Developing authorial skills: child language leading to text construction, sentence construction, and vocabulary development

This chapter begins with a discussion of the development of oral language and specifically control over literate discourse in terms of how this critical skill supports students’ ability to create texts in the early years of schooling and beyond. The main focus of the chapter is, however, the three authorial dimensions of writing as in many ways, these mark the shift over control in written language: text construction, sentence construction and vocabulary development. The authors suggest that children need to learn: (1) how to organise their ideas or information into a text that often follows the rules of a particular text type; (2) how simple, compound and complex sentences are constructed and how punctuation supports sentence construction; and (3) how to choose words to add precision to their writing. Throughout the chapter examples of written texts are provided, as illustrative examples of children's developing control over the authorial aspect of writing. Teaching strategies that support children to handle new and complex language variations with growing facility and confidence in their writing are also provided. Reflection prompts are inserted throughout the chapter, along with recommended readings.