Emergent Writing in Taiwan's Grade-One EFL Classes

An ongoing writing project has been implemented in Taiwan's EFL primary classes of more than 100 students for three years since September 2006. This paper reports the writing activities conducted in the first semester of the project between September 2006 and January 2007 along with the findings. The students were engaged in free drawing-writing activities in one week and in the following week selected written products were displayed in class with leveled instruction. The collected written products were analyzed under the guidance of three research questions on these young EFL beginning writers' writing development, beginning writing behaviors, and spelling performance. These young beginning writers explored writing in different forms, including drawing, letter writing, and word writing with the assistance of spelling-strategy instruction. In addition, the three writing behaviors detected in their writing are the application of particular writing principles, the employment of the codes and symbols to express intended messages, and the decoration of drawn-written products. 一項長期的寫作計畫從2006年九月開始已在台灣小學進行三年了，期間參與的學生超過100名。本文記錄了此計畫案第一學期（2006年九月至2007年一月）所進行的寫作活動以及其發現。第一週，學生致力於自由的畫圖—寫作活動；接下來的一星期，被選中的作品會在課堂中分級展示出來教學，並且根據三個研究問題來分析這些作品；此三個研究問題主要是探討這些以英語為外語寫作初學者，其寫作發展、初期的寫作行為、及拼寫表現。這些初寫作者以不同的形式來了解寫作，包括畫圖、寫信、以及藉由拼寫策略教學的協助所進行的寫字活動。此外，所觀察到的三個寫作行為是特定的寫作原則的運用、準則以及符號的使用、以及對寫畫作品的潤飾。