Writing as a Path to the Alphabetic Principle: How Preschoolers Learn that their Own Writing Represents Speech

This study explores how preschoolers develop understandings of the symbolic nature of print in the context of their own writing. Using qualitative methods and a cross-sectional design, this study documents the learning trajectory that begins with children's earliest experiences linking speech and print in writing events and continues as they learn that English print is glottographic and alphabetic. Children's changing approaches to speech-print linking provide evidence of their developing understanding of how print functions as a representational system. Participants were 134 English-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds attending childcare classrooms where preschoolers' writing was frequent and valued. Children completed an open-ended writing task where they wrote a photo caption and read it to an adult. Open and axial coding identified six core approaches to speech-print linking during writing: marks not read, conversational speech without pointing, conversational speech with pointing to the graphic array, segmented speech with pointing to the graphic array, segmented speech matched to specific marks, and phoneme-grapheme matching. A growth curve model provided statistical support for this ordering of the core approaches. Findings show that early writing experiences can be an important context for building foundational literacy skills such as the alphabetic principle. Adult practices that physically materialize speech-print relations in writing may be especially supportive of this learning. We conclude that young children should be offered frequent opportunities to compose their own texts, and to interact with adults around their writing.