'Text' as an object of metalinguistic knowledge: a study in literacy development

Abstract

Signs of literacy appear in behaviours of young children reared in a literate culture long before they are reading and writing conventionally. In this article, children's abilities to create 'text' are investigated through data from longitudinal studies of literacy acquisition. Two types of tasks were used: story dictations and storybook 'readings.' Speech and non- verbal behaviours were examined for indications that children were able to separate their speech utterances under these conditions into two categories: a textual entity and comments referring to or separate from that entity. Two scales for judging the quality of the created text were presented and bases for judgments about non-text utterances were described. Results indicated that as children increase in emergent literacy, their speech utterances can be judged to fall into these two categories. Children also increase in ability to refer to written texts and textual speech through metalinguistic labels and indirect linguistic means. The ability to create a 'text' and to treat it as an object of knowledge was suggested to be part of more general literacy develop ment of young children reared in a literate culture.