Learning to Write

Gunther Kress

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134908288
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1982, this influential and classic text poses two questions: what is it that a child learns when he or she learns to write? What can we learn about children, society and ourselves, by looking at this process? The book is based on a close analysis of a series of written texts by primary school children and is written for student teachers with little or no knowledge of linguistics. In this new edition, Gunther Kress has made extensive revisions in the light of recent developments in linguistics and in education.
The theoretical focus is now a social semiotic one, which allows a fundamental rethinking of issues such as 'preliteracy' and broad social and cultural questions around the making of texts.

Chapter 1
Learning to write

i Putting language into writing

This book sets out to answer two related questions: ‘What is it that a child learns when he or she learns to write?’; and ‘What can we learn about children, society, and ourselves, by looking at this process?’

Two answers are usually given to the first question. One concentrates on the problem experienced by children at an early stage in their writing experience, with problems such as the control of the writing implement, concentration and attention-span, spelling, letterformation, forming the focus of attention. The other looks at children at a much later age. Here the approach is a broadly literary one, with the emphasis firmly on ‘creative writing’. The questions asked are about the literary and aesthetic quality of the writing: is it ‘good writing’, does it show ‘quality’, judged by criteria which are derived from the study of ‘Great Writing’. Other approaches, closely allied in their concerns, are broadly psychological: ‘What is this piece of writing telling us about the child author?’, ‘is it “sincere” writing?’, that is, is the child writer actually revealing something about him or herself rather than merely going through a routine or a performance, insincerely?

Whatever the merits of such approaches, they can hardly be said to deal with the full process (and product) of writing, and in particular, they pay the scantest attention to language. One deals with largely mechanical problems, while the other deals with the contents of the final product, the intentions of the writer, or the effects of the written piece. They deal with psychological states of the writer, but not with the linguistic process and substance of writing.

The second question, ‘What can we learn about children, society, and ourselves by looking at this process?’, has been posed and answered in the terms I have just mentioned. Again, I wish to put the emphasis firmly on language, and explore the connections of language and the processes of writing, thinking, and perceiving. I put it forward as a hypothesis that the forms of written language which children use at different stages point to cognitive models which are distinctive in their character, and have an independence and validity of their own. There are close connections between language, social structures, and writing: the written language is close to the standard language accepted by a community, so that some social dialects may be either closer or more distant from the grammar of the written language. This has important consequences for the learning of writing. Access to writing is not equally available to all members of a society. Furthermore, the kinds of writing which children are taught and learn to produce at school may provide an insight into the value-system of our societies, particularly given the fact that few children grow up to be writers in any significant sense of the word. For many or most of these children once they leave school writing will mean the jotting down of a shopping list, or the filling in of a docket at work. What has been the function of learning to write for them? The process of learning to write represents one instance of social learning, where pre-existent norms are imposed on the individual, so that a knowledge of these norms should give revealing insights about ourselves.

Hence it is my intention to put the starting point of any discussion of the learning of writing where I firmly believe it is: with the learners when they are first learning, and within language. To state such utterly self-evident aims simply exposes the major short-comings in treatments of the subject. Discussions of writing have focused on two periods: the very earliest stages of writing, and on writers from the ages of eleven to twelve years onwards. That is, problems of handwriting, letter-formation, spelling, punctuation have received attention as matters which need to be taught when children first learn to write. There is then a gap of four to five years, spanning the age-range of seven to twelve, and attention again focuses on the process of writing when children are, or are beginning to be, competent writers, from eleven or twelve years of age onwards. The interest of investigators has then been not so much with writing as with what writers do with their writing. The reasons for this seem to have been twofold. The tools which were available for the analysis of writing—those of literary criticism—were unsuited to the analysis of texts produced by younger writers; that is, it is difficult to apply the criteria used in the discussion of ‘Great Writing’ to stories written by eight-, nine- or ten-year-olds. In addition, linguistics has not provided the theoretical and methodological tools either for the analysis of writing, as distinct from language in general, or for the analysis and understanding of the developmental processes and stages in the learning of writing. Consequently that is the period particularly focused on in this book. The ages of the writers represented by the texts in the book range from six to fourteen.

ii Reading and writing

One startling fact, and one which needs explanation, is the massive discrepancy between the amount of work which has been done on reading, compared to the work done on writing. The number of books on the learning of reading is vast; by contrast there are few on the learning of writing. The impact of linguistics on theories of reading has been pronounced, and just about totally absent from writing. The processes involved in learning to read are not well understood; the functions of reading are. In writing, on the other hand, neither the processes nor the functions are well understood. It may well be that the greater emphasis in research on reading is an appropriate reflection of the fact that this less active linguistic skill is more widespread in developed societies, and more needed. More members of a literate society have to be able to read than have to be able to write. Indeed, the number of writers even in highly literate societies is relatively small compared to the number of readers. Proportionately speaking, few people write. And much of the writing done by these few is highly stereotyped writing. The causes of the unequal distribution of active writing are of course social, deriving from the economic, political and ideological structures of any given society. It has economic, political and ideological effects: those able to produce meanings and messages are few by comparison with those who consume meanings and messages. Hence the control of messages and meanings is in the hands of a relatively small number of people.

The emphasis on reading research may also have been an effect of the types of linguistic theories which were current over the last fifty years. Theories which focus on structures below the sentence, on decontextualized sentences, on meaning as inherent in the individual linguistic item, on reading as a decoding skill, are unlikely to treat the learning of writing as problematic, nor indeed are they likely to be able to deal adequately with the textual aspects of writing.

Changes in attitudes are now beginning to be evident in the teaching of reading. That is, it is beginning to be realized that the processes involved in reading engage a much more far-reaching range of abilities than the more simplistic decoding approaches had supposed. It has become recognized that reading is an active process, in which the reader is engaged in the (re)construction of meaning, indeed in the (re)construction of the text which is being read. This is a far remove from the attitude which saw reading as a passive linguistic skill, one merely of decoding a meaning which resides there in the text. One recent book on the early stages of a child’s learning of language is entitled Learning How to Mean. Terms such as ‘meaning-making’ are now popular currency in the discussion of the learning of reading. This is not the place to comment on the theories of language or of linguistic and cognitive processes implicit in the different approaches to the learning of reading (flashcards, the phonic method, direct accessing, etc.) except to say that they are clear evidence of a poverty of theory both in linguistic and cognitive terms. Fortunately there are signs of changes in this area.

But while research on reading was marked by an impoverishment of theory, no attention was given to syntactic aspects of learning to write. This is exceedingly puzzling; it seems that no problem was seen in that area. Yet why the decoding skills of reading should receive massive attention, and the encoding skills of writing not, is strange. Perhaps the very metaphor of ‘coding’ has proved to be the major problem. Undoubtedly the metaphor has been taken seriously, and literally, as an account of the linguistic process. Meaning is seen as having some existence independent of language, which is encoded by the speaker, into linguistic form. The point is well made in Britton et al.’s chapter on ‘The process of writing’, quoting D.W.Harding:

The notion that in putting an experience into words we always start from a definite something and seek words adequate to convey it may be an oversimplification. It seems necessary to add that language and experience interpenetrate one another. The language available to us influences our experience at intimate levels and if we manage to convey experience precisely, that may be due partly to the fact that available modes of expression were influencing the experience from the start. (Britton et al., The Development of Writing Abilities (11–18), p. 39)

The hearer receives the encoded form, and from this must decode the intended meaning. From this point of view decoding is the problematic part of the process: the encoder knows both meaning and code, the decoder knows only the code. The message has to be decoded, deciphered, by him in order to recover the meaning encoded by the writer. So this aspect of the metaphor, that is, the recovery of meaning, may have caused the emphasis in research on the decoding end, on reading rather than on writing.

The ‘code’ metaphor has another effect in that it predisposes the user of the metaphor to regard the code as empty or vacuous, without meaning in itself. That is, the medium of the code itself has no content. It is true that the dots and dashes of morse-code contribute no meaning to a message, and contain no meaning in themselves. The same is not true of language. As the quotation above suggests, linguistic form is not semantically empty or neutral. Hence one cannot speak of a pre-existent meaning being encoded in language. Rather it is a case of a meaning which exists in a vague, non- or prelinguistic form being expressed through the ‘meaning-potential’ of a given language, where it is assumed that the linguistic form contributes to and shapes the meaning intended by the speaker/writer. The match between intended meaning and its expressibility in a language is never guaranteed. It is a happy coincidence when it comes about, but frequently it does not. Of course, learning to speak and write a language is learning precisely what is and what is not sayable or writable. And that, eventually, becomes the learning of what is and what is not thinkable.

It is a minor irony that the coding view, depending as it does on a code-meaning conjunction, paid no attention to meaning, concentrating instead on the mechanics of de­coding, such as letter-sound, letter-image, picture-image correspondences.

Approaches to reading affect the teaching of writing in several respects. Implicitly they provide models for thinking about the other end of the process. So if reading is seen as primarily a decoding skill, then it is quite likely that writing will be regarded as a process of encoding in a quite analogous manner. And indeed, as the heavy emphasis on matters such as letter-sound correspondences show, that has been the case. From this point of view the learning of writing is often regarded as the learning of the mechanics of translating, either speech into writing, or meaning into visual symbols. Specific theories of reading lead to the production of reading materials which enshrine the theoretical assumptions of the theories on which they are based. These reading materials constitute one form in which children meet written language; for some children these materials will be their first and only experience of the written form of the language. The effect of this can be readily assessed by looking at early (and not so early) Readers, and comparing these (a) with the teacher’s assumptions of what written language is and her or his expectations of the language which children should be producing, and (b) with what written language is actually like. The models provided by Readers are positively detrimental to the child learner as models of the written language.

iii Linguistic theories and writing

Although there is at times a healthy suspicion of theoreticians on the part of practitioners in the field of language learning, it is nevertheless true that practices depend on and derive from theory. This theory may be an unofficial, unarticulated one, held by one or several practitioners, or it may be an official theory, widely held and supported. Hence criticism of practices should always be traced back to the theories which originally gave rise to them. Changes in theory are, conversely, bound to affect practices. In short, practices can only be as good as the theory underlying them. It is the case that linguistic theories have, on the whole, not been conducive to enlightened and effective practice in either reading or writing. This may have been due to the indifference of theoreticians of language to the needs of practitioners, or to inherent limitations in linguistic theories. The history of linguistics may be described as the struggle from smallest to larger linguistic unit: that is, modern linguistics begins with a heavy concentration on the problems of phonetics and phonology, and slowly moves to a consideration of sentence grammar. Moreover, linguistic theory has not made a clear distinction between written and spoken language. That is, linguistics has paid attention to the sound features of language, but has assumed that the grammar of speech and the grammar of writing are in all essentials the same. Writing has been regarded as an alternative medium of language, giving permanence to utterances.

It is small wonder that with such notions (however implicit they may have been) attention focused on the mechanical and largely trivial features of learning to write. Indeed, if one assumes that the syntax of speech and that of writing are the same, then the learning of writing cannot be seen as anything other than the learning of the skills of transposing spoken language into the written medium. After all, when children come to school they do speak their language competently; certain aspects of language use still have to be learned by them—in particular the socially and situationally determined variations—but they certainly have command of the major grammatical forms and processes of their language. If, therefore, it is assumed that the grammar of speech and that of writing are the same, then only such matters as learning the letter-forms, spelling conventions, punctuation, need to be learned.

However, there is now an increasing amount of evidence which indicates that speech and writing do each have a distinct grammatical and syntactic organization. The changed attitudes derive from work in a number of areas: in sociolinguistics and varieties study; in text-linguistics and the study of genre; and work on the grammatical organization of speech itself.

Work in text-linguistics has been taking place predominantly during the last decade. It has sought to establish whether or not linguistic units and rules exist at a level beyond the sentence. In the process it has become clear that there are linguistic patternings above the sentence level, that texts exhibit structural patternings and semantic relations which, while differing from the grammar within the sentence, are no less part of a speaker’s and writer’s knowledge of language. These matters include aspects such as the internal cohesion of texts, the topical connectedness of parts of texts, the development of thematic material, paragraphing, paraphrase and restatement. In considerations of the learning of writing the significant point is that speech and writing differ most markedly textually.

From the same point of view it also becomes apparent that the sentence is not a unit of typical spoken language. The sentence belongs to writing, forming there the basic unit of textual structures. The sentence may occur in speech as a borrowing from the syntax of writing, but speech, typically, is organized on the basis of clausal complexes which are not sentences. They may be long chains of clauses linked by co-ordination or simply by being adjoined. While the sentence typically is a structure of main and subordinated and embedded clauses, the clausal complex is typically an aggregate rather than a syntactic structure. The thematic structuring of sentences differs markedly from that of clausal complexes. Typically each sentence is a construct with an internal structure which marks the thematic element of each sentence from the non-thematic. The treatment and development of topical material within the sentence is hierarchical and integrative. Within a clausal complex the thematic structure is replaced by two structuring devices. On the one hand, there is a sequential development of topics, so that clauses in sequence may take over the function of the theme/rheme structure within the sentence. On the other hand, superimposed on this structure is another structure carried or expressed by intonation, which marks some elements as informationally prominent, thereby leaving the unmarked elements as non-prominent. This structure is interpreted by the hearer as presenting some material as being already known to him, and other material as new to him.

It may be that the differing structures of speech and writing could not readily be seen until structures larger than the sentence were considered within linguistics. However, these discoveries do find support from the study of non-European languages which have only recently been described, and have till now been unwritten. Some of these languages do not have sentences in the traditional sense, and operate instead with two units: clausal complexes and paragraphs.

This book cannot hope to rectify the shortcomings which I have described. However, I hope that it may provide a rudimentary sketch which will be helpful to teachers in looking at the writing produced by the children in their classrooms, to parents interested in the language of their children, and to linguists as a suggestion for areas where research seems to me to be needed. My sketch contains at least the following. It regards speech and writing as two models of language with distinctive grammatical and textual structures and organization. Consequently, learning to write has some of the features of learning a second language, including the initial ‘interference’ from the first language. The distinctive linguistic unit of writing is the sentence, which is not a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the second edition
• 1 Learning to write
• 2 Speech and writing
• 3 Children's speech and children's writing
• 4 The development of the concept of ‘sentence’ in children's writing
• 5 Genre
• 6 Linguistic and conceptual development: conjoined sentence structures
• 7 The expression of causality in children's language (with Michael Rowan)
• 8 ‘Errors’
• 9 Questions in a social theory of literacy
• Appendix List of texts
• Bibliography
• Index