Writing development has generally been assumed to be parasitic to reading development (e.g. Van Orden, Jansen op de Harr, & Bosman, 1997). However, recent studies suggest that writing may not be entirely dependent on reading. Among the limited number of writing studies, the majority of them focus on alphabetic scripts such as English. Chinese script, which is non-alphabetic, receives less attention in writing research. It has been suggested that three sub-character units – stroke, logographeme and radical – are involved in the character writing process. However, their roles in writing are still not clear and their influences on writing and writing development have not been systematically addressed. The present study aimed at studying the relevant processing units in writing development. Before investigating the roles of different sub-character units in writing, a corpus was established to identify a set of logographemes which can capture the use of logographemes among primary school students. The properties of logographemes were studied, including the lexicality and the frequency across different grades. After the identification of logographemes, the roles of radical, logographeme and stroke in writing from grades one to six were investigated using a delayed copying task of pseudo-characters. Pseudo-characters were composed varying orthogonally in radical frequency, number of logographemes, and number of strokes. The results show that logographeme number and radical frequency affected the writing performance of students across the six grades. This suggests that both logographeme and radical are prominent processing units across writing development. Significant effect of stroke was found when the logographeme number and the radical frequency were high. This suggests that stroke is a prominent processing unit when the logographemes and radicals are less accessible. It is interesting that the stroke effect was found to be reversed in some specific occasions. Distinctiveness of logographemes is suggested to explain the phenomenon. Finally, the overall results are discussed in terms of the grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). / published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

The purpose of this study is to analyze the content of dialogue journals of selected third grade students in order to discover the predominant themes in their writing. A second purpose is to explore how a teacher used the information gained from journals with her students to make curriculum decisions in her classroom. Although many reasons have been given for using journals in school writing programs, few studies have examined the role and impact of dialogue journals in primary grade classrooms. It is hoped that this study will add to the knowlege concerning dialogue journals in primary grades. This study is rooted in the desire to explore and explain what it means for a teacher to enter into a dialogue through journal writing with his or her students. It is hoped that this investigation will not only provide new insights into this relationship but also describe what grade three students and their teacher write about in the process of utilizing a journal. Six grade three students and thier teacher were involved in this study. Student journal entries, the teacher responses to the students' journal entries, and subsequent teacher interviews were all subjected to content analysis. The principal finding of this study was that dialogue journals not only provided a safe and secure environment in which children could express their ideas and knowledge, but it also became an important curriculum tool where specific writing needs and/or instruction based on interest could be met cooperatively. All student wrote on a variety of topics, regardless of their writing ability, and the teacher always responded in a positive manner. This study may provide added awareness of the possibilities of utilizing dialogue journal writing for cooperative curriculum planning. If teachers provide opportunities for students to become partners in curriculum planning, based on their needs, perhaps schools may become more personally fulfilling for both teachers and students. / xii, 120 leaves : chart, plan ; 28 cm.

This study explored the effects of metacognitive strategies on expository writing performance and metacognitive awareness of sixth graders. Metacognitive knowledge refers to students' ability to talk and write about the variables operating in expository tasks, the availability and appropriateness of strategies for producing expository text and how aspects of writing interact with the appropriateness of strategies available to the writer. High and low ability students were assigned to an experimental group who received instruction in metacognitive awareness strategies or to a control group. Three different types of measures included writing performance measures of syntax, mechanics and semantics/pragmatics; metacognitive awareness measures; and individual differences measures. The syntax and mechanics measures and the individual differences measures were standardized by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Results indicated no significant differences in either writing performance or metacognitive awareness for the two groups. Possible causal factors emerged: Expository writing performance was shown to be situation specific; a group design did not allow for a clear description of what factors contributed to the uneven performances; writers may not have performed well since a functional context and a source of motivation were lacking. Writing assessment and research design became the central issues of this study. Any comparison of two pieces of writing cannot reflect a writer's competence. Contextual factors influence the writer's performance on any task and a research design needs to allow for description of those factors.

This study explored the construction of written language knowledge as evidenced by the changes in forty-seven preschool children's autographs. Throughout the school year children were asked to "write your name and draw a picture of yourself." The resulting name writing samples indicated that changes in children's autographs were not idiosyncratic but identifiable transitions in a cognitive constructive process as children gradually attempted to make sense out of written language by writing their names. Transitions identified in children's autographs included: graphic actions (scribbling); random graphemes dispersed within drawing; spatial differentiation between writing and drawing; zigzag lines; zigzag lines with graphemes; linear and eventually horizontal, discrete, letterlike strings; reduced number of graphemes; increasing number of pertinent letters in and/or out of order; appropriate number of placeholders and pertinent letters; recognizable letters; and, eventually conventional signatures. As children's autographs evolved over time they provided evidence that children construct knowledge about written language much as Piaget and others have suggested young children construct logico-mathematical knowledge; not by using adult logic but by trying to make sense of and understand written language. Conventional or even recognizable autographs did not suddenly appear or result from the copying of models. Rather, autographs evolved over time as children devised strategies and followed intuitive rules while solving the problem of distinguishing writing from drawing, generating the culturally significant actions involved in writing, discovering the distinctive orthographic features of letters, and eventually controlling the orthographic conventions of name writing. In addition to providing evidence for name writing as a constructive process, this study also presented information indicating that initially, name writing is ideographic and is not based on knowledge of letter names or understanding letter/sound correspondences. Name writing was also discussed as a significant sign of young children's emerging use of symbols. The conclusion was reached that name writing, when approached as a constructive process, is an appropriate curriculum component in preschool programs and an essential ingredient in the emerging literacy of young children.

This naturalistic study of cases explores the interrelationship between children’s awareness of their own thought processes, their ability to understand key concepts and concept vocabulary and integrate new ideas into their existing knowledge base when engaged in specific genre writing tasks. An adaptation of the framework, originally devised by Swartz and Perkins (1989), was used to identify the levels of awareness in thinking displayed by eight Year 3 children, when engaged in genre writing tasks during one academic year. The addition of ‘collaborative use’ to this framework highlights ways in which collaborative thinking can act as a support for young writers. When children co-construct ideas they endeavour to make their thinking explicit thus enabling teachers to assess levels of conceptual understanding whilst the children are engaged in a writing task. Evidence also suggests that young writers move in and out of the suggested levels of thinking depending on the complexity of the task, their prior knowledge and understanding of key concepts and awareness of the working strategies and thought processes they employ. This study not only contributes to current research on genre writing within school based contexts but makes a unique contribution by highlighting the need for pedagogical strategies to focus on the way young writers think about and understand the underlying concepts and principles related to genre writing tasks. Evidence also suggests that learning objectives presented to this age group often focus on the factual and procedural aspects of a writing task. However, when factual, procedural and conceptual aspects are made explicit through clear, thought-provoking learning objectives then children are able to develop their own creative responses within the linguistic and textual structures of the given genre without being confined by them.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This is a study of the nature and extent of third grade Papago Indian children's use of personal experiences in their writing. It examines the reflection of their experiences as individuals with unique personalities and interests, their experiences as Papago Indians, their experiences as third grade school children, influenced by the curricular content of their conventional school experiences and such multi-media as books, newspapers, television and film, and finally, their experiences as young children with the ability to fantasize. The study examines the extent to which these children introduce personal experience into both assigned and unassigned writing, considering such variables as their control over the assignment, their knowledge of the content of the assignment. The study also investigates how developmental maturity and gender factors influence the reflection of real life experiences in the children's writing. The seventeen subjects, seven boys and ten girls, are Papago Indian students, either eight or nine years old, enrolled in a public elementary school on the reservation, and all members of the same third grade class. The main data base contains at least eight compositions from each subject for a total of two hundred and thirty-seven writing samples. It also includes retrospective interviews conducted by the researcher at the end of the school year with each subject providing evidence about how they developed their ideas for each piece they wrote, and the extent to which the people, places and events in their written compositions represent real-life experiences. The findings demonstrate that children do introduce personal experience into their writing, clearly revealing the many facets of their experiences such as the ethnic, the religious and the environmental. The extent to which the children's personal experience is reflected in their writing is not affected by the degree of control they exercise over the selection of the writing topic; rather, it is influenced by the function for which the children are writing and by the content of the topic they are writing about. The study raises questions about the relationship between developmental maturity and the ability to fantasize and reveals striking differences between male and female writers in the extent to which they utilize their real life experiences in their writing.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether students' attitudes towards writing and their abilities to write were affected by their teacher's participation in their writing assignments. The null hypotheses that no significant differences would be found were supported. The control group and two experimental groups were all composed of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders from a racially mixed elementary school in a large metropolitan school district. The two experimental groups received identical instruction in writing skills except that the teacher wrote with one group and not with the other. The attitude scale, constructed for this experiment, proved to be statistically invalid and unreliable.

This study is an exploration of five children’s relationship with the existential as it is played out in their everydayness at the nursery. Previous research in the field has looked at teachers’ perceptions of pre-school children’s existential questions, showing, thus, a place for a study on children’s existential encounters. My focus lies with the subjective meanings and the emotional qualities of these encounters, specifically how they are embodied in children’s play in the form of a word but also an object, an image, a movement or silence as well as in their ordinary doing and their very being at the nursery. I am also interested in how the existential reveals itself in children’s everyday relationships with others as well as how it is precisely through my relationship with them that I, as someone who looks for it, can get closer to it. For that I use psychoanalytic observation as a methodology that stays with the child’s interior worlds as they unfold in her play and in the relationship with the observer. My methodology is informed by relational psychoanalytic thinking and feminist writings that allow me to locate meaning in the liminal spaces between the self and the other, the interior and the exterior. In the analysis, I use writing as inquiry as a means to explore an integrative approach by moving between psychoanalytic theories and existential-phenomenological ideas to think the existential with. I explore children’s existential encounters with the questions of nothingness, strangeness, ontological insecurity, death and selfhood as they emerged in the context of our relationship in the course of the observations. I also discuss how time, space and relationship - as inherent in the existential but also implicated in the method of psychanalytic observation - manifested in children’s existential encounters. Finally, I look at the idea of the interpersonal unconscious as a creative source of meaning and discuss how the existential emerged embodied in symbolic articulations in the form of character, imagery, sounds and scents.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of two different school language programs at the end of third grade, Follow Through (FT) and Non Follow Through (NFT), on the development of children's oral and written language on measures of complexity of structure and diversity of meaning. Linguistic complexity was studied by use of the T-unit and percentage of complex T-unit measures, while linguistic complexity was examined through use of the type-token ratio. The two language programs studied were FT, the Tucson Early Education Model (TEEM), an innovative language experience program, and NFT, a traditional approach. Subjects used for the study were 70 children continuously enrolled in FT (n = 34) and NFT (n = 36) classrooms since kindergarten or first grade, allowing for examination of program effects at the end of the third grade. One oral and two written language samples were obtained for each of the 70 subjects. Collection of the language took place within the classroom context, emphasizing sampling of children's natural language abilities. Instruments used for the collection, coding, and scoring of oral and written variables were the Children's Language Assessment-Situation Tasks (CLA-ST), developed by TEEM at the University of Arizona, and the Productive Language Assessment Tasks (PLAT), developed at the High Scope Education Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Using a posttest only control group design, two separate analysis procedures were performed. A two-way analysis of variance with repeated measures were used to determine the program impact on the linguistic complexity and diversity measures in the oral and written language of FT and NFT children. A correlational analysis was also performed to determine the relationship between the oral and written language patterns for both the control and experimental groups. Study results indicated no significant differences between the two groups, FT and NFT, on the measures of linguistic complexity, T-units, and percentage of T-units. On the type-token ratio measure, the differences between the FT and NFT groups were not significant, but greater differences were shown than between the two groups on the complexity measures. When examining the mean scores for the type-token ratio, the FT children consistently scored higher. These differences indicate a trend toward higher scores on this measure for the FT group even though the differences were not significant. Significant differences were found, however, between oral and written language for the subjects of both groups. Correlational procedures used to examine the relationship between oral and written language resulted in low to insignificant relationships. This is consistent with the analysis of variance finding of significant differences between oral and written language. Linguistic measures in oral language were found to be relatively independent of the same measures in written language. Competencies in oral language did not predict competence in use of written language for this age and group of children. Results indicate that children at this age are aware of the different functions and use of oral and written language. Trends found favoring the FT group indicate possible program effects. Further longitudinal investigations of the complexities and interrelationships of children's developing productive language abilities within the context of different classroom language programs are recommended.