What Little Red Riding Hood Tells Us about Italian Children’s Writing

Summary

What has Little Red Riding Hood taught us about the writing of Italian children? The review of the studies conducted to date on the Italian sample has emphasized how early and effectively these children confront written language. Neglecting a strictly normative perspective and looking at the texts not only for how deviant they are, but also, and above all, for how correct they are, we could observe that children display early competence regarding both the writing system and the written language. The collected narrative texts in fact testify to an implicit and effective knowledge of the limitations of the graphic system among children, as well as to their precocious intention to produce written texts appropriate in form and register. In the framework of an approach that acknowledges the informative value of errors, the analysis of deviant output demonstrates the presence of regularities that reveal an internal logic in the texts.

The usefulness of a Data Bank on first literacy, as the one presented here, is not confined to research purposes alone, but can rather be extended to all these contexts — educational, clinical and compensatory — in which children’s writings could be evaluated. One of the possible directions that this work could take is transforming the Data Bank from a resaerch archive into an instrument that can be questioned with various pragmatic goals. There are still many other things that Little Red Riding Hood could yet reveal to us about the writing of Italian children.

This is the last article that was written by Daniela Fabbretti, a few days before entering the hospital for a very important surgery. Daniela, who was 37, died on September 25, 2002. She was for two years an active and clever research associate of our Department, really appreciated by all her students and her colleagues. Much before, she was strongly involved in the research effort for the constitution of the Early Literacy Data Bank, from which most of the studies quoted in this article were drawn. She thought of the title for this article. Her death is a loss for all the research community on children’s writing development and for all her friends and colleagues.

Thanks Daniela for the creative contribution you left to us.