Becoming literate is part of an individual's linguistic development, and learning to write is an essential component of literacy. Children who have difficulties in acquiring writing are at risk in their linguistic and educational development. In this chapter, we review crucial landmarks in children's acquisition of writing in alphabetic systems, providing a developmental framework within which to characterize writing disabilities/difficulties, which may range from tracing a letter-shape to producing a coherent text. This diversity of areas of ability reflect the multiple meanings of writing, which can refer to the set of graphic signs used to represent an utterance, the method used for producing such signs (mode of production), or the linguistic features that characterize the resulting output. Each of these meanings corresponds to a domain of knowledge that children need to master in order to become competent writers: the forms and function of the signs of writing, the modality of production, and the written products. In the following, we discuss these and our developmental perspective on the evolving knowledge in each of these domains.
The Meanings of WritingThe Graphic Signs Expressions such as writing systems illustrate the first sense of what we mean by "writing": symbol systems formed by a finite set of visible and enduring graphic elements that represent an utterance that can be understood without the intervention of the utterer (Daniels & Bright, 1996). Alphabetic, syllabic, or logographic systems are broad categories of writing systems; all represent language in an arbitrary and conventional way (i.e., without an iconic or direct resemblance between the graphic elements and the objects or events they refer to) (Sampson, 1985). Writing systems are realized in language-specific orthographies (e.g., English, French, or Spanish, all use the same set of graphic marks, letters, but obey different rules of pairing letters to sounds for representing utterances). Learners of writing must acquire not only the alphabetic principle-that individual signs represent categories of sound-they must also gain language-specific orthographic knowledge. Liliana Tolchinsky and Harriet Jisa -9789004346369 Downloaded from Brill.com08/05/2020 01:18:54PM via free access 54 tolchinsky and jisaSome languages have a transparent orthographic system (have a regular sound-letter correspondence), while others have a more opaque (less regular) relation between phonemes and graphemes. Languages differ in their transparency/opacity (the way that phonemes and graphemes map to each other). Studies have shown that children learn to read and spell earlier in more transparent orthographies (e.g.
The Mode of ProductionExpressions such as say it in writing refer to the biomechanical mode of production (i.e., non-speech, non-signing) used for encoding utterances. Unlike speaking or signing that can only be produced by voice or manual gestures, many different tools can be used for writing: pens, pencils, brushes, keyboards and fingers. All leave visi...