ABSTRACT

In the previous two chapters I attempted to establish that the sentence is not a unit of the spoken language although it does intrude into speech from the syntax of writing at a later stage in the language development of children. As a consequence, the early writing of children is characterized by the absence of the sentence. Perhaps the major part of learning to write consists in the mastery of the linguistic unit of sentence, with all the manifold ramifications entailed in that. When children first learn to write they have to establish for themselves, gradually, what a sentence is about. This is an unrecognized factor in discussion of children’s writing, and that teachers, and others, are not aware of this factor means that they have no way of understanding what is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the early writing of children. Hence many of the corrections of and interventions in children’s writing by the teacher are misconceived and ill-motivated. Placing full-stops, replacing small letters with capitals, crossing out conjunctions, are all to some measure beside the point. My discussion, in the previous chapter, of a quotation from Guiding Children’s Language Learning (see p. 62) shows that teachers are not to blame for that. They are acting on what is received opinion within the ‘Language Arts’, as taught in teacher training institutions. I hope that this chapter will provide a better understanding of the long process of experimentation which leads a child, eventually, to an understanding and mastery of the adult concept of sentence.