Teaching How To Write

[Jemineye]

So I've been doing a lot of research and there's enough stuff on the internet dealing with teaching children how to speak and listen and even read to some extent. But what about writing? At what age do teacher's start teaching writing/spelling? Have any of you had experience with this? How did you go about it? I heard somewhere that teaching the alphabet is pointless because English isn't a phonetic language.

Just after some more insight.

[Lucy]

I think young learners need some time to learn to write in their own language. It's not good for them to be learning to write in their own language and a foreign language at the same time.

[Jemineye]

I gather, but I've just watched a video of a couple of kids playing hangman and they looked about 4/5 years old...

Irrespective, writing in English must start somewhere, right? Middleschool, maybe?

[jezinspain]

I teach in an 'immersion school' in Spain. The children in the infants will begin to write their name whenever they do it in Spanish. Remember that writing really should follow on behind speaking and reading as it usually does with native tongue. It's a case of whenever the children are ready, rather than a specific age. As this is a 'school' and the children go through, each teacher will be assessing the children when they arrive in the class. I teach year 3, 6-7 year-old on arrival. All of them have started writing, but their performance will vary greatly given their maturity, ability etc.

PS, teaching the alphabet is crucial. 1. If the children are going to learn to spell, they'll need to know the letter names.
2. It's not true to say that English is not a phonetic language, it's just that there are a lot of irregularities. Most of the irregularities occur with the vowels, not the consonants which are more regular. The key to teaching English spelling is to teach the regularities and the irregularities. It isn't easy. But it kan bee dun. (Whoops!)

[Jemineye]

I would think that it would be easier to teach writing in European countries, however, as the alphabets are similar. But teaching in the Far East, for example, would probably be a lot different as their written language is very different from English. And in the video, the children who I mentioned writing were Asian. Therefore, it kind of baffles me how in some instances, it seems to be okay to teach the alphabet (even though our alphabet and the way each letter sounds can spurn irregularities) and in others it's not.

[jezinspain]

I think you are right about the European /Asian contrast, although I don't know anything about Asian languages so I don't really know. I teach in English, but in Spain to Spanish children. They do find learning English spelling difficult compared to their native Spanish. But there are rules in English and patterns (even among the irregularities).
Back to teaching the alphabet, the children often ask me to spell words, I can't tell them if they don't know their alphabet. There are actually only 44 phonemes in English, made up by combining 26 letters. It beats Chinese for simplicity, but isn't as easy as Spanish where there is a closer link between letter and sound and less variation!

[reyonahole]

Writing is a combination of thinking and vocabulary hence both things must be strong.