Learning to Write/Learning to Do School: Emergent Writers' Interpretations of School Literacy Tasks

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between learning to write and learning to perform school writing tasks. Data collection took place two to five times weekly over a 14-week period in a kindergarten. The researcher identified the classroom situations in which writing occurred and then observed across that range, focusing on three children selected as case studies. The collected data were examined to identify the nature of the children's varying interpretations of classroom writing occasions, as evidenced by their writing behaviors, their written products, and how they talked about those products. On the basis of the findings, inferences were made about the process of learning to write in school.