CLA Practice 20/4/26 Rewrite

One way through which development’s in Emily’s literacy skills can be seen is through her orthography, specifically her spelling. In text A Emily has spelled the word ‘saw’ as “sor”, ‘baby’ as “babee” and ‘lambs’ as “lams”. Within these deviations from the standard spelling system, we can see that she is using common grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) as substitutes for the less common GPCs found in the words that she is trying to spell. For example, she may know that the phoneme /m/ is typically represented by the grapheme <m>, so she used it to spell “lams” as she didn’t know about the silent <b> grapheme. The use of phonetic spelling suggests a transition from Kroll’s preparatory stage into his consolidation stage, in which written language reflects spoken, which would typically happen at around 6 years old. This suggests that she is able to use written language to communicate somewhat effectively, as she is able to segment the phonemes that she has heard accurately and translate them into written language. However, this ability to communicate could be being limited by the spelling rules that she is aware of, as she is using more common GPCs as substitutes for the those that are actually there. In text B she spells the word ‘called’ as “corld”, much like how she spelled ‘saw’ as “sor” in text A. She may have learned that the phoneme /ɔ/ is represented with the digraph <or> through words such as ‘morning’ or ‘sort’, leading to her not considering a different GPC like the grapheme <a> or the digraph <aw>. She also could have used the digraph <or> to represent this phoneme by sounding it out in her head as the phoneme /o/ followed by the phoneme /r/, which are typically represented by <o> and <r> respectively. However, in text B she spells “treasure” and “pirate” accurately, despite the fact that they have quite uncommon GPCs, such as the /ə/ in “pirate” being represented by the split digraph <a_e> rather that <u> or <e>, which you might expect from someone who is spelling the word phonetically. This could be due to being taught these spellings in correspondence with learning the words in school, as the text was written for a school task titled “My Pirate Story”. This suggests her literacy skills have developed to allow her to communicate ideas surrounding this purpose effectively, as she has been able to remember these spellings accurately and use them in a narrative story, although it also suggests that she may have more difficulty writing for different purposes that she hasn’t learned specific vocabulary for.

Emily’s literary development can also be seen through the texts’ discourse structures. Text A is a first person account of a trip to the farm, which we can infer is based off of Emily’s own experience based off of the first person possessive article “my” in the text’s title, “My Easter Holiday”. In terms of Rothery’s genre theory, this text would be classified as a recount, as it is a account of an event. This suggests that her literary skills have developed to allow her to communicate for the particular purpose of writing about her personal experiences. On the other hand, text B would be classified within Rothery’s narrative genre, as it is a story that she has made up. One way that this development in genre can be seen is through the expression of a clear chronology within the text, which can be seen through conjunctions such as “and” and “but”, and the verb phrase “she was [looking] for treasure” followed by the verb phrase “she [found] treasure”, indicating a clear order of events. This shows that her use of language has developed as she has become able to structure a narrative text in the chronological form that would be expected of the genre, allowing her to communicate the events she is describing more clearly. While text C is a recount like text A, we can see that, like in text B, there is a clear chronology to the events described, which is absent in text A. This can be seen through the use of temporal adverbials such as “in the morning” and “then” as discourse markers to indicate the order of events to readers. This suggests that she has used her knowledge of the narrative genre to inform herself when writing recounts, suggesting that her literary skills have not only developed to allow her to communicate information more clearly, but also to allow her to adapt certain types of language for different purposes.