The significance of emergent writing
Two voices
Elizabeth: one of the major turning points in my teaching career came, in the early
1980s, when I took an early writing course at the Centre for Language in Primary
Education in London. This introduced me to a developmental writing approach to
teaching. Later, in 1987, at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, I took another
more intensive course on early literacy development tutored by Jean-Anne Clyde.
This helped me in my enquiry about children’s literacy and directly supported me in
my teaching of reading and writing. This developmental theory or emergent
approach was developing slowly in pockets of England (McKenzie, 1986); New
Zealand (Clay, 1975 and Holdaway, 1979), and in the USA (Goodman, 1968). The
significant change in my teaching was that I started to observe what children were
actually doing in writing when given the freedom to explore their own thinking.
Maulfry: at about the same time, I also came across emergent writing, but via a dif-
ferent route. A local teacher had visited several Early Years settings in the USA and
had seen children using the ‘writing station’ (or writing area). She talked about the
way children made their own marks and that these were accepted by the teacher. I
was intrigued by this idea and took it back to my classroom.
Gradually I encouraged children to use their own marks and, with the children’s help,
developed a writing area. Their growing confidence and deep levels of understanding
were soon evident. At the time I called this ‘thinking writing’ since I emphasised the
need to ‘really think’ about all aspects of their writing – and especially their intended
meaning, the content. At first I had no idea that other teachers were supporting chil-
dren’s early writing in England in this way. For two years I kept every piece of the chil-
dren’s writing – including writing they chose to do in their play – in order to assess and
be able to justify what the children did. Gradually I was able to trace a developing
pathway that included content, understanding of phonics, spelling, punctuation and
handwriting. As I did this I came across texts that highlighted this development within
the context of ‘whole language’. This was a major turning point in my teaching and,
like Elizabeth; it was the observations of children that helped reveal their thinking.
The literacy movement also heavily influenced many other teachers. This was a
theory based in classrooms and homes rather than specially set-up clinical tasks. This
grounded theory is based on the social environment, about the lived experiences of par-
ticipants (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). It is effective because, although it is complex, it is
based in real situations and therefore manageable to do in classrooms, because that was
where the research was based. It was argued that: ‘the classroom practice of tens of thou-
sands of Key Stage 1 teachers has been changed by the findings of emergent literacy.
Teachers are better equipped conceptually to exploit children’s knowledge of reading
and writing as a bridge to what is conventionally required’ (Hannon, 1995, p. 16).
Both of us therefore constructed strong classroom practice in literacy teaching. An
objective view of your classroom is always useful: a visitor once walked into my class-
room and remarked ‘the children are really developing their literacy but where is the
mathematics?’ Criticism is always hard to handle but once you have recovered from theEarly writing, early mathematics 578657part 1b.qxd 04/07/2006 18:08 Page 57