Chapter 9: Developing Young Children’S Multifaceted Understandings of Writing

Toni, a 5-year-old girl beginning her second month of kindergarten, is growing up in a Spanish-English bilingual home. Her mother is Latina with Spanish as her dominant language, and her father is African American with English as his dominant language. Toni has a 2-year-old brother. Both parents work; however, their combined income still leaves them with limited financial resources. Extended family lives close by and social supports for the family are robust. Toni’s dominant language is English, and she speaks Spanish with family and Spanish-speaking children at school. Toni lives in a rich linguistic and cultural community.

In this second month of kindergarten, her teacher, Ms. Bean, finds that Toni is very limited in her writing ability throughout the school day. When asked to write her daily journal entry, Toni writes her name properly but fails to write any connected text. She writes words she finds around the room in lists. Toni is described by her prekindergarten teacher as one who “just loves to write—she goes all around the room and writes down words.” In addition, her fine motor skills are nicely developed. However, she is so different from other students who include pictures, some Spanish or Arabic as well as English writing, writing that is barely clear but is telling a story, reviewing what was done in science, or sending a message. At this point, she is having difficulty with metalinguistic aspects of writing and defining writing as narrative or explanation of understanding. Ms. Bean is worried about her lexical, semantic, and syntactic development (see Darrow-Woolfolk, 2012; Hresko, Herron, Peak, & Hicks, 2012 for more detail on components of early writing). Ms. Bean uses New Standards Reading and Writing Grade by Grade (Resnick & Hampton, 2008) as a framework for instruction and is particularly concerned about Toni’s writing purposes and resulting genres such as narrative writing, report or informational writing, functional writing, and responding to literature. Ms. Bean wonders whether Toni is confused about language. Does she have a language disability?