Research On The Mirror Writing Phenomenon During The Emergent Writing Of 4-6 Years Old Chinese Children

Mirror writing refers to the production of individual stroke,components or the whole character in reserve derection,which always appears when pre-school children spontaneously write some chacracters in their emergent writing,including the left-right and up-down reversal,but can be recognized in the mirror.Understanding the rules of children’s mirror writing is helpful for us to deepen our understanding of pre-school children’s emergent writing,maintain a scientific attitude and give effective guidance to Chinese children’s mirror writing.Children’s mirror writing is a frequent phenomenon when children begin to write.Studies at home and abroad have shown that children’s cognitive development and the characteristics of the writing system may be related to children’s mirror writing.This study collected children’s mirror writing productions through name writing,number and letter writing,guided writing and copying tasks,and understood children’s writing strategies and habits through video,so as to further supplement and explain the characteristics and rules of children’s mirror writing.In addition,this study also investigated children’s family writing environment and children’s writing experience through questionnaires,and analyzed the correlation between these two points and children’s mirror writing.The study found that children’s mirror performance of mirror writing digits gradually subsided in the preschool stage,6-year-old children have basically been able to write numbers correctly.Children’s performance of mirror writing letters showed a significant increase with age,while children’s Chinese character image writing showed no significant difference in age.Different from the study of English characters,Chinese children mirror writes digits of 7 and 9,and letters of C,D and E frequently,which do not show the same pattern as that of English children’s high-frequency characters.Researchers believe that this may be due to the fact that the Chinese language environment does not transmit the righ-writing rules to Chinese children,and the characteristics of Chinese characters,such as ideographic,multi-level structure,twodimensional plane structure and high redundancy of information,make children only need to memorize the whole shapes when they identify Chinese characters.Therefore,when children try to write Chinese characters,they often can only write the general shape of Chinese characters,but can not return them every detail of the original Chinese character.Therefore,Chinese children’s mirror writing is mainly based on strokes,and older children will mirror writing Chinese characters with left-right structures.There are significant differences between monolingual children and bilingual children in the mirror writing of numbers and letters.Bilingual children’s master numbers and letters better than monolingual children.There is no significant difference in the mirror writing of Chinese characters between monolingual children and bilingual children.On the other hand,through the analysis of children’s family writing environment and children’s writing experience,the families participating in the research have rich writing environment,children’s writing experience is rich,and they are interested in writing.Through the correlation analysis with the situation of mirror writing,it is found that the number of Chinese and English picture books in the family,children’s interest in reading,the frequency of autonomous reading,and the frequency of parents using text guidance strategy in parent-child reading are negatively correlated with children’s rate of mirror writing,while the frequency of parent-child reading is not correlated with children’s mirror writing rate.In the aspect of writing experience,children’s literacy,writing interest,writing amount,writing name experience,writing expression and writing practice experience are negatively correlated with children’s mirror writing,and children’s age of interest in writing is positively correlated with children’s mirror writing rate,which indicates that children’s family writing environment and writing experience are positively correlated with children’s mirror writing rate And the richer the family writing environment and writing experience,the higher the children’s interest in reading and writing,the lower the children’s mirror writing rate.This may be because children’s rich writing experience makes them pay attention to the more precise strokes of Chinese characters,which is conducive to inhibiting the mirror constancy of identifying things,thus reducing the appearance of mirror writing.Finally,the researcher summarizes the characteristics of Chinese character mirror writing,and discusses children’s mirror writing performance under different writing tasks.On this basis,it is suggested that kindergartens should arouse children’s interest in writing through games and other ways that children are interested in.Secondly,it is necessary to provide children with the opportunity to observe adult writing,and provide children with meaningful writing expression opportunities,so that children can develop the concept of prints and the sense of words and reduce the mirror writing,by experience the meaning and pleasure of written language.All of this has answered the question that how to guide children’s mirror image writing in kindergarten activities.