Studying Emergent Writing: An Expedition Together with Iris Levin
Adriana G. Bus, Leiden University
When Shaul returned home after a day of work in the clinic Iris used to say: he
worked, we were just playing. It always made me a bit angry with Iris but this was
undeserved. Iris just tried to protect herself/us against too much involvement and
commitment. Her persistence in continuing the research after she became ill is
another illustration of her high commitment. Since the eighties of the last century
Iris studied how children acquire alphabetic knowledge and I was one of the lucky
people who joined her at times, on this long-lasting expedition. Preparing for this
day in memory of Iris, I tried to reconstruct how our collaborative projects
developed and how this collaboration influences my research till today. Iris’
research has influenced ways of teaching alphabetic knowledge to young children
and I will try to highlight how. I make no pretention to present an overview of all
the work that Iris has done during her long career. My comments are a personal
view on our common enterprise.
II
Iris and I met the first time at the ISSBD in Tours in 1985. We both presented a
poster. I had an emergent interest in emergent reading and writing. Iris had a
poster together with Lilianna Tolchinsky-Landsmann about figurative elements in
preschoolers’ writing. I assume that Lilianna, her first doctoral student, aroused
Iris’ interest in emergent writing. As a student, Lilianna had collaborated in Emilia
Ferreiro and Anna Teberosky’s Argentinian research group. Guided by Jean
Piaget’s approach, the work with Lilianna was based on the belief that all
knowledge including the acquisition of writing has a developmental story. In the
process of making knowledge their own, children reconstruct it in their own
terms.
Iris and Lilianna had observed a mixture of features of writing and drawing. Their
participants had used letters to write the dictated words but there were figurative
elements as well: they might use more letters for bigger objects, write tomato in
red or select forms that are typical for an object. Illustrative is the girl who wrote
the name of her baby brother as a series of zero’s “because he is zero”. In the
years after this first exploration, Iris continued this line of research. With Ofra
Korat, she studied the effect of age on which cues influence most how many
letters children use for writing words. Effects of phonology increased while effects
of semantics decreased, indicating growth in understanding the alphabetic
principle.
III
In the following years, when we met in Israel, the Netherlands, and at
conferences all over the world, we began to make plans for a common crosscultural study. Most emergent writing research so far including our own focused
on four- and five-year-olds and, given the ideas at that time about the genesis of
writing, it seemed important to expand the research to much younger children.
Dominating was the theory that there may be some overlap between drawing and
writing but writing features are present from the beginning. Even the youngest
children were assumed to use writing features. Yet there were other studies
showing that writing and drawing cannot be distinguished at an early age.
One of those studies was done by another doctoral student of Iris, Esther AdiJapha. Esther asked young children to produce the same forms but sometimes as
writing and sometimes as drawing. For instance, children were asked to write O’s
on the side of a ship as elements of a ship’s name or draw portholes on the same
ship. She assessed how long it takes to produce the forms and how many times
the pen accelerated and decelerated. 4-year-olds produced the O’s in the ship’s
name and the portholes in an (kinematically) undistinguished manner which
suggests that drawing and writing were very similar activities at age four. From
age 6, children wrote the letter O faster and more fluently than they drew the
portholes.
The inconsistency in findings available at that time motivated us for a new study
that would focus on younger however testable children. The range in our sample
was from two years and four months to four years and four months. To study the
role of culture in children’s early writing development, we collected data at two
sites, Israel and the Netherlands. Iris would follow this approach many times in
the years to come and it made her stay for longer periods in foreign countries like
Japan.
IV
It was Iris who took the lead in designing our common study. She was much more
aware than I was (at that time) of all traps and pitfalls in a balanced design and
what can go wrong when you elicit writing and drawing from children this young.
As an undergraduate student she received an excellent training in designing
experiments. Her teacher of statistics and research methods had been Daniel
Kahneman, the later Nobel prize winner.
When she started her study psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem she
wanted to become a clinical psychologist. Her literary adventures as a teenager
illustrate her deep interest in the human factor. When she was sixteen or
seventeen she translated the Necklace, a story by Guy de Maupassant in Hebrew,
she told me not so long ago. This tragic story about Madame Mathilde Loisel and
her husband fascinated her and may have elicited her interest in clinical work.
However, she reconsidered her initial plans after attending Daniel Kahneman’s
courses in statistics and research methods.
Kahneman describes the group of undergraduates as very bright in his account of
his early experiences with teaching undergraduates in the psychology department
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1961. In his autobiography, he describes
these experiences as consistently gratifying “because the students were so good:
they were selected on the basis of a highly competitive entrance exam, and most
were easily PhD material.”
From reading Kahneman’s (autobiographical) notes, I can imagine why his course
in statistics and research methods had been so inspiring to Iris. Kahneman: “At
that time I did a lot of serious thinking about valid intuitions on which I could
draw and erroneous intuitions that I should teach students to overcome. I had no
idea, of course, but I was laying the foundation for a program of research on
judgment under uncertainty.”
Iris adopted his strict standards for good experimental designs as is manifest in all
her work but luckily not his policy for writing up research. Kahneman says about
his publications at that time: “I got quite nice results in my one-question studies,
but never wrote up any of the work, because I had set myself impossible
standards: in order not to pollute the literature, I wanted to report only findings
that I had replicated in detail at least once, and the replications were never quite
perfect.”
V
We dictated our 2- and 3-year-old subjects eight words that differed in color (we
dictated grass and sun), size (we dictated mother and baby, father versus bird),
and number (flower versus three flowers). We asked children to write and draw
the words. We took great care in selecting stimuli that were as meaningful for
Israeli as for Dutch children. I remember that we once had a long discussion about
the possibility of including the word rabbit as one of the stimuli, in the presence
of Elizabeth Sulzby. Afterwards Elizabeth told us that she couldn’t believe her
ears.
We went through a bad patch when we started coding the completeness of
written and drawn representations of children this young. I travelled several times
to Israel to discuss the coding problems face to face. I was always most welcome
in Iris and Shaul’s apartment. We worked from early morning to late evening at
Iris’ dinner table; in between we walked the two dogs, Jazz and Blues.
VI
Our findings deviated from the at that time dominating idea that writing and
drawing differ from early on. Up to age 3, almost all children drew and wrote by
making scribbles or producing what we called a good form. It was impossible to
make a distinction between products meant to be writing and drawing, for us, the
mothers of the children, and the children themselves. The data did not support
our expectation that the origin of drawing and writing was different.
We did see, however, that the skill to draw print improved in three- year-olds.
Features typical for print were present at this early stage. Children segmented
writing, used increasingly complex forms, and many other typical characteristics
of writing were increasingly manifest in their products. Just as they drew a flower
by representing features as stem and leaves they drew the two-dimensional
object print by creating something linear composed of different units that with
age varied more and became more letter-like. Our main conclusion was that
children as young as 2 to 3 years are familiarizing with visual elements of print. In
2002, we published finally our paper in Developmental Psychology.
VII
A logical follow-up to the finding that visual processing is changing in the early
years was: does visual processing of print further refine when children are four
and five and does the way in which children visually process print predict letter
knowledge and learning letters? I will quickly present a few results from a study
using eye-tracking that we recently did in Leiden to prove that this early visual
development is important for developing alphabetic knowledge.
From research with adults comes evidence that expert readers recognize letters
by fixating only small areas of the letters (they are called distinctive areas).
Likewise, we determined with eye-tracking whether four- and five year olds do
something similar. We created so-called “heat maps” to make visible which parts
of the letter attracted most attention from our subjects and may therefore be
seen as the most distinctive areas in letters.
Using heat maps we concluded that just as is found for adults small parts are
distinctive features for letter recognition (cf. Dunn-Rankin’s findings in adult
groups). In letters as T especially angular intersections are fixated. Almost all
participants fixated the same small part of letters but fixation duration varied. We
found that this variation in how long children look at distinctive features predicts
letter learning. The briefer children fixated the distinctive areas the more letters
they knew and the more they benefited from repeated readings of an alphabet
book.
At first it surprised us that briefer, not longer, fixations on distinctive areas
predicted letter knowledge and letter learning. However this makes sense if we
assume that critical dimensions of letter forms are engraved in children’s memory
as a result of previous encounters with letters and consequently a glance is
sufficient to recognize the letter.
VIII
Iris was fascinated by the special position of the proper name in young children’s
development of writing skills. Her early writing research with Lilianna had shown
that any 4- to 5-year-old can print their name in conventional spelling
(Tolchinsky– Landsmann & Levin, 1985). She also found that by the age of 4–6,
children are more proficient at naming letters of the proper name than other
letters (Levin & Aram, 2004). Similar observations were reported by Becky
Treiman for American children (Treiman & Broderick, 1998; Treiman & Kessler,
2003).
The gap between the levels of name writing and word writing was however never
tested. Iris initiated therefore in 2003 a secondary analysis in which data in
various age groups, collected in Israel and the Netherlands, and coded in a similar
way, were synthesized.
In this study four data sets were included, in all about 450 children. The
conclusions supported the gap between the name and other words: Whatever the
age or culture, the names had more characteristics of writing compared to other
words. When children wrote random words children showed very similar behavior
as appeared from the high correlations between each dictated word and all other
words – on average .71. The correlations between the name and random words
were either low or insignificant – on average .30.
IX
Originally the focus in the writing research had been on children’s endogenous
motivation to experiment with words. Learning was not seen as the result of
caregiver’s input, feedback, or guidance. Young children may know more about
name writing than writing other words because they often come across their
name on personal possessions- their bedroom door, drinking glass and cubby hole
at school – and this may explain the advantage found for the name over other
word.
Iris argued that a preference for the name stems primarily from differential
mediation. Caregivers may typically select the name as a starting point to direct
children’s attention to print, to encourage them to mimic it by scribbling or
producing marks, to practice writing a letter string, and to name letters and
become acquainted with their sounds.
End of the eighties, Iris began to study in a pioneering research with Dorit Aram
how parents support young children’s writing. Maybe my work contributed to her
interest in this aspect of early writing. In 1988, she asked me to give a talk about
parental mediation in her department at Tel Aviv University. I had just published a
paper about mother-child interaction, attachment and emergent literacy in Child
Development.
The study with Dorit highlighted the important role of mothers in the
development of emergent writing skills. Mothers not only stimulate children to
write but they raise their child’s writing level at the same time. Dorit and Iris’
findings evidence that maternal support makes a huge difference. When mothers
provide help in shaping the letters or suggest phonemic analysis – which letter do
you hear? - children outperform their less lucky peers who receive less (adaptive)
support from their mothers.
X
In Leiden, we elaborated on the special position of the name in writing
development. We tested the hypothesis that name writing might help developing
phonetic writing. My PhD student Anna Both-de Vries argued that adults may
provide children with fairly substantial amounts of direct instruction about letters
as symbols for sounds when talking about children’s own or other people’s name.
They say things like: “Look. That’s your letter” or “That’s /pi/ of Peter” or “M of
mama”. Adults may thus unintentionally instruct children on how letters of their
own name and other people’s names sound in words.
There was prior research showing that children use letters from their own name
more often than other letters when they produce strings of letters to write words.
Iris and Dorit (Levin & Aram, 2004) had found that young speakers of Hebrew
show elevated letter-sound knowledge for the first letter of their own name. We
went one step beyond these results and tested that the first letter of the name
may be the first one to be used phonetically in children’s writings, whatever the
letter is. More than other words, the name may thus be the start of symbolic
writing.
Treiman (2001) had not found special effect of letters from the child’s name in
kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Her observations did not confirm that
early phonetic writing was limited to letters from the name. We argued that in
Becky Treiman’s 2004 sample, the effect of name letters might not have been
present because her group included many quite advanced children. It seemed
plausible that only in the very beginning stage of phonetic writing phonetic
writing would be limited to the first letter of the name.
XI
So we focused on a group in the very beginning stage of phonetic writing. In their
writings, letters from the proper name often occurred and in particular the first
letter. This letter appeared more often than any other letter of the name or
nonname letters. So Tom may often use the letter T and rarely one of the other
name letters.
The most interesting result was that they used the first letter of the name not
random but in most cases correctly while all other letters were used incorrectly.
Linea Ehri described emerging spelling skills in terms of an increasing ability to
parse spoken text and decide what units align with the written form (Ehri & Wilce,
1985). We refined this theory by showing that identifying phonemes starts with
the first letter of the name.
Recently Chris Lonigan (2012) extended the finding to a group of English-speaking
preschoolers. A substantial proportion of full-name writers were able to use their
advanced knowledge about the first letter in the name to represent phonemes
when spelling words consistent with our findings with Dutch preschoolers
XII
Being a reader is in various ways important for success in society. Imagine you are
getting ready for a job interview. What should you do? The authors of an article in
the October number of Science advise, besides dressing up and combing your
hair, to read. But not just anything. A story by Chekhov or Alice Munro will help
you more than Dan Brown’s Inferno. They found that reading Chekhov led to
better performance on theory of mind tests just after reading brief story
fragments. It looks as if literary fiction uniquely engages the psychological
processes that enable empathic responses.
Iris felt compassion for disadvantaged children who often fail to learn to read and
therefore fail at school and later in society due to low academic performance and
clumsiness in situations as job interviews. She aimed at advancing reading
instruction especially for low-SES children. In her valedictory lecture in 2006, she
talked about her attempts to improve teaching of reading and writing by
designing interventions in schools instead of just doing more controlled research
of basic processes. She went to schools in Jaffa to help the teachers improve their
teaching.
Rereading the sheets it struck me how uncertain Iris was about the value of her
hard work at the schools in Jaffa. In her lecture she concluded that it is
worthwhile to initiate interventions that promote literacy among preschoolers in
a low SES population via the teacher as she did because “research with teachers
may form a bridge between basic research and introducing reforms into the
educational system”. The studies thus directly contribute to the participating
children and teachers. And more importantly, the conclusions are accessible to
policy makers and practitioners. This way you may affect the educational system
more than with basic research alone.
XIII
Iris did not believe that these interventions would add in important ways to the
improvement of teaching. She found more improvement in reading and writing in
the experimental than control classrooms but in her valedictory address she was
rather desperate about the interpretation of her findings, and she gave several
good reasons to be desperate. There was, for instance, no easy way to know what
the intervention had been. Looking back Iris concluded that it had been the result
of many decisions, some evidence-supported, but more often based on common
sense.
She also mentioned: Interventions in classrooms carried out by teachers need
strong collaboration with teachers if the teacher is implementing the intervention
but they have their own (conflicting?) agenda and simultaneously use other
programs that often compete with the intervention program. So you don’t know
what exactly happened neither in the experimental nor in the control group, was
another devastating observation.
XIV
It is pity that we cannot know where Iris’ thinking would have taken her to enable
a more experimental approach in schools. Maybe she would have joined me in
attempts to use computer interventions. We talked about the possibility to thus
create a real match at school for the long stretch of early literacy experiences
across the preschool years at home. Unfortunately this research and the
investment in computer programs for young children cannot be done with our
low-budgets. Compared to society’s funding of finding the Higgs particle or
sending rockets to the moon investment in studying teaching is peanuts.
In Leiden we had a chance to bring the results of the basic research of Iris and
other people in a more controlled way into classrooms. I came in touch with a
private company who aimed at developing educational software for very young
children. They responded enthusiastically to my proposal to build a computer
program for young children aiming at stimulating similar experiences with the
proper name as a print rich environment at home may offer. The program is webbased and automatically adapts to the child’s proper name and provides the child
with targeted instruction using the first letter of the name. The program affords
far more exposure than from the teacher alone in identifying the name,
identifying the first letter in the proper name and identifying this letter in other
words. The program includes a tutor who adapts to the child’s responses. We thus
tried to model all games in the program after Dorit and Iris’ findings when
observing mothers.
XV
The program enabled us to design randomized control trials in a large number of
schools and study effects of the computer intervention in various age groups and
samples differing in other moderators. We have by now done three large
experiments with very promising results. One study for instance focused on fiveyear-old Dutch children who had no notion that letters relate to sounds. Directly
after the intervention we found gains in children’s alphabetic skill–on the order of
half a standard deviation on average.
Even more interesting was that the treated group outperformed the nontreated
group after two years of beginning reading instruction. The group at-risk who
received the remedial computer program at kindergarten-age scored half a
standard deviation higher on standardized tests than the nontreated group. The
program narrowed the skills gap by about 8% in the first two years of reading
instruction.
The research has brought us other interesting new insights in differential effects
of programs that I cannot discuss today.
XVI
The study of teaching reading is rocket science, and researchers like Iris cannot be
missed. It is pity that we cannot know where her thinking would have taken her
after her long career path across the arenas of early literacy research. We live in a
changing society in which technology takes an increasingly important position. So
far we do not notice much of technology in preschool and kindergarten probably
due to the low investment in software for young children but children do spend a
lot of time with commercial software at home at the expense of reading and
writing with adults.
Iris could only make a start with looking at the effect of technology on young
children’s literacy. Familiarizing with letters happens nowadays less by sharing
writing with adults and more and more through computer programs. Young
children make use of typing or following the letter’s shape on a computer screen
with a finger instead of handwriting. Brain researchers suspect that this may
affect letter learning negatively. When you type the letter, you do not create
motor activity unique for each letter because the action of typing has no intrinsic
relationship with the shape of the letters – you make the same movement
regardless of which key you press.
Iris made a start with exploring the promise of eBooks in collaboration with Ofra
Korat. She liked computer interventions probably in particular because she was in
control of what children experienced.
XVII
After my last meeting with Iris end of March/beginning April this year she wrote
on April 6: “I am sorry we could not meet again. I felt too weak. But it was really a
treat to see you and talk to you. I had so many more questions to ask you ...” And
I had so many more questions for Iris. I am so sorry that our discussion ongoing
for almost thirty years has stopped, at least face-to-face. But her writings will
remain a source of inspiration.