ABSTRACT

It is well known that children construct their concepts of writing long before being exposed to formal instruction in reading or writing at school. To describe the progress of writing, written productions of young children were classified into categories, and these categories were ordered according to scales assumed to capture a developmental progression. Partly overlapping scales have resulted from writings of children exposed to different languages: Spanish (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979), Italian (Pontecorvo & Zucchermaglio, 1990), French (Gombert & Fayol, 1992), English (De Goes & Martlew, 1983; Scarlett, 1989) Chinese (Chan, 1992; Chi, 1988), and Hebrew (Levin, Amsterdamer, & Korat, 1966; Tolchinsky Landsmann, & Levin, 1987).