Research On The Emergent Writing Development Of Chinese Young Children

Emergent writing refers to the developmental process of beginning writing behaviors, which contain scribbling, drawings, writing symbols and proper characters. This concept underlines that child's environmental print awareness plays a key role in the acquisition of writing ability. Emergent writing of Chinese young children focuses on the development of Chinese-speaking children become writing Chinese characters with active interaction with print information of environments before school entry.Emergent writing is a significant aspect of child writing language acquisition. Previous researches of English background children illustrated that an obvious environmental print sensitivity was showed in preschool years. Besides, children's emergent writing development followed certain principles and characterized distinct periods. Based on literature review, this research designed a systematic observation task which is fit for Chinese young children. Using this observational task researcher collected 113 writing samples of children aged from four to six.As contrast,105 writing samples of aged five to six children were collected from an educational environment of Chengdu City kindergarten. Researcher analyzed both systematic observation and educational environment data, and characterized the developmental specialties of Chinese young children emergent writing.The systemic observation data was collected under the condition that pulling out the impact of teaching children writing Chinese characters in kindergarten. The analyzed result showed that each group of children's (four-year old, five-year old and six-year old)emergent writing scores had significant differences.To analyze the writing samples, researcher asserted that Chinese children's emergent writing had a critically close relationship with Chinese language system.The impact of Chinese as a graphical language and the shapes of square characters were in evidence. The development of children's emergent writing showed a clear trace from image to characters. Based on the examination, researcher illustrated the seven developmental periods of Chinese young children's emergent writing.The data collected from the educational environment revealed that the interaction between emergent literacy curriculum, teachers and children impacted the development of children's emergent writing strongly. Children's writings presented specialties. Researchers concluded that children adopted two creative writing strategies:(1) using pictures to represent meanings or Chinese characters and (2) creative "proper" characters to convey ideas and share information. Besides, researchers also analyzed the impact of children's life experiences and the interaction between teachers and peers.Finally, researcher summed up the findings of this research and suggested how to improve the design of early emergent literacy curriculums. Related to the practice of kindergartens, researcher clarified the confusion about emergent literacy education in kindergartens, and answered the questions about how appropriate emergent writing curriculums were.