go
unobserved and unsupported.
Teachers must know the power they have
over children and the effect that teacher
attention can have on developing literacy
and learning.
Implications for the Classrooms
Continued
Ifteachers become overly concerned with
requirements for written text that deal with
teacher-chosen topics and that are to be
written specifically to define standards for
writing, then children will be limited in the
ways they can express themselves
through symbols.
The Complexities of Theory
Construction
Literacyis socially mediated by the more
capable members of the learner’s groups.
How these more accomplished members
mediate the use of literacy will determine
the uses that the learner will attempt,
develop and adapt.
The Complexities of Theory
Construction Continued
Literacy is also constructed which means
the culture group may have multiple levels
of literacy's and literacy uses.
In order for children to learn to write they
must construct and test their theories
themselves.
Without this process of experimentation
and construction children wont develop
writing.
The End