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Children's Early Text Construction

Clotilde Pontecorvo editor Margherita Orsolini editor Barbara Burge editor Lauren B Resnick editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Inc

Published:1st Jan '96

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Children's Early Text Construction cover

For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by questions of how children learn to read. Especially among Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on reading has been the only approach to studying written language education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have revealed that when young children are asked to "write," they show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this understanding long before they can read conventional writing on their own.

The rich structure of meanings involved in the word text provided the glue that brought together a group of scholars from several disciplines in an international workshop held in Rome. Reflecting the state of the field at the time, the majority of the workshop participants were scholars working in languages other than English, especially the romance languages. Their work mirrors a linguistic and psychological research tradition that Anglophone scholars knew little of until recently. This volume provides English-language readers with updated versions of the papers presented at the meeting. The topics discussed at the workshop are represented in the chapters as follows:

* the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts;
* the reciprocal "permeability" between spoken and written language;
* the initial phases of text construction by children; and
* the educational conditions that facilitate written language acquisition and writing practice.

"...would serve well as a means for researchers who are familiar with information-processing perspectives on children's writing....covers many topics....is worthy of consideration by anyone who wants to think seriously about how to study children's acquisition of literacy. Readers who are not familiar with the work of this volume's European coeditors and chapter authors will do well to learn what they have been doing."
Contemporary Psychology

"...the 18 chapters offer a number of interesting methods of analyzing qualitative data....impressive scope in exploring different cultures, different types of written products, and different aspects of language and discourse."
American Journal of Psychology

"Children's Early Text Construction explores 'the rich structure of meanings involved in the word text' and represents an important addition to our understandings about children becoming literate..."
Harvard Educational Review

ISBN: 9780805815047

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 870g

384 pages