Conceptualizations Underlying Emergent Readers' Story Writing. CIERA Report.

Two series of case studies were carried out following a multiple baseline design across individuals. The first series of eight studies included 4- to 5-year-old Dutch kindergarten children, and the second series examined 5- to 6-year-old kindergarten children. Each child wrote approximately 16 stories in the natural classroom environment over a 2-month period. During the last month of the experiment the teacher or a researcher promoted invented spelling by modeling this strategy for the children prior to their second series of writing sessions. The two series of case studies tested how children harmonized knowledge and understandings, represented by early-developing forms of writing such as random letter strings or pseudo-cursive scribbles, with an emerging understanding that letters represent sounds. Even when children understood the alphabetic principle and adults promoted the use of letter-sound rules to represent their story, children were not inclined simply to drop early-developing forms such as pseudo-cursive scribble or random letter strings. They often produced combinations of early forms and invented spelling. Invented spelling gradually increased over earlier forms, but only among a group of older kindergartners. Contains 4 tables, 3 figures, and 24 references. (Author/NKA)