Early writing development in L1 English speaking children

Abstract

This paper reports on the developmental and psychometric properties of an early writing task. The study was carried out over four years in Toronto, Canada with L1 English-speaking children. Two cohorts of children who began in Nursery School were followed to the end of their Grade 1 year. Children were administered the same writing task at four time points along with standardized measures of early reading. The early writing task required children to write words and number and word combinations; we examined how children move from understanding print as “objects” to understanding print as representation of sounds. We also examined how writing in Nursery School and Kindergarten related to later literacy skills. The methodology allowed us to examine the extent to which early writing in Nursery School (3 years old) and Junior Kindergarten (4 years old) predicted later literacy skills when children were in Grade 1 (6 years old) and were receiving formal reading instruction. Results show characteristic features of children’s early writing of number and word combinations at each of the four grade levels and show that performance on the writing task in Kindergarten predicted reading skills at the end of Grade 1.