Writing Across Writing Systems

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Writing Across Writing Systems

• Presented By
• Kayla Romsa
• Elisa Jones
• Debi Womack

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Emergent Writing

• Children come into literacy through a gradual and
  integrated development.
• Literacy develops when children are exposed to
  print written in a language they speak. Also by
  having social interactions around print with
  adult or older readers and writers.
• Research shows that preschoolers not only have a
  remarkable knowledge of print, but have developed
  some print conventions on their own. This is
  true regardless of racial, ethnic and cultural
  background and from all socio-economic levels.

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Emergent Writing Continued

• Piagets (1959) theories describe those
  childrens developmental tasks in a schema
  framework where new learning must be assimilated
  and accommodated.
• Some researchers characterize the acquisition of
  writing as a psychogenetic process, in a
  Piagetian sense (Ferreiro, 1990). This is due
  to the facts that children construct their own
  representations and explanations about writing,
  that similarities occur in different linguistic
  environments, and that the processes children
  exhibit appear to be developmentally ordered.

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Emergent Writing Continued

• How do we integrate
• What we know about development of literacy?
• What we observe children doing with their own
  writing system?
• What we present in classrooms as first- or
  second-language literacy instruction?
• What is the definition of writing?
• Writing includes graphic displays that are
  understood as a code for spoken or potentially
  spoken messages.

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Distinguishing Writing From Drawing

• Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) found that young
  children could learn to make several distinctions
  between written productions and other graphic
  symbols. They distinguished
• Drawings from writing
• Pictures from print
• Letter from numerals
• Letters from punctuation
• Letters from words
• Print from cursive writing

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Distinguishing Writing From Drawing Continued

• Dyson (1984, 1993) studied childrens writing
  development as it relates to purpose situated
  within social contexts and then defined these
  contexts as multiple worlds the symbolic world,
  the peer social world, the official teachers
  world, and the wider world.
• Other researchers have begun to discover the
  principles that children use in constructing what
  Ferreiro (1982) called childrens theories
  about writing and literacy. Some of these
  principles are
• The principle of minimum quantity How many
  letters or symbols must exist for print to say
  something?
• Internal quality variations Variety is
  important. For instance, can the same letter
  repeated be readable?

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Distinguishing Writing From Drawing Continued

• Objective differences in writing How can they
  create graphic differentiations for different
  meanings?
• The phonetization or syllabic hypothesis
  Depending on the language, how do children begin
  to attempt a correspondence between the spoken
  language and the written symbols?
• The alphabetic hypothesis Children attempt to
  use letters to represent individual sounds (for
  children learning alphabetic languages).
• This developing knowledge of these graphic
  features is the raw material children use to work
  out their individual constraints, which seem to
  be general across writing systems.

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Example

• The following was done by a child who is 2 years
  and 10 months old. The blue represents his
  drawing of a circle. The orange represents a
  line. The red represents dots. The green
  represents an E and the yellow was just free
  drawing.

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Writing Systems

• According to Pinker (1994), in all known writing
  systems, the symbols designate only three kinds
  of linguistic structure
• The morpheme
• The syllable
• The phoneme

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Writing Systems Continued

• The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in
  language. Ex Are words like kind that can not be
  divided without changing the meaning.
• The syllable is a unit in speech often longer
  than one sound and shorter than a word.
• The phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that
  can distinguish two words Ex The words cat and
  mat only differ from their beginning sounds
• The number of phonemes vary from language to
  language English is said to have 44 phonemes 24
  constants and 20 vowels.

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Writing Systems Continued

• Most writing systems can be classified into three
  main types according to the units of language
  that they represent
• Logographic
• Syllabary
• Alphabetic

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The logographic writing system

• In the logographic writing system, most symbols
  represent words or morphemes rather than having a
  grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
• Chinese is the most widely used logographic
  writing system today.
• This morphemic writing system appears to have
  served the Chinese well, despite the fact that
  readers are at a loss when they face new or rare
  words.
• Speakers of many dialects can share texts,
  although they may pronounce the words
  differently.

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The syllabary writing system

• In the syllabic or syllabary writing system the
  symbols represent syllables rather than phonemes.
  
• Japanese is a combination of the logographic and
  syllabic system.
• Japanese uses two sets of written syllabic
  symbols, the Katakana and Hiagana.
• Each letter of Katakana is a fragment of a simple
  Chinese character, hence the name Kata
  (fragment)Kana (borrowed name)
• Each letter of Hiragana (cursive or smooth
  borrowed name) is fashioned from a cursive form
  of a simple character

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The alphabetic writing system

• In the alphabetic writing system, the symbols
  represent phonemes of the language.
• Historically, alphabetic writing systems were the
  last to be invented.
• Generally assumed that alphabetic writing evolved
  from Egyptian hieroglyphics, through Phoenician
  writing that represented both constants only, to
  Greek writing that represented both constants and
  vowels. English, Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese,
  and many other languages use the Roman or Latin
  alphabetic writing system.

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The alphabetic writing system Continued

• English is an alphabetic language that poses some
  complicating challenges for second-language
  learners.
• English orthography relies on representing spoken
  language through an alphabetic system that does
  not closely relate to the surface sounds of
  words.
• Orthographies may be defined as either shallow or
  deep, depending on the ease of predicting the
  pronunciation of a word from its spelling.
• Shallow orthographies spell words as they sound
  with high degree of sound-symbol correspondence.
  Ex. Spanish and Italians
• English is said to have a deep orthography.
• English word spelling can reflect morphological
  relations rather maintaining a consistent sound.

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Language Discourse Differences

• Written text has a style that is different from
  oral language.
• Even though oral language is an vital part of the
  culture and everyday social life, literacy opens
  up larger worlds to readers that may not be
  available in a purely oral culture.
• Written language uses vocabulary that is more
  diverse and described as literacy or written.

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Learning a Second System of Writing

• Research shows that we transfer our writing
  knowledge and skills to a second language.
• Clearly if both languages use the same symbols
  the problems of learning to write and to identify
  the symbols are less difficult.
• The problems consist of associating familiar
  symbols to a different sound system.

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Implications For The ClassroomTransfer of
Literacy Process Skills

• Outside distinct linguistic skills, there are
  many process skills that transfer from literacy
  in a first language to a second language.
• Literate students will understand that a written
  language is a code, and there are certain rules
  for decoding and encoding and making meaning.
• They will understand that the written language
  varies from the spoken language, but that there
  are conventions to help the reader make the
  written text sound as much like oral speech as
  possible when read aloud.

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Transfer of Literacy Process Skills Continued

• Literate students will have strategies for
  dealing with a written text and they may look for
  physical signs that help them analyze the nature
  or genre of the document.

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Transfer of Literacy Process Skills Continued

• If teachers dont have the basic knowledge of
  writing development to understand the behaviors
  that children are exhibiting, literacy behaviors
  of children go unobserved and unsupported.
• Teachers must know the power they have over
  children and the effect that teacher attention
  can have on developing literacy and learning.

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Implications for the Classrooms Continued

• If teachers become overly concerned with
  requirements for written text that deal with
  teacher-chosen topics and that are to be written
  specifically to define standards for writing,
  then children will be limited in the ways they
  can express themselves through symbols.

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The Complexities of Theory Construction

• Literacy is socially mediated by the more capable
  members of the learners groups.
• How these more accomplished members mediate the
  use of literacy will determine the uses that the
  learner will attempt, develop and adapt.

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The Complexities of Theory Construction Continued

• Literacy is also constructed which means the
  culture group may have multiple levels of
  literacy's and literacy uses.
• In order for children to learn to write they must
  construct and test their theories themselves.
• Without this process of experimentation and
  construction children wont develop writing.

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• The End