Child Writing

Writing beyond the school environment

• A large proportion of a child's writing will take place at school
• A child who is starting to write may have various opportunities to communicate through the written medium eg. letter, birthday cards
• This way a child can practise their language with a real audience and purpose
• A child encouraged to write for a variety of purposes will develop their independence and will see the point of writing
• In the same way, a child not encouraged to write outside of school might struggle to see the point outside of school

Geographical and social influences

• Writing up until the end of the consolidation stage is likely to resemble speech
• A number of factors will influence the lexical and grammatical features emerging in a child's writing
• Children will learn to use different vocabulary choices according to context
• The audience, purpose and genre of writing will effect vocabulary choices, but so will age, gender, regional background and social class

Handwriting

• Children are encouraged to develop a cursive script in primary school after the initial acquisition
• A popular in-between is casual cursive where some words are joined together and others aren't
• Technology might impact how writing is used, with it being arguable that in many people's lives, writing by hand is not as important as being able to use a computer

Orthography

• Richard Gentry proposed five stages of spelling acquisition
• Stage 1: Precommunicative stage- Random letters and symbols appear on a page with no letter to sound connections
• Stage 2: Semiphonic stage- Letters might be used to represent whole words. Writing will generally be formed left to right with some letter-to-sound connection
• Stage 3: Phonetic stage- Spelling will be based on the sound of words
• Stage 4: Transitional stage- Spelling will combine phonetic approaches as well as visual approaches. Silent letters might start to be acknowledged within words
• Stage 5: Conventional stage- Difficult spellings have been learnt and words with alternate spellings are known