Graphic Deviations In Preschool Children’s Writing

Psychological Structure of Writing

The first and main component of writing process is the sound analysis of a word. It involves the ability to separate individual sounds from a sounding word and identify them with phonemes. The second component involved in the process of writing is the operation of associating each sound separated from the word with the corresponding letter. The third item is the re-encoding of the visual representation of the letter in its appropriate graphic images, carried out by a series of consecutive motions. For more details on this, please see A.R. Luria (1950), T.V. Akhutina et al (1997). Each of these three components mentioned above breaks down into a number of separate independent acts from the child who starts mastering reading and writing.

When translating phonemes into graphemes, there is no difficulty if the sound analysis is carried out quite clearly. The experience shows that in the course of this operation descriptive mistakes can appear: "mirror" writing, or replacement of letters that are similar optically or kinetically. During the translation of optical signs into kinetic ones, at the early stages of the mastering of writing skills, even writing a single letter involves a series of isolated actions. By writing out individual elements that make up letters, the child (who has just started learning how to read and write) takes care of the correct writing of each element individually. Only the combination of such individual conscious actions leads eventually to writing a whole letter.

As far as the skill develops, the psychological structure of writing changes. The child is accustomed to easily write the whole combinations of letters, and then whole words. The separation of individual sounds, finding the right graphic signs and writing letters – all of these cease to specifically take his attention. It automates and becomes the separate operations subordinated to a common whole. The child starts doing these operations automatically, and often he even ceases to realize them clearly. Gradually the elementary acts of writing combine and turn into more complex activities – written speech. Only in individual cases, for example, when checking a written text or a word that is complex in its sound composition, the child returns to the systematic decomposition of the word into sounds. Individual operations become conscious again.

Graphic Deviations

Deviations are отклонения differences in the norms of writing. In the Russian psycholinguistic tradition (for example, Vygotsky, 1935; Luria, 1950; Rozhdestvensky, 1960; Zinder, 1987; Kornev, 1997), for a long time this phenomenon has been called mistakes. Given the early age of the children observed, it is more correct to call them deviations (Tseitlin, 1997). All the deviations from the norms of writing can be divided into three types: descriptive, letter-combining, and orthographic. We have been interested in the graphic (descriptive) violations of the rules of the Russian letters. "When learning to read and write, the child learns letters correlating them with sounds (phonemes), but naturally, all his attention is focused on memorizing letters that are something new for him." (Zinder, 1987) Naturally, during the initial learning how to read and write, the child focuses his attention on the technical side of writing. Errors in writing can be caused by a variety of reasons. This can be the violation of basic hygienic requirements, overstrain of the hand, lack of necessary spatial orientation, imperfection of the regulation (and control) of movements, discontinuity in the development of motor and visual analyzers, insufficient interaction of the optical and oculomotor system, etc. Most graphic deviations are unstable, except for specific deviations from the norm. The latter is caused by the defective pronunciation of sounds, their acoustic and articulatory non-distinction.

What is the linguistic nature of children's graphic deviations?

Which graphic deviations are typical of preschool children?

How does the practical mastering of lettering of writing units – the letters – happen in case of different preschool children?

Subjects (cases)

The research subject is the written material of 100 preschool children (5-7 years old) able to read and write. This has allowed obtaining objective data on typical and atypical deviations from the graphic norms of writing.

Two children aged 3 to 7 years old are selected to study individual strategies during learning how to write.

Procedure

The children performed specially prepared dictations. 80 words dictated by a specially trained adult were written by each child for eight weeks.

The children’s parents collected a large material, which included spontaneous children's texts (poems, tales, stories, drawings with captions, greeting cards, etc.).

The parents of the two children kept diary entries for four years, in which they fixed the highlights of the writing skills mastering by their child.

The Russian graphic system is difficult for the child, who starts learning how to read and write.

The evolution in mastering letter graphics by children demonstrates clearly how our letters are arranged, and what sorts of varieties and types they have. Нас интересует лингвистический механизм графических девиаций, так как в них проявляются особенности графики как совокупности начертаний, с помощью которых устная речь передается на письме. We are interested in the linguistic mechanism of graphic deviations, since the features of a graphic (as a set of inscriptions which help transfer oral speech to writing) are shown in them. Let us consider them in detail. The modern Russian letters have different orientations:

• right: Б, В, Г, Е, Ё, К, Р, С, Ц, Щ, Ы, Ь, Ю (13);

• left: З, Л, У, Ч, Э, Я (6);

• double orientation: А, Д, Ж, И, Й, М, Н, О, П, Т, Ф, Х, Ш, Ъ (14).

In general, 19 out of 33 letters of the Russian alphabet have clear properties of mirroring. Therefore, it is quite natural that the child acquiring differences in letter writing is not able to immediately remember the specifics of letters that characterize the general appearance of the letter: ovals, semi-ovals, rectangles, and symmetry. This causes the children to mirror letters in writing. The letter has an "inverted" graphic image. For example, the letter Я is depicted as R. There are also psycholinguistic features in addition to purely linguistic. So, in the words ЖУК (a beetle), ЧУЖИЕ (alien), children often depict the letter Ж like a beetle. This is because in alphabets the letter Ж is often represented by an image with a beetle in it. With the transition to automatic writing, these deviations are eliminated.

In the course of our experiment it has been discovered that the non-normative inscriptions of letters (descriptive deviations) manifest in the preschool children’s writing as follows:

In order to understand the individual strategies for mastering writing, let us consider the primary skills of writing formation process in case of Valya P.

The girl early acquired the desire to "draw": this was facilitated by early mosaic lessons (from seven months old) and grandmother's drawings, who helped her explanations of something with drawing the simplest objects – a house, a tree, a fish, a girl, a duck, etc. The first "drawings" of Valya were the dots and strokes obtained from the contact of the pencil with the paper, while the adults always watched the girl holding the pencil. At the age of one and a half years old, already managing her speech, Valya, explained that she was drawing, although on paper there were only strokes, broken lines, and spirals, often trembling.

The next stage in Valya’s (aged 3.6-4.0) learning how to write was the writing of whole "texts", which are plain wavy lines – words separated by intervals. At the end of the "sentences", various punctuation marks were put. Apparently, during this period the child was already aware of the discrete nature of speech, which he or she tries to convey in writing.

It should be noted that mistakes on solid spelling of words were found in the children’s writing very long. It was explained by the syncretic character of thinking, its non-dissociation, and non-separation of individual words from the speech stream. Therefore, it was so important that already in the specified age period the child was able to understand the discontinued nature of the utterance. Writing her first words Valya copied them from the sample suggested by the elders. This period of copying letters was experienced by many children. This technique was usually spontaneous. In combination with other techniques, the child began to form the correct visual image of the letter, i.e., more or less adequate representation of the form of the letter mark, which contributes to the further implementation of the graphomotor program. By the age of four years old, the observed girl knew the correct outline of all the letters of the Russian alphabet. This was facilitated by reading. Valya was glad to remember what she had heard and remember children’s poems by heart. At the age of one year seven months, the girl learned the descriptive names of the letters, according to the pictures in the alphabet: the letter Б is БАРАН (a ram), and the letter Д is ДОМИК (a house). She was pleased to choose the words in which one or another letter "lived". This was a very important point, since the work on the sounds was not done with the child, i.e. no phoneme-graphic matches were specified. Therefore, avoiding wrong associations between the letter and only one word for this letter (for example, a picture of a house for the letter Д), other words with that or another letter were selected. Valya tried to draw letters herself, she could easily find letters in different texts and guess them in the outlines of objects. Seemingly, this was a very important point in the formation of writing skill: the analogy of forms was prompted by the learner's life experience. Hence the problem of perception and effective recognition of the graphic forms of signs (big and small letters, capital and block letters). The learning of letters was promoted by the lessons with a magnetic alphabet. When Valya was two years old, the elders began to play in "Railcars" with her. A drawn train and railcars with windows were used for this purpose. The girl was asked to load certain letters in this or that railcar. At stations, "passengers" changed places. At the request of the person playing with her, Valya replaced one letter with another. This also contributed to acquiring graphical images of letter signs.

Thus, despite different tactics, in the initial period of learning how to read and write, the child proceeds from memorizing a graphic appearance (image) of the letter (mostly block letters) to writing individual "frozen" forms (words like МАМА, НАТА, БАБА), often by means of copying from the sample. These forms can be very different depending on the child’s circle of interests, but, as a rule, there are words of the initial children's vocabulary.