Emergent literary literacy

Abstract

Research on early school writing has focused primarily on formal aspects of writing, such as spelling, punctuation and various aspects of text structure. Less attention has been given to what distinguishes the content of these early texts and how particular disciplinary content is developed and identified. This study endeavours to examine the subject specific content in early school writing of literary texts with the following research questions. (1) What content is construed in narrative texts written by students in early school years (grades 2-3)? (2) What linguistic resources are used to construe this content? This study offers a model for addressing content aspects of early school writing, giving empirical example of analysis of early narrative writing in primary school. The data consists of two groups of narrative texts written by the same children in school years 2 and 3, in relation to two comparable tasks. Our analytical framework is inspired by Systemic Functional Linguistics and in particular the analytical tool set provided by cohesion and transitivity analyses. We conclude that narrative writing in primary school can mean both to explore a diverse textual world and a more uniform one. We further claim that signs of emerging literary literacy may be detected throughout the analysed data sets by using the text analytic method suggested.