Stages of Writing Development

Hi there, 

Have you ever gotten a piece of writing from a student and had no idea what was written on it? From scribbles, drawing, symbols in between letters and well-developed sentences. Young children's writing follows a pattern. They move through a series of changes as they learn to write. These stages reflect their knowledge of letters, sound and spacing of words. There are many models of writing development, however in our LIT session we looked at a model from Rog (2007). According to Rog there are four (4) stages: Emergent, Early, Developing and Fluent. Let me share a brief insight to each stage. For emergent writers although they understand that writing conveys a message they scribble or draw to represent stories. They grip the pencil tightly and have a short attention span. These can appear anywhere on the page. On the other hand, the early writers can put letters together to form words, they use invented spelling and have knowledge of high frequency words. In developing writers, they focused a lot on punctuation and used both conventional and phonetic spelling. Their writing may not be well sequenced however they do more planning, revising and editing. Lastly, fluent writers write for various purpose and their writing represents book language.  

  As we looked at our handouts and discussed the stages of writing development, Chall reading stages of development came to mind. At that point, I realized that the writing stages and reading stages of development go hand in hand. Therefore, it is important that as teachers we are aware of the stages the children in our class are at so that we can provide opportunities and support to them. There are various ways to assist the students and what I like and appreciate about our sessions in LIT 102 is our lecturer always provides us with ways or examples to support the students. As teachers we can teach the emergent writers how the alphabet works and introduce them to routines, for example thinking of a topic. draw something, add your name. Teachers must always model good reading for children using different genres. For the early writers we can allow students to share their writing using the author's chair and encourage the use of phonetic spelling. For the developing and fluent writers teach how to develop and sequence ideas, focus on pre-writing activities by using graphic organizers and teach how to be responsible writers.  

Being aware of the various stages of writing can help me tremendously. Now I am better equipped to identify my students' stage of writing development and provide guidance and support. I can scaffold my instruction to meet the needs of the students. It can assist me during my planning process and help foster my student's literacy skills. For my Grade 4 class most students are developing writers although there are two who are early writers. Please keep in mind that students in a class may be at a different stage in their writing. No matter what stage they may be in we must commend their efforts and give feedback to help move them from one stage to the next. 

I attached a video depicting the different stages. This video gives a pictorial representation of each stage of writing. As mentioned before there are different models of the writing development process. Hence this shows 7 stages while the one by Rog (2007) has 4 stages. I do hope the video helps you as it helped me get a better insight on the stages of writing.