This study examines the writing of six first grade children (three girls and three boys of varying abilities) in a "whole language" classroom where writing was modelled daily during "Morning News" and "writing skills" were taught in context. Conducted from a socio-psycholinguistic/emergent writing perspective, this study addresses two major questions: (1) What are the functions and forms of writing in first grade? (2) In what ways do these functions and forms change throughout the first-grade year?
All of the children's writing produced during "Writing Workshop" time was analyzed to determine writing functions, structure (genres, structures of text, syntax and sentence patterns), and orthography (segmentation, punctuation marks, capitalization, and spelling). Interrelationships between function and the various levels of form were examined, as were changes throughout the school year. Analytical categories were developed from previous studies and from the data.
Evidence was found to support the following conclusions: (1) First grade children write for a variety of purposes. Changes in function appear to be due to children's interests and preferences rather than to their development. There is a trend towards multifunctionalism in first grade writing. (2) Children compose written discourses from the beginning of first grade. (3) Discourse-level structure increases in both variety and complexity from beginning to end of first grade. (4) Segmentation increases in conventionality, with sentence segmentation becoming conventional before word segmentation. (5) Punctuation, capitalization, phonemic segmentation and representation, and spelling become increasingly conventional. (6) Discourse- and sentence-level forms "follow" function, but orthography does not. Changes in orthography are due to development and writing experience. (7) In a comparison of texts produced by children considered by the teacher at the beginning of the year to be "advanced" in development to those of children considered to be "average" or "delayed" in development, at the end of first grade, "advanced" children: (1) write in more complex genres, with more complex text structures; (2) use a greater variety of sentence patterns and punctuation marks; (3) write more conventionally in terms of segmentation, punctuation marks, capitalization and spelling.
Thus, the study provides insight into how children develop as writers and the relationship between functions and various aspects of the development of form. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/9481 |
| Date | 20 June 2018 |
| Creators | Chapman, Marilyn Lesley |
| Contributors | Mickelson, Norma I. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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