A Look at the Development of Writing in Children

Dec 17, 2024

16 min read

One of the topics I have explored recently is how children learn to write. Many elementary teachers find writing the hardest subject to teach, and many elementary students find writing the hardest subject to learn. Writing isn't easy. However, after a ton of research, I can say that writing is natural. At least parts of it are. Below are the slides from a presentation I did on how children learn to write. Below that, you will find a paper I wrote explaining the natural and artificial parts of writing.

The Development of Writing in Children

Writing as a Cultural Tool and an Innate Drive to Communicate and Make Meaning

What invention most changed the human experience? I argue that it was writing. Writing allowed us to

share knowledge across time and space. It made gathering, organizing, and building upon ideas possible so that we could leverage information to improve other aspects of life. Neither the Enlightenment nor the Scientific Revolution could have happened without writing.

Writing is not innate in the same way our brains have evolved for oral language. People have to be taught how to write. However, it is based on the human instinctual need to communicate and make meaning. Nearly one hundred years ago, Vygotsky argued that writing was both artificial and natural. I believe that current research reaffirms his view and that this dichotomy of writing is what makes it so difficult to teach and learn.

The artificial parts of writing are those things that we have to teach children, such as letter formation that involves fine motor skills, spelling patterns that combine phonology, morphology, and phonics, and concepts of print, including directionality of words and spacing (Clay, 2010, Puranik & Lonigan, 2011). These aspects of writing come long after children begin engaging with writing as a natural tool for sharing meaning. Children innately use gestures, play, scribbles, and drawings to represent their ideas and make sense of the world around them. Written language provides humans with a more efficient means of recording their thoughts using a prescribed set of signs. This is the system that has to be learned.

An Innate Desire to Communicate and Make Meaning

Humans have an innate desire and ability to communicate and make meaning. All humans learn oral language based on input from and interactions within the environment (Wood, 1998). Oral language allows people to communicate with each other and, through this communication, make sense of the world around them. In literate societies, people also use written language to pursue these goals.

Learning to write is not natural in the same way learning oral language is. This is evident by the existence of nonliterate societies and illiterate individuals within a literate society (Wood, 1998). However, the beginnings of written communication, including gestures, play, scribbling, and drawing, are natural and exist in both literate and nonliterate societies (Cox, 2005). Beyond these first stages, the rules and patterns of a given culture’s written language must be learned, either implicitly or explicitly.

A Brief Overview of the Stages of Learning to Write

The stages of learning to write are not rigid or necessarily sequential. Children proceed through them along different timelines with significant overlap between stages (DeFord, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983). However, researchers from Vygotsky to Marie Clay have observed a general progression of skills from gestures to conventional writing practices. While the details of each theory differ, the general idea that children learn to write in predictable and consistent stages is commonly accepted (Wood, 1998).

Gestures, Play, and Scribbles

Around one hundred years ago, Vygotsky argued that “gestures, it has been correctly said, are writing in air, and written signs frequently are simply gestures that have been fixed,” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 107). Both gestures and written signs represent ideas beyond themselves. Reaching for a bottle means, “I am thirsty and want to drink.” The printed word “dog” activates meaning in the reader’s mind, pulled from all of their experiences with dogs from the past. Gestures and written language have the same purpose: to communicate meaning.

As children begin to engage in play, they more fully explore representation. The objects around them, at first defined by what the child can do to or with them, take different meanings based on the child’s imagination (Vygotsky, 1986). A cardboard box becomes a rocket ship hurtling through space because that is the meaning the child attaches to it. The ability to alter the meaning of objects to fit their needs introduces children to symbolic and abstract thought (Dyson, 2020). These are the same types of thinking used in creating written language.

Gestures and play extend across a lifetime, but scribbling occupies a very specific period of development. Around two, children will start to scribble. The scribbling stage appears to be as natural as the babbling stage in language because children from both literate and nonliterate societies scribble (Lamme & Childers, 1983). At first, these scribbles are a joyful motor activity (Clay, 2010). However, children soon attach meaning to their scribbles (Puranik & Lonigan, 2011; Longobardi, Quaglia, & Iotti, 2015). One of the first examples of meaningful scribbles is the confluence of gesture and written marks called onomatopoeic scribbling (King, 1980; Longobardi et al., 2015). The child holds a pen over paper as they act out an action, such as a rabbit hopping in a forest. The pen records the jumps of the rabbit, creating a written record. However, only by witnessing the creation of the marks would someone know their meaning as neither adult nor child could tell the meaning of the marks later. Similarly, the meaning of other scribbling can be ascertained by witnessing a child’s narration during its creation (Longobardi Quaglia, &Iotti, 2015).

Between two and three, children start differentiating their drawing and writing scribbles. Writing scribbles are smaller and follow some of the universal features of writing, such as linearity, and cultural features of writing, such as horizontal lines and left-to-right orientation in English (DeFord, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983; Treiman, 1993). Children’s ability to read their scribbled writing shows significant variability as some children report that they cannot read it while others read fluently (Clay, 2010; Lamme & Childers, 2013; Sulzby, 1992).

From Scribbles to Drawing and Writing

The transition from scribbling to drawing results from increased fine motor skills, working memory, and cognitive abilities (DeFord, 1980; Morra & Panesi, 2017). While scribbles are made up of sharp and curved lines, drawings are composed mostly of shapes. Also, scribbles represent actions, such as the rabbit running through the forest, while drawings represent things (Longobardi et al., 2015). As they use drawing to represent meaning, children begin to draw writing. This extends from their past scribble writing to pseudoletters and real letters (Clay, 2010; Lamme & Childers, 1983). These first attempts at writing often do not have meaning beyond representing “writing.”

Interestingly, the meaning attributed to early writing is often related to quantity and size. Children will use the length of their scribble writing strings to represent the length of a sentence. When they start using letters and pseudoletters to write, they will show a greater size or amount by using more letters. For example, in Luria’s experiments with early writers, children reported that the word “bear” should have more letters than the word “duck” because bears are much larger than ducks (Luria, 1977).

Prephonetic Writing

Over time, children transition from drawing letters to writing them. Different neural networks manage writing and drawing. It is a rule-bound system comprising a limited number of signs, whereas drawing is a compositional system with infinite possibilities for composition. As a result, writing is faster than drawing once children develop automaticity with letter formation (Adi-Japha & Freeman, 2001). The first stage of writing letters is called prephonetic writing because children have not yet connected letters and the sounds they make.

Prephonetic writing shows some universal characteristics of written language. For example, as young as three, children will write letters in horizontal lines without repeating letters. (Clay, 2010; Treiman, 20017; Treiman et al., 2007). Two theories are related to why we see these features in early writing. The constructivist position argues that children use universal features of language, including the ideas of linearity, words needing multiple letters, letters not repeating, different words needing different letter combinations, and syllables being represented by letters, before they use features of their particular language structure, such as specific letter combinations(Pollo, Kessler, & Treiman, 2009). However, the prephonetic statistical learning position argues that prephonetic letter use reflects patterns children have seen in the print in their environments, including labels, toys, books, advertisements, and posters (Read & Treiman, 2013). The most common text young children interact with is their own names. As a result, children most often write their names first (Pollo et al., 2009; Read & Treiman, 2013). Furthermore, by studying the prephonetic writing of children from the United States and Brazil, Pollo and her colleagues showed that the percentages of letters and letter combinations young children used matched the percentages of their appearance in the environmental text around them (Pollo et al., 2009). Even before they connect letters to sounds, children are aware of patterns in print.

Phonetic Writing

Around five, children discover the alphabetic principle that letters represent sounds and can be combined to form words. Many children realize this through interaction with environmental print before direct instruction on the concept (Tolchinsky, 2003). This phonetic writing is based on what children hear when they say a word and what they know about the names and sounds of letters (Read & Treiman, 2013). Early phonetic writing represents fewer sounds than later phonetic writing, and sounds may be represented with the wrong letters, such as using the letters “ch” to represent the /t/ sound in truck. (Treiman, 2007). These mistakes happen because children record what they hear in words, which is affected by accent and pronunciation. Certain letter combinations in English make it harder to hear given sounds (Read & Treiman, 2013). As children gain experience reading and writing, they can match more letters and sounds using both auditory and visual clues.

Learning Spelling Patterns

Children who are writing phonetically will start to experiment with spelling patterns. Spelling patterns are learned both implicitly from environmental print and explicitly through direct instruction. There are three types of spelling patterns: phonological, graphotactical, and morphological (Treiman, 2017).

Phonological patterns involve the relationship between letters and the sounds they make. Graphotactical patterns govern the order and arrangement of letters, such as when and where consonants must be doubled. Morphological patterns are related to word origin and meaning (Treiman, 2017). In English, morphological patterns will always override phonological patterns, which is just one thing that makes learning to read and write in English so difficult.

Learning spelling patterns is a long part of the learning-to-write process. There is no specific order in which children learn spelling patterns, but they generally move from simple to more complex patterns (Read & Treiman, 2013). Many patterns based on morphology but incompatible with phonology, such as using the letters “ed” to signify a regular past tense verb, are first learned around six but not mastered until age eleven or later (Bissex, 1980; Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 2006; Read & Treiman, 2013). Teachers are most effective at helping students master conventional spelling patterns if they understand both the reasons for students’ spelling misconceptions and the logic behind conventional spelling (Reid & Treiman, 2013).

Morphology

Morphology can make spelling more difficult for children when it differs from phonological patterns. However, some children implicitly use morphology to guide their spelling as early as four or five. For example, many English words have a letter “t” that sounds like /d/. Many children will spell “water” as “wader.” However, these same children will spell “waited” and “dirty” correctly because they implicitly know the root word is spelled with the letter “t” (Bryant, Nunes, and Bindman., 2000; Nunes et al., 2006; Read & Treiman, 2013; Treiman, 2017). These children are unaware of why they make these choices but have learned the morphological patterns from environmental text. This implicit knowledge is helpful, but it is not sufficient. Children must be explicitly taught morphological rules and patterns to grow as writers using conventional spelling patterns.

Signs Without Sound

Written language is mainly based on the sounds of oral language, but some signs carry meaning but no sound. These include punctuation that tells a reader how to phrase sentences, such as commas, periods, and question marks, and marks that give meaning to words, such as the apostrophe. Apostrophes are difficult for children to master because they have two uses in English. They show both ownership and contractions. As they learn to use apostrophes, children will overgeneralize them, such as using them in plural nouns, before mastering their use around twelve (Bryant et al., 2000). Becoming proficient in using conventional written language to express their ideas takes a long time.

Handwriting

While children can learn the shapes of letters from environmental print, they usually need direct instruction in letter formation to write efficiently. In one experiment, half of struggling first-grade readers were given supplemental handwriting instruction, while the other half were given supplemental phonological awareness instruction. After the lessons, the students who received the handwriting instruction produced more writing than the phonological awareness group, and the effects were still visible six months after the experiment concluded (Graham, Harris, & Fink, 2000). While this experiment found no difference in the quality of the writing of the handwriting group, other studies have shown an increase in quality as well as quantity after a handwriting intervention. The working theory is that developing automaticity with handwriting frees attention to focus on content over letter formation (Graham et al., 2000).

Syntax

While written and oral language both stem from humans' innate desire to communicate and make meaning, the purpose of written communication differs from oral communication. First of all, writing is done independently without the aid of a conversational partner, so there is no feedback or support to clarify thoughts. The writer has to assume the perspectives of both the writer and the reader (King, 1980). Second, oral communication primarily uses interpersonal language, while writing requires ideational language. Interpersonal communication is focused on building relationships, expressing emotions, meeting needs or wants, and negotiating social relationships and interactions. Conversely, ideational communication involves conveying information, constructing knowledge, and exploring ideas (King, 1980). These types of communication require different vocabulary and syntax.

Most children know basic sentence patterns by age five and can write simple sentences. However, they must learn many syntax patterns of written language, such as compound and complex sentences. Children will need different amounts of direct instruction to learn how to purposefully use these patterns in their written language (Clay, 2010). This instruction and development occur across years, with a significant jump in grammatical awareness and use between eight and ten (Nunes, Bryant, &Bindman, 1997). Using conventional grammar and syntax helps readers understand what the writer is trying to communicate.

The Role of Adults in Learning How to Write

In literate cultures, children learn about written language from experiences in their environments with texts and more knowledgeable others (King, 1980). Reading books introduces children to the superordinate features of writing, such as linearity, distinguishable units, the regularity of blanks, directionality, and the lack of iconicity, and language-specific features of writing, including spelling, punctuation, and grammar rules (DeFord, 1980; Treiman et al., 2007). It also teaches children about story structure and character behavior (King, 1980). This knowledge is implicit, and children can apply what they have learned before they can explain what they are doing.

Adults also serve as models and direct instructors for writing practices from letter formation to genre features. The best instruction from adults comes within the child's zone of proximal development, where the adult provides just the right amount of assistance until the child can perform the skill independently (Vygotsky, 1986).

An adult's most important role in helping a child learn to write is that of an appreciative audience member (DeFord, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983). Children have a natural urge to both write and become increasingly proficient at it (DeFord, 1980). By celebrating what children can do, adults create the space for children to apply what they are learning both implicitly and explicitly about writing. As Piaget said decades ago, “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves,” (Piers, Piaget, Erikson Institute, & Loyola University of Chicago, 1972).

The Role of Other Children in Learning to Write

Writing, drawing, playing, and talking are interconnected tools for making meaning and communicating. As a result, writing and learning how to write are both individual and social activities (King, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983; Sulzby, 1992). As children progress through the stages of learning to write, they move from highly social stages, like gestures and play, to more balance between the social and individual aspects of writing (Sulzby, 1992). Even the most experienced writers, such as published authors, work with others to produce their writing.

Children naturally integrate talking, playing, drawing, and writing (King, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983). They will write about their games and conversations, and they will have conversations about their writing. During one of Anne Dyson’s ethnographic studies of urban first graders, she witnessed the boys playing a game involving throwing pine cones on a large field during recess. They called it the Pine Cone Wars. Unfortunately, snow covered the field one day, and they couldn’t play their game. Instead, they moved the Pine Cone Wars to the playground, where bark chips became their soldiers in an epic battle. Later, the boys brought the game inside and began drawing and writing to continue the story. (Dyson, 2020). Writing and drawing were tools for their play.

Lamme and Childers observed similar interactions when they watched three young preschool children compose. The children spontaneously planned and edited their writing and drawing while discussing their work with each other (Lamme & Childers, 2013). The researchers summed up what they witnessed, saying, “Composing for children is a social activity” (Lamme & Childers, 2013, p. 34).

Summary

In researching for this paper, I have learned more about writing than I would have thought possible. I have also realized there is so much more to learn. In gathering information, I didn’t know what I would write about writing, but over time, I became fascinated by its duality. Writing is both an innate, natural process and an artificial cultural construct and tool. We are driven to record our thoughts and observations, as evidenced by our earliest ancestors' cave paintings.

What makes writing different from the symbols and signs of drawing, which are innate and occur in both literate and nonliterate societies, is the use of a prescribed set of signs created by humans that do not directly represent ideas. Vygotsky called writing second-order symbolism because the signs represent oral language representing objects, actions, and ideas (Vygotsky, 1986). These signs, most notably the alphabet, are an example of the artificiality of writing because children need to learn them from more knowledgeable others. Different children need different amounts of explicit instruction to learn how to write, but, in contrast to speaking, not everyone learns to write (Vygotsky, 1986).

Children will learn parts of writing implicitly through interaction with the text around them. What children learn implicitly varies with every child due to their environment, interactions with others, and their own biology (DeFord, 1980; King, 1980; Read & Treiman, 2013; Sulzby, 1992). Explicit instruction on writing is important for all children because even children who learn spelling patterns and grammatical structures implicitly will not be aware of the reasons behind their choices and cannot leverage them to extend their writing (Clay, 2010).

A Reflection on Writing in School

Working on this paper, I have spent much time reflecting on why so many students (and people) claim to hate writing. In the early stages of writing, children are driven to create using play, scribbles, drawings, and writing. The more they learn about writing in school, the less they want to do it. I have concluded that this change happens because we have forgotten that playing, drawing, talking, and writing are interconnected (Dyson, 2020; King, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983). Writing is the farthest from an innate human ability, and it is the hardest of these four activities. By separating writing from our natural processes of communication and meaning-making, we are making it a joyless and almost impossible task for children.

We are also teaching children the rules of conventional writing without allowing them the space to construct their own knowledge. As a result, writing doesn’t feel like a creative space to share their ideas. Instead, it is a minefield filled with hidden traps and endless opportunities to be wrong. This way of thinking shows our fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of writing.

Luckily, there is a way forward that allows children to maintain their creativity as they learn to write. First, we let children create. We provide opportunities for them to create as they play, draw, and write. Second, we let them create together. Third, our explicit instruction on writing is quick, targeted, and available to students as they need it. Children integrate information at different rates and at different times (Clay, 2010; DeFord, 1980; Lamme & Childers, 1983). Laboring over a topic that a child isn’t ready to learn or has already mastered leads to frustration for everyone. Of course, this type of instruction requires teachers to be experts in writing, child development, observation, and planning. To accomplish these goals, teachers must observe students as they work and play, teach the entire class, meet with small groups, and support individual students. Teachers need to do all of these things because of the dual nature of writing. To support children’s innate desire to communicate and make meaning, the teacher must give them space. However, children need instruction and support to use the human invention of written language. This paradox of independence and support is what makes learning to write so frustrating and so powerful.

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