Vygotsky argued that in education, the question we attend to is how to teach children to write, yet we fail to see the value of thought training that lies behind writing, and we do not teach them what genuine "written language" is. He regarded handwriting as "drawing symbols," whereas "written language" is the use of symbols to express thought. The former is an external operation; the latter has internal meaning. If schools merely enable children to recognize and read characters aloud, attending to whether their pronunciation is correct and clear but not to how children use language to express meaning, this leads to "dead speech."
Unlike spoken language, children's written language must be taught through a scientific and systematic pedagogy; it cannot be naturally acquired in everyday life. Precisely because of this "deliberate training" character, in actual teaching we treat "handwriting" as a motor skill to be learned and neglect the meaning of "writing" itself. Children begin writing because they are required to "be able to write" a certain character, not because of a self-generated motive such as "I need to write a card for Mom." Even psychologists previously held that writing is merely a fine motor act in which the brain controls the fingers, and did not see the significant "development" that the emergence of children's writing behavior signals.
Written language is a "second-order symbol." That is, spoken language, as sound, is itself a symbol; written characters are symbols of speech sounds, that is, symbols of symbols, and are therefore a form of second-order symbolism. However, once children have mastered reading and writing, they can bypass the intermediate phonetic stage of "reading aloud." At that point, when children see written words, these correspond directly to reality. In the process by which humans learned to use written language, psychological functions underwent complex development, not merely the development at the level of movement that we observe in children. To understand psychologically "how children learn to write," we must study, on a broader scale, how children come, step by step, to use various symbols.
1. Children's use of symbols through scribbling
The earliest form in which children use "written language" is a visual sign: the gesture. The gesture is the first "visual sign" in a child's life used to indicate meaning. The gesture is like an acorn: the child's future capacity for writing lies hidden within this seed. A gesture is "writing in the air." Many of the signs we later write on paper are merely "frozen" gestures. As for primitive writing, the pictographic signs painted on walls are in many cases movements performed by humans that have been fixed in place. The indicating lines drawn by ancient people are in fact a person extending an index finger to point the way, with this movement captured and fixed. The origin of all human pictographic writing is the gesture. Even after writing became an independent sign, it originally evolved from movement. Visual signs (writing/drawing) derive from bodily signs (gestures).
When we ask children to draw, they often begin to "act it out," gesturing with hands and feet the thing they want to draw, and the marks on the paper are merely a "by-product" of this performance. The child believes: I have gestured the movement and left a trace of the movement on the paper, so I have finished drawing. Moreover, the "park" they draw may be exactly the same as the "ice cream" they drew earlier, being nothing more than some circles. This shows that what children draw on paper is unimportant; the movements they gesture are the core of their expression. Therefore, children's early scribbles are more like a "gesture" than genuine "drawing." They are not drawing; they are leaving on the paper traces of their own movements. This also explains why, when children draw complex things, they do not draw details at all but only a rough outline. What they pursue is the "feeling" of the movement, and the style of their early drawing is likewise coarse-lined, movement-based, and conceptual. What they draw is their own concept of the object, for example a circle, rather than the actual object seen by the eye.
Children never pursue sketching from nature. If you ask a child to draw Mom sitting opposite, the child may not look up at Mom at all and draws entirely from the impression in the mind. Children often make "X-ray drawings": what they draw is not what the eyes see but what the mind knows, with the concept in the brain (what I know) prevailing over vision (what I see). They strive to "name" and "indicate" reality rather than to "copy" it.
At this age, what children draw is not the visual image of reality but a "judgment" about reality that has been processed by their own language. For example, Mom: has glasses, has long hair. Therefore, when a child draws what is in the mind, the child is in fact using the drawing tool to "tell a story." Since the child is thinking and telling stories in language, what is drawn must be abstract, because language itself is highly generalizing. Drawing is a kind of "graphic speech," a branch of the great tree of "oral speech." Children's early scribbles are a rehearsal before the emergence of written language.
2. Children's use of symbols through play
In pretend play, a child can take any object and treat it as something else. For example, a piece of wood becomes a mobile phone, and a leaf becomes a plate. Whether the object resembles the thing is quite immaterial. The core of play is "symbolization" (substitution). What matters is how the toy is "used," and whether the child can perform the corresponding action (gesture) with it; that is, meaning is conferred by people through action. All higher forms of symbolic expression originally cannot do without action. For example, a child rides a stick as a horse because the child can clamp the stick between the legs and perform the action of "horse riding." In play, children use action (gesture) to indicate meaning. When playing house, children are in fact "speaking" with actions and communicating through actions, telling others what the toy in the hand represents. Only because of the child's actions does the toy gradually acquire meaning. As long as an object can be used to perform the corresponding action (gesture), it can function as a symbol. The essence of the symbol lies in "use," not in "resemblance." If an object cannot perform an action, the child will refuse to treat it as a character. The child has his or her own strict "symbolic logic." For example, a fixed wardrobe in the room, being too real or too large and hard to manipulate freely and endow with actions, is rarely regarded by children as a toy.
As children grow older, inspired by action, older children begin to discover that objects can not only "pretend" to be something else, but the features of an object itself can also "suggest" other things. For example, a teacher picks up a black book and says: "Now let's pretend this is a big forest." A somewhat older child will supply a reason on their own: "Yes! This must be a forest, because it's dark!" This child has already learned to seize a partial feature of the object (blackness) to substantiate the meaning of the symbol. This is an enormous leap: the child no longer relies solely on action (gesture) but begins to use the physical properties of objects (color/shape) as support for the symbol. This is precisely the cognitive foundation leading toward "pictographic writing" and "ideographic writing." Children begin to exploit features of objects to fit symbolic meaning; that is, they evolve from "wholesale substitution" to "feature extraction." Moreover, once meaning is established, it becomes fixed and no longer depends on direct external action; that is, a certain thing always represents a certain meaning, just as the written symbol "dog" stably symbolizes the "name" of "dog." Essentially, all of these are second-order symbols. In the "post office game," for example, paper slips of various colors represent different kinds of mail (telegrams, newspapers, letters, and so on), testing whether children can memorize by rote these entirely illogical "conventions." This points directly to the essence of human writing: the sounds and shapes of written words are, in the first place, arbitrarily stipulated by humans, and their essence is "symbolic substitution." Play lays the most solid foundation for the later learning of genuine written language (a second-order symbol system).
Scribbling, like play, belongs at the outset to "first-order symbols," which, without the mediation of language, directly symbolize things through action or graphic form. How, then, do children learn to turn "scribbles" (first-order symbols) into "genuine writing" (second-order symbols)?
We can understand this process along two dimensions:
(1) Beginning to "name": I create this sign in order that it represent something
For example, a child finishes drawing a line and then "names" this sign. As children grow older, the moment of "naming" comes earlier and earlier, until before putting pen to paper they have already decided in their minds what to draw and what to call it. This shift from "drawing first, thinking afterward" to "thinking first, drawing afterward" is precisely the rudimentary form of writing, namely conceiving first and then putting pen to paper. A three-year-old knows what a completed block structure represents; a four-year-old, before building, has already announced: "I am going to build a big castle!" Planfulness and purposiveness are increasing. Drawing is the same. When a three-year-old finishes drawing, if you ask what was drawn, the child may only then begin to "name" it; but by the age of seven, the child has already decided before drawing what he or she is going to draw.
However, the child's move from casual scribbling to genuinely treating his or her own drawn "mark" as a symbol of expression is not a leap accomplished naturally. Between leaving meaningless lines on paper and understanding that "the lines I draw can represent real things," there is an extremely critical moment. Psychologists unanimously hold that children must, on their own, "discover" that lines can represent meaning.
For example, if you give children a task of using marks to record some objects, then cover the objects and have them recall the objects on the basis of the marks they made, the experimental results show that children of three to four years, even though they made marks, do not look at their own marks when recalling but recall by natural memory. Older children, however, are able to "read" their own marks during recall; these marks have become their own exclusive "writing," and they have succeeded in inventing "symbols." This is called pre-writing. At this point the child's relation to those marks on the paper has entirely changed: the "mark" the child has created has become a "second-order symbol," that is, it can represent something, rather than merely "being something" (first-order symbol).
(2) The transformation from single symbols to sentences
We deconstruct this process by having children draw an entire sentence: when the picture cannot handle complex linguistic logic, genuine symbols (written characters) are born. In the experiment, school-age children showed a strong tendency to move from "drawing actual objects (pictographic)" to "drawing concepts (ideographic)." Children could draw "the whole sentence" only by drawing each word in the sentence as a separate small picture, forming a "sequence of pictures"; what they drew was the grammatical structure. That is, however the sentence is spoken by the mouth, so the picture is divided up by the hand. In order to draw function words, such as "cannot be seen" and "respect," children were compelled to rack their brains to "invent" new symbols. This "forced invention" is the key step by which the child crosses from drawing to genuine writing! For writing is the use of abstract symbols to express logical relations.
The human capacity for elementary symbolic expression is built on the foundation of "speaking (speech)." The child first "names, and then writes down, draws," which shows that oral language is the foundation of the development of written language. The way meaning is expressed in children's play transitions from gesturing to linguistic expression. The richer the oral language, the more abstract the child's thinking becomes, which prepares the child to sit quietly at a desk later and write (written language).
Vygotsky held that, according to the laws of psychological development, the Soviet Union of that time waited until age six to teach children to write, and did so in a dull, imposed manner; yet the preceding experiments prove that children at ages three to five already possess a very strong capacity for symbolic substitution. Therefore it is not that children cannot be taught writing in the early educational stage; the question is how it is taught.
First, writing must be necessary for children; it must not be done for the sake of handwriting. If writing is only for copying the "official documents" conceived in the teacher's mind, this is purely motor practice; the child is not expressing his or her own genuine thoughts, and will soon find it utterly boring. Reading and writing must be something the child "wants from within." Writing is not an activity of "exercising the hand muscles" but a cultural activity of expressing thought. Second, writing must be relevant to life and must be integrated into tasks that are "truly needed in life." Just as in teaching math, you must have children count real objects in necessary situations rather than directly doing math operation. We must therefore teach children to write in a natural way. As Montessori believed, we should let children "discover" reading and writing themselves while playing games. The need for reading and writing emerges naturally in play situations, for example the need to make "tickets" in a game of travelling. In essence, through a play-based pedagogy we help children understand the meaning of symbols, that is, "what writing is actually for." The teacher's task is to build the extremely complex bridge of transition between "drawing," "play," and "writing." The teacher must guide children through those critical "moments of insight," until the child understands that the drawing tool in hand can depict not only objects but also the voice and thoughts within the heart, that is, speech. In that case we are supporting children in learning "written language," using written words to express ideas, rather than merely "writing letters correctly."
This is the evolutionary history of children's use of signs: At first, children express themselves through hand movements, that is, the sign of the gesture; later, children use concrete objects such as sticks, blocks, and scribbles to replace movement and satisfy their expressive needs; finally, children no longer need objects and begin to use abstract lines and signs to describe reality and express meaning, ultimately mastering written language, this advanced and flexible form of expression. From “I write as I think” to “I write in order to think better”, the ultimate aim is social and cultural communication and the sharing of meaning.