Social scripts : children writing in a multilingual nursery

Kenner, Anne Charmian (1996) Social scripts : children writing in a multilingual nursery. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This thesis presents an investigation of young children's understandings about writing, in English and in other languages, focusing on the relationship between script and genre.

A review of the literature on early writing development demonstrates that research on learning about script and learning about genre has been conducted along relatively separate lines, from a psycholinguistic and a sociolinguistic standpoint respectively. It is argued that greater coherence could be achieved through a social semiotic approach, linking both script and genre within the same theoretical framework, to discover how young children make links between written language as a symbolic system and the purposes for which it is used.

A discussion follows of how these questions could be illuminated through research conducted in an educational environment in which children were able to work with different genres, languages and scripts. A description is given of how a year's fieldwork was undertaken with 3 - 4 year olds in a multilingual nursery, in which the roleplay area was enriched with everyday literacy materials, and bilingual parents were invited to bring in texts from home and write in different languages in the classroom. Data was gathered through participant observation, interviews with parents, and the collection of children's texts, and was then analysed qualitatively, using a variety of categories, to relate children's comments and behaviour around text to the written symbols used and the type of text constructed.

The results show that these pre-school children, through their experience of everyday literacy practices, had already formulated notions of genre, which they continued to develop through play at home and at school. Bilingual children demonstrated an understanding of specific patterns of language and literacy use amongst their families, and produced their own texts, showing attention to script and genre, in response to the multilingual activities in the nursery.

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