ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the social nature of young children’s story writing by examining how two young girls co-construct meaning in early story authoring as they tell, draw, write, and respond to each other’s stories during free writing time. It demonstrates that storytelling and story writing practices of young children in the classroom. The chapter shows how young children’s narrative practices has been traditionally conceptualized, and examines the concepts of intertextuality and intercontextuality as alternative ways to make sense of young children’s early story writing process. The traditional approach to children’s narratives categorizes oral and written narratives as mature narrative structures or as less cohesive or underdeveloped narratives. The chapter discusses a microethno-graphic analysis of a story writing event between two kindergarteners focusing on the social nature of the authoring process. Storytelling and story writing time in the classroom was videotaped to learn specifically about how children develop their oral and written narratives in relation to the broader literacy learning context.
