Developing Young Thinkers
Weekly Series — “Written Speech”
In the previous article of Developing Young Thinkers we outlined the importance of private talk as a way to begin the foundation of thinking.
The research of Russian Psychologist Lev Vygotsky provides the road map for developing strong thinking skills. He believed that through social interactions (play) children go through a continuous developmental process.
Language and communication starts as gestures, shifts to private talk, inner speech, and eventually will move to the next level of development.
Now that your child has mastered the use of private speech, they are ready to take their speech to the next level. They are ready to move into “written speech”.
At the early stages writing begins as no more than drawing and symbols.
Drawing is just a representation of thinking and begins to build the next level of processing information and ideas.
It is important to begin to think of the writing process as the thinking process. Writing is thinking.
Thinking is the ability to solve problems. Isn’t that we are all working here on the planet together — to solve problems?
Vygotsky suggested that written speech is not just oral speech on paper but represents a higher level of thinking.
Thinking becomes more explicit. The use of symbols makes language more deliberate and makes children more aware of the elements of language.
Writing forces inner thoughts into a sequence because you can only say or write one idea at a time.
As children learn to write they take on the role of the reader to see their thoughts for the first time. This gives them a greater ability to see gaps in their thinking and notice points of confusion.
They acquire an awareness of their own ideas. These ideas become more concrete as they continue to learn to read and write.
In the next part in this series we will explore how to develop the writing process from symbols and drawing. The emerging process of writing becomes the emerging process of thinking.
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