Kindergarten and Primary School Children talk about teaching children to write

Introduction. Many studies carried out over the last few decades have analysed learning and teaching conditions that favour children's internalisation of the uses, functions and conventions of written language. The authors propose that research in this area might gain by integrating children's thinking about the contents and ways of teaching children to write. With this purpose, the authors studied the development of children's conceptions of how to teach writing in the kindergarten/primary school period by exploring how children account for the following: teaching content, the teacher's activity, the learner's activity. Method. Individual interviews were administered to 160 children from public schools in Argentina, equally distributed amongst preschool and the seven grades of primary education. The following questions were analysed in this paper: 1. How were you taught to write? 2. How would you teach a child like you, who is your age, who hasn't learned to write yet and wants to learn? Once he/she learns that, how would you go on teaching him/her? And after that? The interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. Textual data analysis or lexicometry was applied to the children's complete responses. Results. Four lexical groups were distinguished, indicating key moments in the development of these conceptions. Conclusions and discussion. The results show that the concept of writing as "content to be taught" evolved from a global approach to a componential approach of mounting complexity. On the other hand, the representation of the teacher's and learner's activity evolved very little. In all the lexical groups, such activities were cast in behavioural terms (providing instructions, exercises and tasks, models, teaching aids) rather than in mental terms (taking account of intentions, affective and/or epistemic states, cognitive processes).