ABSTRACT
A strong epistemological change has occurred in the study of writing over the last two decades. From being considered as a skill to be taught at school, writing started to be considered a problem-space children explore, an object of knowledge children have to conceptualize. A huge number of empirical studies were developed from this perspective showing that children from different cultures and social backgrounds are sensitive to the formal features of writing and to the different functions written language fulfills (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979; Gibson & Levin, 1975). The fact that some of children's ideas about writing were found to be developmentally ordered and recurrent in different environments has led some researchers to speak about the "ontogenesis of written language" (Scinto, 1986). However, writing is a cultural artifact. The information that defines how any writing system works and prescribes how it is to be used is based on culture, not on genetics. The process of becoming literate occurs in a web of social interactions and is mediated by different cultural representations of literacy and writing was the invariable accompaniment of certain sociocultural conditions (Street, 1984). The only possibility to solve this apparent contradiction between the description of psychologists, mainly those of a constructivist stance, and the social nature of the object of knowledge is by addressing the issue of how differing sociocultural conditions affect the acquisition of writing.
