ABSTRACT
Scholars of developmental psychology usually agree that children's acquisition of spoken language is one of the most impressive intellectual feats that most people will ever perform. Learning communicative functions, acquiring new words, mastering the basic structure of a native language—these are remarkable achievements that are extremely difficult to explain. The same sense of wonder usually is not associated with children's acquisition of written language. Traditionally, literacy has been conceptualized as a process in which teaching prevails over learning and instruction enables children to transfer linguistic knowledge to a visual rather than auditory modality. An implicit tenet of this concept of literacy is that written language is not a language per se, but just a different modality for expressing meanings.
