Communication Science and Disorders
But, Can Johnny Write?
Being literate in modern society means being able to read and write. Yet, “There has been so much attention paid to helping children read that I think we have all but ignored the origins of good writing,” says Dr. Cynthia S. Puranik, assistant professor, Department of Communication Science and Disorders. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 75 percent of school-age students only achieve partial mastery of grade-level writing, and just one percent write at a proficient level.
“Just as we can predict which children are at risk for reading disabilities, we should be able to spot the student for whom writing may be a challenge.” And that is what Puranik’s research is designed to address. Thanks to a $1.1 million grant from the National Center for Education Research, Puranik will soon begin assessing preschool children, ages three to five years. They will be representative of the nation with respect to age, gender, and ethnicity, and will include children from different types of preschools and family socioeconomic backgrounds. Puranik’s research is designed to establish criteria for assessing children’s written language. Her current studies follow a line of research she initiated at the Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University, which was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Institute of Education Science, US Department of Education.
“I was originally looking at older children when I realized that the origins of writing in young children have not been studied that intensely. Most of the research that had been conducted has been more observational or case studybased but not something that has been quantified,” Puranik continues.
Puranik notes that children enter school having had different qualitative and quantitative encounters with print through their experiences at home. She also indicates that it is well known that children living in poverty are disproportionately more likely to be referred for special services such as speech and language therapy or learning disability classes due to poor reading and writing skills and academic performance.
“Perhaps these children come from homes where no adult reads a newspaper, receives a personal letter, or reads books out loud,” notes Puranik, who indicates that these children enter kindergarten classrooms with low levels of emergent literacy skills in the areas of language, phonological processing, and print knowledge. “Unfortunately, these children may also attend preschools that don’t provide optimal support for the development of literacy skills.”
When Does Writing Begin?
Virtually every parent of a young child has turned the refrigerator into a museum, adorned with the latest art created by a budding van Gogh or Warhol. These seemingly meaningless scribbles are an early precursor to the written word. Do you remember the first time you wrote something legible? Probably not, but chances are it was your name – or at least the first letter of your name. Research indicates that this is the case because one’s name is important to developing a sense of self and feelings of control.
“This demonstrates again why parents or caregivers are so important to emergent literacy,” states Puranik. Parents attach meaning to the spoken word and that’s how children learn to talk. Similarly, parents, caregivers, and teachers attach meaning to early scribbles and that’s a first step in learning to write. But it’s more complicated than that. “You have to remember that writing also has a motoric component to it, so asking a three-year-old to write his or her name might not be reasonable,” she points out.
Just as children do not begin to talk by speaking in complex utterances, children do not begin writing in complete sentences. Similar to the development of oral language, the acquisition of writing skill progresses in stages. As children’s writing develops, certain features are manifest in their written output. These writing features can be grouped into universal and language specific features. Universal features of writing include linearity (writing units/marks are organized in straight lines), discreteness or segmentation, and lack of iconicity (writing units are abstract) that all languages share. Language-specific features of writing include directionality – left to right – symbol shapes, and spacing between words.
For example, in English we write from left to right, but in Arabic one writes from right to left. “Linearity is a feature that is learned early, which children seem to pick up from watching adults write or from noticing the orientation of print,” she points out. “Segmentation, understanding that writing is somehow made up of discrete separate units, comes a bit later. Research suggests that children begin displaying some knowledge of the universal properties of writing as early as age three, and by four, most children have written output that is linear and discrete,” says Puranik. But she adds that it’s not really writing as we conventionally know it, but rather scribbles containing made-up letters.
In her earlier research results, Puranik explains, “Our results point more toward a linear progression of learning; development of writing takes place in sequential steps. Early features are mastered first, and these early features, in turn, contribute to the acquisition of later developing skills. As applied to writing, what this means is that children will demonstrate the universal features of writing before they demonstrate knowledge of the language-specific characteristics of their writing system.”
Numerous Gaps Remain
Puranik notes that although previous research on emergent writing has been instrumental in the identification of early writing behaviors in young children, numerous gaps remain in our current understanding about early writing. “First, there is no common theory of how writing develops,” says Puranik. “Whether the writing of very young children shows superordinate features, ordinate features or both has not been the subject of thorough investigations.”
She continues, “Second, with a few exceptions, studies examining early writing have generally involved a small number of participants from select socio-economic groups or have been descriptive case studies.”
And finally, Puranik notes that a major shortcoming in research on emergent writing is the lack of consensus on how it should be measured and quantified. Puranik points to the National Early Literacy Panel, which identified 10 studies on writing. “But no study used a similar scoring system and as a result, each child’s score varied depending on the criterion used for a particular study.” Consequently, comparisons among studies are difficult and generalization of findings is almost impossible.
In her current research, Puranik is building on her work at the Florida Center for Reading Research. “In the current testing and development stage, we’re looking at what skills are important to writing. How do children learn there are different kinds of print and that print serves different functions? How do they come to the point of recognizing symbols and print? I think that’s one aspect of it. And then there’s the physical act of writing, and finally being able to put words together and make a coherent sentence.”
Home Environment Key
Just as with reading, young children who have parents, caregivers, or older siblings actively involved with their emergent literacy appear to do better than those who do not. “We don’t really know what specific home literacy behaviors might be responsible for the growth of writing,” says Puranik. “But it’s safe to say that when children are allowed to explore with writing utensils, when parents actively engage a child in ‘writing’ projects, the kids do better. We don’t know specifically what is more important; is it that parents actually make their children write, teach them the letters of the alphabet, play games with sounds, or is it just sufficient that they point to words in a book.”
Young children mimic what they see their parents doing or something they’ve seen on television. They might pretend to create a shopping list or answer a toy telephone and take a message. Puranik points out that very young children, around two-and-a-half, just know they need to fill in an empty space on paper, and it’s usually with scribbles. But parents help children in other ways. “A baby points and says something undecipherable, but the mother says ‘he wants his bottle.’ Children learn from the meanings that adults assign to what they say. They learn spoken language like that, and they actually learn written language the same way. Adults give meaning to their early scribbles.”
Puranik relates the story of a teacher who tells her young students to write their names and one little girl became excited and proud that she had written her name telling the teacher, “Look, that says my name!” “An untrained person might wonder what the fuss is all about because all the child had was a wavy line on the paper. However, the teacher made those early attempts at writing meaningful and attached significance to a wavy line. I think it was an example of understanding by the little girl that what she writes actually carries meaning.”
On-line Environment Creating Shifts
There is no question that the computer has revolutionized our lives in a good way. But it may have also led to a decline in our handwriting skills. “Today, kids are already typing and spending a lot of time on the computer at a young age and we don’t understand the long term influence of very little writing on penmanship and writing. There is a good amount of research that shows having handwriting fluidty and speed, not penmanship, is actually a very important component of writing and composing,” Puranik cautions.
There is also the question of the ‘new’ language being created by an overabundance of text messaging, which has led to deterioration in spelling skills. Furthermore, “We have already become reliant on the spell-checking feature on our computers. Even I often have trouble spelling words. I know I can type a word that closely resembles the target word and the computer will do the rest for me. I don’t want to imagine the impact of this on the current generation,” Puranik concludes.
CSD Grant Provides Student Scholarships
The Department of Communication Science and Disorders (CSD) has been awarded a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to provide scholarships to qualified students enrolled in the Doctor of Audiology (AuD) program. Students currently being recruited for the Fall 2009-2010 term may receive scholarships that will cover the majority of tuition costs over the three pre-extern school years. Several students currently enrolled in the AuD program are being selected to receive support.
The DOE program is intended to bring increased attention to the growing nationwide need for practitioners of pediatric and educational (“ped-ed”) audiology. Selection of awardees favors students of high scholastic achievement, strong undergraduate CSD backgrounds, and an expressed career goal of joining the ranks of audiologists working in these fields.
According to Dr. John Durrant, professor and vice chair of CSD and project director, students will be educated under an intensified plan that aims to meet general audiology competencies and provide a pediatric/ educational audiology emphasis. “Students will receive ped-ed enhanced didactic study, clinical practicum, clinical research, special conferences, and, ultimately, pediatric and/or educational externship placement.”
“Students will also become partners with faculty, working together to focus efforts and resources across specialties on this important area of the audiologist’s practice,” he points out. The program will also strive to bring together audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and educators to increase attention to links across auditory processing, speech-language, and literacy development.
The academic coordinator of the project, entitled “Preparation of Audiologists to Serve Children with Auditory Disorders,” is Dr. Deborah Moncrieff, assistant professor. She notes that the grant submission was the concerted effort of the entire audiology faculty and strongly supported by the CSD faculty at large. This is the first grant of its type to be awarded to CSD.
Durrant notes that, although a great deal of successful research has been conducted to develop universal newborn hearing screening and early intervention of hearing impairments, the AuD degree has been strongly driven by advances in the diagnosis and treatment of hearing problems in adults, especially in the aging population. Technical advances and information growth have similarly greatly benefited the diagnosis and treatment of children, even young infants, yet, according to Durrant, the growth rate of audiologists going into pediatric and educational audiology is rather flat.
“Encouraging students to pursue ped-ed will help ensure a continuing pool of trained professionals.”C o