Cognition in writing
Dr. Suchitra Renguntwar (Ajgaonkar)
Ph.D. in Management,
MA Psychology, NET & SET Psychology
Milburn, T. F., Hipfner-Boucher, K., Weitzman, E., Greenberg, J., Pelletier, J., & Girolametto, L. (2017).
Cognitive, linguistic and print-related predictors of preschool children’s word spelling and name
writing. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(1), 111-136.
COGNITION IN WRITING
the role of three cognitive components (phonological awareness [PA], oral language development
[OLD], and working memory [WM]), on writing development.
Foundational cognitive components (i.e., phonological awareness, oral language, and working memory)
may be beneficial in promoting writing for upper elementary English Learners who are receiving
English-only instruction.
WM comprises a central executive controlling system that interacts with a set of two subsidiary storage
systems: the speech-based phonological loop and the visual-spatial sketchpad.
WM provides a limited place for holding information, ideas, and concepts as well as carrying out
cognitive processes that require controlled attention (Adams et al., 2015; Berninger, 2000). It also
provides an interface as the writer expresses information vocally or subvocally as sentence parts and
determines what is kept using a written text
Research continues to suggest that WM may be directly involved in the acquisition of writing skills
(Bourke et al., 2014; Bergsleithner, 2010; Swanson & Berninger, 1996a; Yi & Luo, 2012; Yi & Ni, 2015;
Zabihi, 2018).
ORAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES ARE
FOUNDATIONAL TO WRITING
many studies have documented a concurrent relationship between
oral language and writing in children ranging from kindergarten to
the intermediate grades of elementary school (Berninger & Abbott,
2010; Drijbooms et al., 2017; Hooper et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2013;
Kim et al., 2014; Shanahan et al., 2006).
Two constructs (i.e., listening comprehension and vocabulary
knowledge) are the main focus in this area.
A. DEVELOPMENT OF FINE MOTOR
SKILLS IN PREPARING FOR WRITING
The development of motor skills is the process of a child learning
to skillfully move their body parts. They learn from teachers about
some movement patterns that can be practiced to improve agility,
speed, strength, flexibility, as well as hand-eye coordination.
The fine motor skill development that is implemented takes the
form of activities such as coloring, folding paper, cutting,
practicing scribbling on blank paper, pasting pictures, playing
puzzles, shredding paper, and so on.
B. DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL MOTOR
SKILLS IN PREPARING FOR WRITING
The development experienced by students, especially young
children, includes motor skills in both fine and visual aspects.
This development is crucial for their future as it determines their
ability to be active in life.
A child's visual ability to prepare writing is the first step in
producing an activity that eventually leads to the creation of their
work, such as written form
The Development of Visual Motor Skills includes recognition of
different types of pictures, similarities and differences, recognition
of geometric shapes, recognition of symbols or letters, recognition
of colors, transportation tools, fruits, recognition of big and small
objects, and long and short objects.
Media that can be used includes pictures on the classroom wall,
geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, circles, blocks or
colorful balls, illustrated letters, and objects that show size such as
beads, marbles, long or short items such as sticks, nails, colored
pencils.
C. SUPPORTING AND HINDERING
FACTORS IN SKILL DEVELOPMENT
The factors that support the development include: first, the
capability of the educators and education managers, which refers
to the ability of school administrators and teachers to manage and
implement the teaching and learning activities so as to produce
outputs that meet the educational goals.
Second, supporting facilities, known as infrastructure facilities,
must be equipped in education to facilitate the implementation of
the teaching and learning activities. Third, the internal aspect of
students, namely, the interest and enthusiasm for learning.
PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS AND
EARLY LITERACY SKILLS: A CRITICAL LINK.
Early literacy development begins long before a book or pencil is placed in
the child’s hands.
The emotional connections the young child makes with his parents, and
the parents with their children, are the building blocks for literacy.
Holding and caressing a newborn baby in the first minutes of life while
talking to him and singing to him set the stage for the child?s later ability
to read and write. It is important to help parents recognize the value of
their role as their child's first teacher, the importance of routines and
family rituals (e.g., reading together, sharing stories together) and how
these serve as the foundation for parent empowerment, parent-child
attachment, parent-professional relationships, good parenting practices,
and overall family literacy.
Each interaction the child has with his primary caregivers contributes to
FACTORS THAT HINDER THE
DEVELOPMENT OF FINE MOTOR AND
VISUAL SKILLS
First, the lack of sufficient accompanying
teachers in proportion to the number of
students, especially in the accompaniment
of children with delayed development of
motor skills.
Second, the incomplete availability of
learning media and facilities that is
inadequate for the number of students.
Third, the lack of maximum support from
parents in the implementation of the
development of fine and visual motor
skills, especially when the child is outside
the school environment.
LEARNING TO READ
Learning to read entails mapping the units of the writing
system onto the corresponding spoken language units. In
order to read a word or text, a child must be able to
decode the graphic units of a particular orthography into
spoken language units (e.g., morphemes, syllables,
phonemes).
During reading acquisition, children not only learn how
written words are composed, but also build up
orthographic representations of spoken language units
(typically words or morphemes).
Reading becomes fluent, when
(1) decoding is automatized and
(2) words can be directly and effortlessly retrieved from the
orthographic lexicon
COGNITIVE PRECURSORS
Cognitive precursors of reading are skills whose
development starts prior to reading and which are
functionally related to later reading skills.
In order to decode words, children need to be familiar
with the graphic symbols of the writing system (e.g.,
letters of an alphabet, Chinese characters).
They should also become aware of the linguistic units
represented by a particular orthography (phonological
and morphological awareness).
In addition, naming speed, that is the ability to name
visual information quickly and effortlessly, is associated
with (later) reading fluency. It is important to note that
a precursor does not have to be fully established before
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS &
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS
Phonological awareness refers to the ability to consciously access
and manipulate sublexical phonological segments, such as
syllables, syllable onsets, rimes and phonemes.
Morphological awareness is defined as the “ability to reflect upon
and manipulate morphemes and employ word formation rules in
one´s language”. In the Reading Systems Framework (Perfetti,
Landi, & Oakhill, 2005; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), the contribution
of morphology to reading is twofold: As part of the word lexicon it
contributes to word reading, and it further contributes to reading
comprehension indirectly through word reading and also more
directly through morphology as part of a general linguistic system
ORTHOGRAPHIES
Orthographies represent the phonological structure of the
corresponding language in varying ways. Alphabetic orthographies
represent phonemes and the more complex and unpredictable the
relation ships with corresponding graphemes, the higher are the
demands on children´s phonological competencies in order to
work them out.
TESTS OF PHONOLOGICAL
AWARENESS
Phonological awareness. Phonological awareness was measured by
four subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological
Processing (CTOPP; Wagner et al., 1999) and one subtest of the
Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (WRMT-R;
Woodcock,1998).
Four subtests (segmenting words, segmenting nonwords, blending
words, and blending nonwords) in the CTOPP, each with 20 items
or 18 items, were used to assess phonological awareness in
English
DUAL ROUTE MODEL OF SPELLING
