Most young children love to draw and they all need to learn to write. However, despite the research over the past 30 years which identifies a strong relationship between emergent writing and drawing, in some classrooms young children are being obliged to see drawing and writing separately rather than as a unified system of meaning making.
In this article Noella Mackenzie’s classroom research examines the relationship between children’s drawing and learning to write in the first six months of formal schooling in an era where visual literacy and linguistic literacy combine. This required a shift in teachers’ priorities. The result of the research is unambiguous: if teachers encourage emergent writers to see drawing and writing as a unified system for making meaning children create texts which are more complex than those they can create with words alone.
Article provided by ALEA and first published Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2011, pp. 322–340
Link to Touchstones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 10.