Managing the written text: the beginning of punctuation in children's writing

This study aims at understanding the use of punctuation in children’s early writings in connection with the organisation of the written text. Data are drawn from a larger comparative study in which written stories of Little Red Riding Hood were collected from primary school children who speak one of the three Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The corpus consists of 134 written stories of second grade children from low income families. Different quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented. Results show that all children, in spite of differences in literacy practices, try to make sense of the conventions of a system of writing, including punctuation marks (PMs). Some children seem to assume a ‘graphic principle’, while others make sophisticated attempts to distinguish the function of PMs for different types of speech genre. Contrastive textual use of PM seems to be critical also for teaching purposes. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.