Understanding Young Children's Composition Across Three Key Components: Transcription, Connection, and Discourse

Early writing (i.e. young children's emerging skills prior to the onset of skilled writing) provides important foundations for literacy; however, its components are not evenly understood, assessed, or supported. Transcription skills (handwriting/spelling) are emphasized, while other aspects of composing are often sidelined. Understanding multiple composing components, including transcription, is critical. This study, examining a large corpus of composing samples (N = 394 samples) across two writing tasks, explores composing using a holistic conceptual frame and includes components of transcription in context (handwriting and spelling), connection (relationship between pre- and post-writing verbalizations), and discourse (quantity of ideas expressed). The results demonstrate variable skills (38%-41% of samples using scribbling and drawing; 63%-68% demonstrating connection between pre- and post-writing verbalizations) and further demonstrate that children express more ideas prior to writing, compared to following writing, on average (M = 3.48-4.12 ideas in pre-writing verbalization; M = 2.60-3.13 in post-writing verbalization), suggesting that many children transform and shorten their writing naturalistically and without prompting. Relationships between components were inconsistent (transcription and connection significantly related, ps < .05; other relationships were nonsignificant, ps > .05). The study provides insights into children's writing processes and has implications for instruction and assessment.