Emergent Writing in Taiwan’s Grade-One EFL Classes

Abstract

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.