Learning to read and write constitutes a central part of becoming literate. From an emergent literacy perspective, learning to write starts during the first years of a child's life, fostered by experiences that permit and promote meaningful interaction with oral and written language. Data from a research study that took place in 11 pre-primary education classes in the region of Achaia, Greece, is reported. The early children's attempts to write are in the center of this paper. Written samples by 172 pupils (aged 47-71 months), who were in the pre-alphabetic spelling phase, the period preceding the phonographic or conventional spelling, are analyzed. During this phase, even though the children have not yet discovered the letter sound correspondence, they demonstrate a great amount of knowledge of what is written language, how it works and what are its purposes. The results of the study suggest that reading and writing development is a strictly interrelated process and pre-school education reinforces literacy by creating context of decontextualized language use. The educational implications of the findings are also discussed. The main argument is that kindergarten education could significantly help the development of early literacy, but it is important to adopt an approach that starts from what children know and gives them opportunities to communicate by writing.KEY WORDS: emergent writing and reading, kindergarten education, prealphabetic phase of writing L1 -Educational Studies in Language and Literature 4: 129-150, 2004.

Subscribing to Systemic Functional Linguistics approach, this paper examines aspects of decontextualised language, such as classification and definitions, in Greek preschool instructional contexts. Following the assumption that such decontextualised uses are considered critical to the transition from commonsense to educational knowledge, we attempt a lexicogrammatical analysis of taxonomic meanings occurring in these educational settings. The analysis of instances of classroom discourse in terms of identifying and attributive clauses has shown that classification and definitions, conceived as critical for educational knowledge development, seem to be a reiterated pattern by which teachers recontextualise commonsense meanings into educational knowledge. Different lexicogrammatical realisations of categorisation and definitions with respect to their meaning potentiality are discussed, and evidence of variation in lexicogrammatical choices regarding the continuum from common to uncommon experience is also illustrated. Another point worth mentioning is that social/abstract entities tend to be categorised and/or defined through saying verbs, while physical/ concrete entities through being verbs. This variation appears to be a tendency in reproducing the paradigmatic distinction between physical and social science which characterises actual school discourse from very early school age.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Quantitative Linguistics on 7 October 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09296174.2016.1226430. The Accepted Manuscript is under embargo. Embargo end date: 7 April 2018.Theoretical and empirical studies prove the strong relationship between social factors and the individual linguistic attitudes. Different social categories, such as gender, age, education, profession and social status, are strongly related with the linguistic diversity of people???s everyday spoken and written interaction. In this paper, sociolinguistic studies addressed to gender differentiation are overviewed in order to identify how various linguistic characteristics differ between women and men. Thereafter, it is examined if and how these qualitative features can become quantitative metrics for the task of gender identification from texts on web blogs. The evaluation results showed that the ???syntactic complexity???, the ???tag questions???, the ???period length???, the ???adjectives??? and the ???vocabulary richness??? characteristics seem to be significantly distinctive with respect to the author???s gender

The purpose of this article is to investigate two interconnected facets of literacy development and more specifically the interplay between reading and writing development. Given the rather poor literacy practices in Greek pre-primary education, our intervention during ''reading-writing workshops'' (engagement of children in meaningful literacy activities as socially situated written texts) showed that changes towards literate practices occurred in both age groups (4-5 and 5-6 years old) under investigation. Significant differences in literate performances have also been found between second year pupils who had attended first year class and those who had not.We discuss the contribution of pre-primary education to the development of literacy, as well as some educational implications concerning the Greek pre-primary school.KEY WORDS: emergent literacy, greek importance of schooling to early literacy development, pre-primary education, reading/writing interplay L1 -Educational Studies in Language and Literature (2005) 5: 3-21 Ó Springer 2005

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