Introduction

Britton reminds of Vygotsky's perception of the links to be made between writing and other forms of symbolic representation, such as make-believe play and drawing, which he saw as 'different moments in an essentially unified process of development of written language. Peter Smith, considering possible connections between the fantasy and socio-dramatic play of young children and written-language development, draws parallels between the themes and narrative structures which emerge in play and those which later appear in children's stories. Joan Tamburrini discusses children's capacity for understanding other people's points of view in terms of the growth of distancing. In her review of the literature on story-telling and story-writing. She shows too how, with age, children develop greater distancing abilities – spatially as they place the events of their narratives in increasingly unfamiliar settings, and psychologically as they give the characters that people their stories experiences and feelings distanced from their own.