Theory to test in Investigation for Coursework

Kroll’s 4 stages of development   

February 7, 2012

Barry Kroll (1981) identified 4 phases of children’s development and further work by other researchers such as Katherine Perera added the suggested age ranges.

Preparation – up to 6 yrs – basic motor skills are acquired alongside some principles of spelling.

Consolidation – 7/8 yrs – writing is similar to spoken language including more colloquial and informal register.  Also a string of clauses joined together by the conjunction “and”.

Differentiation – 9/10 yrs – awareness of writing as separate from speech emerges.  In addition a stronger understanding of writing for different audiences and purposes is evident and becomes more automatic.

Integration – mid-teens – this stages sees the use of the “personal voice” in writing.  It is characterised by evidence of controlled writing, with appropriate linguistic choices being made consistently.

The Five Spelling Stages

Pre-phonemic: Imitate writing, mainly scribbling and using pretend writing; some letter shapes are decipherable.

Semi-phonetic: Link letter shapes and sounds, using this to write words.

Phonetic: Understand that all phonemes can be represented by graphemes; words become more complete.

Transitional: Combine phonic knowledge with visual memory; an awareness of combinations of letters and letter patterns, including the 'magic e' rule.

Conventional: Spell most words correctly

Bibliography: AQA English Language Specification B Textbook

CLA Coursework Preparation

CLA Coursework Preparation

I intent to test  the development of child writing and how the vocabulary and grammatical structures develop over the long period of language acquisition. I also plan to investigate how the child's ability of displaying idiolect and dialect begins to shape as they get older. The children I am going to study are two boys ages six and seven so it will be interesting to look at their books from younger years and see how their writing abilities have developed including writing for an audiences and manipulating register. I predict that as the child gets older, they are more likely to develop the ability to manipulate register, display idiolect and dialect, the complexity of vocabulary and the complexity and range of grammatical structures used will all be displayed more and I also predict they will make less grammatical and spelling mistakes.



I am planning to collect several workbooks from both of the boys over the years at similar ages, and look at the factors stated above. It would be good to acknowledge Noam Chomsky's theory of children being born with the ability to acquire language and to test the presence of their Language Acquisition Device (LAD). This means I can test the way in which the grammatical structures are used i.e. if  'runned' is used instead of 'ran' during the development stage then this shows understanding of adding the 'ed' to past tense verbs and therefore proves Chomsky's theory of children already having these grammatical 'rules' imprinted on the brain. I can also look at how easy it is for the children to acquire more vocabulary and test how this is linked to Chomsky's theory.


It will be difficult to compare the development of the language of the two boys as their development will differ and this is not fair to assume that one may be more linguistically developed than the other at a certain age. However I can use their own data to compare with their own data in previous years. This means I have  two children so I can perhaps analyse certain pieces of data that I might not have seen with just testing one child's writing ability and I can learn more about the difference of their development, errors and improvements. This will be a difficulty as it will be hard not to compare the two however comparing their data might help me to discover some things about their individual development. I cannot assume that one child at the same age as the other is less developed as there are other factors that could influence that which I have not controlled.

Phonics Research

Phonics Research

There are a range of phonetic techniques to teach children, however the dispute is which one to teach them. The more traditional method of teaching phonics is called 'synthetic' phonic teaching, which involves the introduction of 44 different phonemes without putting them in context. However the new, updated version of phonics teaching is 'analytic' phonic system, which involves teaching phonics in context, so the sounds from children's books are recognised and focusing heavily on rhyming groups.


According to the Independent, research shows that using the 'analytic' phonic system, children's reading age as improved by 9 months and the brightest by 14 months, as apposed to the more traditional 'synthetic' phonic method improving children's reading age by a year. Furthermore the two methods are still being disputed as to which is more beneficial for children and more research needs to be carried out to confirm this.