ABSTRACT
This chapter is about children's early experiences of English as a written language and the first stages of their development as literate language users. The author tried to convey a picture of children, from their earliest years, encountering print with its many functions, forms and purposes. The chapter describes some aspects of the process in which the young child engages when learning to write in English. In order to do this, it was important to show how English relates to other writing systems and the choices children have to make about what belongs to English writing and what to other languages. The young child's first discoveries of reading and writing have been termed emergent literacy, an expression that captures how children who live in a literate community are in the process of becoming literate almost from birth in a world of environmental print.
