ABSTRACT
In his analysis of the emergent literacy practices of young children, Gunther Kress undertook a very different position from approaches that consider writing to be a matter competency and mental processing. Kress had the insight to recognize that the initial stages of literacy inform reasoning strategies, as children begin to develop an understanding of the perceptual inferences that can be made from visual representations. Kress convincingly demonstrated that an orthographic system is not simply the means for language to be rendered into written form, but more deeply involves the role of sign-forms as fundamental patterns of meaning that represent and shape the symbolic character of social life. His theoretical concepts of “resources of meaning” and the “semiotic logic” of writing were especially revealing to me as I observed my two daughters, born in Japan and educated in Japanese schools, as they were learning to write.
