ABSTRACT
This article illustrates a way of looking at children’s writing that is informed by an awareness of linguistic structure at different levels. Many teachers, when marking pupils’ work, concentrate on spelling and punctuation, to the exclusion of other and often more important features of the language used. Some children have a confused notion of the relationship between speech and writing; some have difficulty with word-structure; others find it difficult in writing to vary their sentence-structures, while some write quite ‘correctly’ but in sentences that do not quite hang together. The article puts forward the view that by regarding error as an opportunity for the teacher to help with linguistic features that are erratically or insecurely displayed by children, it is possible to be more powerfully constructive about writing development. To do this, it is important for teachers to know as much as possible about the structure of the English language at the traditional linguistic levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and discourse. For too long, there has been a gap between the theoretical work of descriptive linguists and the attempts of teachers to improve the language performance skills of pupils. By applying basic linguistic principles to a piece of writing by a 13 year old, this paper seeks to show, in an informal and simple fashion, how a linguistic approach may illuminate the teacher’s responses.
