story by Claire Miller
Young children develop important foundational writing skills during the preschool years (ages 3-5). Early childhood teachers play an essential role in the acquisition of these emergent writing skills.
Although reading and writing skills are connected in childhood, teacher preparation programs often focus more on reading skills than early writing development. As a result of this focus, teachers often feel underprepared to teach writing skills, which can negatively impact their classroom practice.
Gary Bingham, the Hettie Floyd Lee Professor of Young Learners in Urban Settings, and Clinical Assistant Professor Rebecca Rohloff Clough co-authored a study in Reading and Writing on preschool teachers’ knowledge of early writing skills and how this knowledge affects their teaching practices.
For this study, 47 preschool teachers responded to three children’s writing samples by answering questions about the children’s writing development. The researchers also conducted classroom observations of participating teachers and video recorded their instructional day.
Their results showed that teachers varied in their writing knowledge, with most participants mentioned handwriting in their answers – a nod to how much educators emphasize handwriting skills in preschool classrooms.
Only six percent of teachers brought up all four of the main writing components – print concepts, handwriting, spelling and composing – in their responses to the writing samples.
The classroom observations and video recordings revealed that teachers predominately focused on handwriting and spelling skills more than children’s composing (i.e., opportunities to talk about children’s ideas for writing), and teachers didn’t always show their students the connections between what a child says and what they scribbled or wrote on the page.
“Perhaps teachers feel children don’t need supports for developing print concepts, as many children develop some of these skills early,” Bingham and Clough wrote. “However, recognizing the relations between oral and written language is foundational to early writing development and children benefit from conversations about print concepts specifically.”
Teachers with more in-depth knowledge of writing components provided students more opportunities to write and their lessons incorporated multiple writing components rather than focusing on just one or two.
Bingham and Clough’s study shows that teachers must have a thorough understanding of writing development as this knowledge is important to higher quality writing practices that are shown to promote children’s writing development.
“Our results demonstrate that teachers’ early writing knowledge is enacted in classrooms through multiple strategies that tend to emphasize handwriting,” they wrote. “Because teachers’ instructional practices were of relatively low quality, teacher development and professional learning models are needed to support teacher’s implementation of meaningful early writing experiences that emphasize the connections between early reading, language and writing skills.”