The transition from speech to writing: drawing, gesture and early forms of writing

Welcome to Component 2: Child Language – The Transition from Speech to Writing

Have you ever watched a young child scribble enthusiastically across a piece of paper, point to it, and proudly announce, "That says I love Mummy"? To an untrained eye, it might look like meaningless lines and random shapes. But to an English Language linguist, it is a fascinating milestone in human development!

In this chapter of Component 2: Child Language (8EN0/02), you will explore how children move from spoken words and physical movements to making purposeful marks on a page. This journey involves physical coordination, creative problem-solving, and a massive conceptual leap known as symbolic representation.

Quick Reminder for the Exam: Pearson Edexcel examiners love to see you appreciate what a child can do rather than just listing their spelling mistakes. This approach is called the emergent literacy framework.

1. Understanding Emergent Literacy: The Bridge from Speech to Writing

Before children ever write complete words correctly, they engage in emergent literacy. This term refers to the early reading and writing behaviours that happen before formal schooling takes over.

Key Concept: Early mark-making, pointing, and drawing are not "failed attempts" at writing; they are functional, meaningful steps on the path to literacy.

The Shift from First-Order to Second-Order Symbolism:
• Speech and Gestures: In speech, a spoken word directly represents an object or idea (for example, saying "dog" when pointing to a furry animal).
• Drawing (First-Order Symbolism): A drawing visually represents the real object (a picture of a dog directly looks like a dog).
• Writing (Second-Order Symbolism): Writing is one step further removed. The letters D-O-G represent the sounds of the spoken word, which in turn represent the animal. Understanding this abstract link is one of the hardest cognitive leaps a young child makes!

2. Theoretical Frameworks: Gesture, Drawing, and Multimodality

When analysing unseen data in your exam, you will need to back up your observations with linguistic theories. Let's look at two key thinkers who explained how children bridge speech, gesture, and writing.

Lev Vygotsky: Socio-cultural Theory & Graphic Speech

Vygotsky argued that writing does not suddenly appear out of nowhere; it grows out of spoken language and physical action.

• Gestures as "Writing in the Air": Vygotsky observed that physical gestures are the earliest visual signs a child uses. When a toddler points or waves their arms to show size, they are creating a visual symbol in physical space.
• Drawing as "Graphic Speech": When children first draw, they are essentially recording their spoken thoughts visually. Over time, drawing acts as a crucial stepping stone between physical gesture and abstract written language.

Gunther Kress: Multimodality and Early Mark-Making

Gunther Kress showed that young children are naturally multimodal communicators.

• Multimodality: This means using more than one mode of communication at the same time.
• How Children Combine Modes: A young child rarely just writes. They combine visual drawings, physical gestures, spatial arrangements on the page, and spoken narrative (talking out loud while drawing) to make a unified, meaningful text.
• Analogy: Think of a child's early drawing-writing piece like a comic strip with a live voiceover commentary!

Section Takeaway: Never view drawings as separate from writing in early texts. Children use drawing and gesture as active partners to written text to express meaning.

3. Marie Clay's Principles of Early Literacy Acquisition

New Zealand educator Marie Clay noticed that children discover several underlying "rules" about print through everyday exposure to books and signs. Look out for these four principles in exam data:

• The Recurring Principle: A child learns a few basic shapes or letters (often the ones in their own name) and repeats them over and over across the page.
• The Directional Principle: The child realises that English print follows a specific path—moving left-to-right and top-to-bottom across a page.
• The Generating Principle: The child discovers that you can take a limited set of known letters and rearrange or mix them up to create endless new words.
• The Inventory Principle: The child creates structured lists or "inventories" of all the letters, numbers, or words they know to display their knowledge.

Memory Trick: Remember the acronym R-D-G-I ("Real Discoveries Grow Insight") for Recurring, Directional, Generating, and Inventory!

4. Barclay's 7 Stages of Writing Development

Barclay outlined a clear, step-by-step pathway showing how motor control and phonetics develop side by side. Use these stages to pinpoint exactly where a child is on their journey:

• Stage 1: Scribbling
Random marks and continuous lines spread across the page. There is no clear directionality yet, but the child often assigns spoken meaning to the scribbles.

• Stage 2: Mock Handwriting (Wavy Scribbling)
The child produces wavy, horizontal lines that mimic cursive script or lines of text in a book. They have noticed that writing is organised in horizontal rows.

• Stage 3: Mock Letters (Letter-like Forms)
The child draws distinct, separate symbols that look like letters of the alphabet, though they are invented shapes (pseudo-letters).

• Stage 4: Conventional Letters (Random Strings of Letters)
Actual letters of the alphabet appear, usually capitals (often from the child's own name). However, there is no link yet between the letters chosen and the sounds of the words (no letter-sound correspondence).

• Stage 5: Invented / Transitional Spelling (Early Phonetic)
The child starts linking letters to sounds. They usually capture the first letter (initial consonant) of a word, such as writing M for "Mummy" or B for "ball".

• Stage 6: Phonetic Spelling
Words are written down exactly as they sound to the child. Both consonants and vowels are represented phonetically (e.g., writing "MI DOG WNT TO TE PARK").

• Stage 7: Conventional / Correct Spelling
The child masters standard English orthography (spelling rules), standard punctuation, and distinguishes clearly between uppercase and lowercase letters.

5. Barry Kroll's Stages of Writing Development (1981)

While Barclay focuses on early mark-making and spelling, Barry Kroll looked at the broader relationship between speech and writing as children grow older:

• 1. Preparatory Stage (up to ~6 years):
The child focuses on the physical mechanics of writing (holding the pencil, forming letters) and learns basic spelling rules.

• 2. Consolidation Stage (~7 to 8 years):
Writing acts as "talk written down." The writing closely reflects spoken language patterns, using simple declarative sentences, coordinating conjunctions like "and" (parataxis), and spoken discourse markers.

• 3. Differentiation Stage (~9 to 10 years):
Writing separates from speech. Children realise writing has different purposes, structures, and genres. They begin to use complex sentences, passive voice, and formal grammar suited for stories, reports, or letters.

• 4. Integration Stage (mid-teens+):
Writers develop a personal "voice" and style. They can effortlessly adapt register, tone, and format to suit any audience and purpose.

6. Graphology and Motor Skills: Mechanics of Writing

Writing is not just a mental exercise; it requires complex physical coordination. In Paper 2 data, always examine the graphological features:

Fine Motor Control & The Tripod Grasp

To write clearly, a child must develop fine motor control in the small muscles of their fingers and hands. A major developmental milestone is moving from a whole-fist grip (palmar grasp) to a tripod grasp, where the pencil is held securely between the thumb, index, and middle finger.

Key Graphological Features to Spot

• Linearity: The ability to write in a straight, horizontal line along a real or imaginary baseline.
• Directionality: Consistently moving left-to-right across the page and top-to-bottom without reversing or scattering text.
• Letter Formation: Managing the size, proportion, and shape of letters.
• Ascenders and Descenders: Early writers often struggle with letters that stick up (like d, b, h, t) or hang below the line (like p, y, g, j). You may see all letters drawn at the same height.
• Case Inconsistency: Mixing CAPITAL and lowercase letters inside a single word (e.g., "pLaYinG") is very common as children practice letter shapes they find easier to draw.

7. Early Spelling Strategies: Making Sounds Visible

When children transition into phonetic spelling, they use creative strategies to map sounds (phonemes) onto letters (graphemes):

• Pre-phonetic Spelling: Letters are written randomly with no connection to the sounds in the target word.
• Semi-phonetic Spelling: The child uses one or two letters to represent an entire word or syllable (e.g., U for "you", B for "bee").
• Salient / Key Consonant Strategy: The child writes down only the most prominent, loud consonant sounds and omits unstressed vowels or quiet consonants.
Examples: Writing CT for "cat", DRM for "drum", or LFN for "elephant".

Did You Know? When a child writes "LFN" for elephant, they are demonstrating fantastic linguistic awareness! They have successfully isolated the three most important acoustic sounds in a long, difficult word.

8. Exam Strategy: How to Ace Component 2 (8EN0/02)

In the AS Level examination, you will be presented with unseen data (such as a child's annotated drawing, a classroom spelling exercise, or a story written at home) and asked to produce an extended response.

1. Avoid the "Deficit Model" Trap

• The Mistake: Describing everything the child gets wrong (e.g., "The child has made numerous errors and cannot spell 'elephant' correctly").
• The Linguistic Approach: Use an emergent literacy framework. Explain what the child's choices show about their linguistic understanding (e.g., "The child uses a salient consonant strategy in 'LFN', demonstrating an awareness of phoneme-grapheme correspondence despite omitting non-salient vowels").

2. Avoid "Theory Dumping"

Do not simply write out everything you know about Vygotsky or Kroll in a giant block paragraph. Always anchor the theory to the exact data on the page. Mention a specific mark, letter shape, or word, and then explain which stage or principle it demonstrates.

3. Pay Attention to Context & AO5 Tasks

Look carefully at the contextual details provided in the prompt:
• Was the piece produced independently at home, or with teacher scaffolding in a classroom?
• What was the child's intended purpose (e.g., labelling a drawing, writing a card, telling a story)?
• If the exam asks you to produce a shaped response (such as a talk, guide, or article for parents/teachers), ensure you adapt your tone, format, and style appropriately to fulfill Assessment Objective 5 (AO5).

Quick Revision Summary Checklist

Before moving on, make sure you can define and explain each of these core concepts:

• Vygotsky: Gesture as "writing in the air"; drawing as "graphic speech"; first-order vs second-order symbolism.
• Kress: Children as multimodal communicators combining visual marks, space, and speech.
• Clay's Principles: Recurring, Directional, Generating, and Inventory principles.
• Barclay's Stages: Scribbling → Mock Handwriting → Mock Letters → Conventional Letters → Invented/Transitional Spelling → Phonetic Spelling → Conventional Spelling.
• Kroll's Stages: Preparatory → Consolidation → Differentiation → Integration.
• Graphology: Tripod grasp, linearity, directionality, ascenders/descenders, and case mixing.
• Spelling: Salient consonant strategy, semi-phonetic, and phonetic approximations.