On the Interplay of Genre and Writing Conventions in Early Text Writing

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on early text writing. 16 preschoolers and 16 firstgraders, all native Hebrew speakers, were asked to write, read and revise a fairy tale — a narrative — and a description of one of the objects in it. Texts were analysed in terms of grapho-phonemic correspondences, the spaces between words, and the children’s own reading of their written text and their modifications of it. With age, children wrote according to grapho-phonemic correspondences the two genres Blanks between words were more frequent in first grade children. They are likewise more frequent in descriptions than in narratives. The number of modifications increased with age, in narratives more than in descriptions. Both age groups performed modifications on different text levels in both genres, mainly during the revision phase. Findings are examined within the frame of writing development studies and also from the perspective of the researcher analysing the texts.