To learn to write, it is not enough to know the letters

Abstract

The psycholinguistic and psychogenetic research carried out by Emilia Ferreiro provides fundamental explanations about the systems of ideas that children develop in order to understand the writing system. In this article we analyse some children's productions and comments that –in the view of these findings– should be interpreted as provisional decisions, reasonable and not reducible to the knowledge of letters: introducing non-relevant letters, excluding a known letter and trying to include two appropriate letters in a syllabic segment. Since that research, the field of early literacy has substantially transformed the teaching perspective.