When do children learn to write? Earlier than you might think

We typically think of writing as something that is out of reach for preschool children. After all, young children can’t write recognizable letters, and they can’t spell words.

We have been studying young children’s knowledge about writing in our research. And we are finding that they know more about writing – even before they learn to read – than one might think.

Writing is smaller than drawing

Consider a study in which Chinese children were asked to write several words, such as “sun,” and also to draw pictures of those same things. Two- and three-year-old children’s attempts to write characters were far off the mark, bearing little resemblance to the correct characters.

However, children’s writings tended to be smaller than their drawings. The writings were also less curvy and more angular, angularity being a property of characters in Chinese.

Not only did children make different sorts of marks when writing than when drawing, they also chose different implements to do so. Specifically, children would often choose dark pens or pencils to write and colored crayons to draw

In another part of this study, adults were shown the productions that the children had made. They were told that some of them were produced in response to a request to write and that others were produced in response to a request to draw. The adults were not told which was which, and their job was to guess.

The adults found the task to be difficult, which is not surprising. However, they performed better than would be expected by random guessing even with the productions of two- and three-year-old children.

Clearly, children were doing something different when writing than when drawing – different enough that adults could even detect some of the differences.

Young children may know that writing generally looks different from writing, but the next question is: do they have any understanding that it functions differently?

One important property of writing is that it represents a specific word in a specific language. The written word “rabbit,” for example, stands for the spoken word “rabbit.” It would not be appropriate to read this word as “bunny.”

source: The Conversation

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