Write this way: examining teachers ’ supportive strategies to facilitate children’s early writing in preschool

In this study, we applied a fine-grained approach to examine preschool teachers’ instructional practices for supporting children’s early writing skills in a dyadic (i.e., one-on-one) context. The key aims were: (1) to describe teachers’ supportiv e strategies for handwriting, spelling, and composing within a dyadic writing task; and (2) to determine whether teachers’ supportive strategies varied according to the domain of writing they addressed. We asked thirty teacher–child dyads to complete a picture description writing task, and used a researcher-developed coding scheme to document teachers’ supportive strategies. Descriptive analyses revealed that teachers frequently used directives, modeling, and closed-ended requests, and that there was wide variation in teachers’ supportive strategies for writing, Moreover, teachers’ i nstruction primarily focused on spelling and composing, and less so on handwriting. Accordingly, our findings help to complement and extend the extant literature regarding teachers’ writing practices by providing a detailed description of teachers’ strategies to facilitate children’s writing a nd demonstrating the ways in which these strategies vary within a dyadic context.
Source: Reading and Writing - Category: Child Development Source Type: research