Exploring young children's language awareness

Abstract

This paper presents some of the findings of a study undertaken by the Beginning Writing Enquiry Group, the members of which were mostly classroom teachers. The project included a study both of children's language awareness and of their writing. The language awareness enquiry was conducted twice with the same group of children, once at each end of a school year. It is the findings of the first part of this enquiry which are analysed here. The children were selected from the classes of the teachers in the group, and a questionnaire designed by the teachers themselves was presented to them. It was hoped that the children's responses to the various items would help the teachers gain a deeper understanding of how certain metalinguistic terms such as SENTENCE, WORD, and LETTER were understood. The children were also asked what they thought a good writer needed to know. The way in which the questionnaire was designed and the children's responses to each item are presented here in the hope that they will be of value to other teachers and therapists interested in the relationship between children's awareness of language and their ability to use it both in speech and in writing.