From “What Did I Write?” to “Is this Right?”: Intention, Convention, and Accountability in Early Literacy

Abstract

When children enter public kindergartens in the current atmosphere of high stakes testing, they often encounter an emphasis on correctness that casts doubt on the integrity of their personally invented messages, prompting them to ask not "What did I write?" but "Is this right?" This ethnographic case study examines early writing by 23 kindergarten children within the context of their free-writing time and their teacher"s plan to restore intention to compensate for a mandated curriculum that overemphasized convention. Children"s writing samples were analyzed before and after the teacher introduced peer sharing, a strategy aimed at reestablishing the children"s communicative intent.

Kindergarten as Nexus of Practice: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Reading, Writing, Play, and Design in an Early Literacy Apprenticeship

“…Field notes, audiotapes, photographs, and videotapes recorded children's talk and physical action with literacy tools, toys, and materials. Emergent coding identified frequent reading, writing, play, and design practices, facilitated by qualitative data analysis software and informed by previous pilot studies that were conducted in other primary classrooms (Wohlwend, 2006(Wohlwend, , 2007(Wohlwend, , 2008. Close interactional analysis of language and visual analysis of objects in key nexuses (integrated practices, e.g., reading to play and playing to read) linked valued practices to classroom participation.…”

Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts Through Disney Princess Play

“…To identify a classroom rich in material resources for literacy and play, I analyzed materials in the eight kindergartens using literacy environment surveys (Loughlin & Martin, 1987;Wolfersberger, Reutzel, Sudweeks, & Fawson, 2004) and a play environment checklist that I had developed to examine the physical products, tools, and material objects that were actually used by the children in the selected classrooms. I conducted pilot studies in two of the kindergarten classrooms to locate the times and spaces that integrated play, literacy, and design activity (Wohlwend, 2008b).…”

The Nature and Measurement of Children's Early Composing

“…We were interested in whether authors and researchers conceptualized composing as comprising smaller components (e.g., composing comprises planning, translating, and reviewing; J.R. Hayes & Flower, ) or as a unique, singular construct (e.g., as a component in a framework with other writing skills; e.g., Kaderavek et al., ), as demonstrated in Figure . When considering this factor of defining composing, 24.1% of articles including a definition (14.61% of total reviewed; n = 65) presented composing as a construct containing multiple smaller parts, such as intention and convention (Rowe, ; Wohlwend, ). Across these results, many were more theoretical about writing, and although they did not explicitly mention an age group that would lead to exclusion in this review, they may have had more skilled writers in mind.…”