Thinking Skills and Creativity 5 (2010) 138–149

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Thinking Skills and Creativity

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Creative writing strategies of young children: Evidence from a study ofChinese emergent writing

Si Chena,∗, Jing Zhoub

a Department of Early Years Education, East China Normal University, Chinab Professor of Early Years Education and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Early Years Education and Special Needs Education, East China Normal University, China

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 29 May 2010Received in revised form10 September 2010Accepted 29 September 2010Available online 12 October 2010

Keywords:Creative writing strategyYoung childrenChinese emergent writingThinking skills

a b s t r a c t

The ways in which learning graphical representations can encourage the development ofcreativities in Chinese young children remain to be fully explored. Previous research on chil-dren’s writing focused on children’s symbolization with syllabic languages, providing littleinformation regarding Chinese young children’s symbolization and creative writing strate-gies in writing with a logo language. This study explores how Chinese children, as activelearners and inventive thinkers, could develop their writing skills from simple drawing andscribbling to emergent writing skills, to commanding the Chinese writing system finally.The creative strategies children used in writing Chinese characters are also focused.Thisstudy investigated children’s emergent writing by examining qualitatively how childrenexpress their meanings through symbols and representations including “proper” Chinesecharacters and drawings. The subjects of the study are 105 writing samples collected from32 Chinese kindergarten children aged from five to six. The data reveals that children canuse creative writing skills to communicate when they meet with characters they were notable to write. Based on the phonological and orthographic features, children can use (1) pic-tures of objects or (2) pictures of objects which have the same pronunciation of the targetcharacters, and (3) alternative character which has the same pronunciation. The differentstrategies they use reflect that in this creative writing process, children are not only familiarwith Chinese language but also open their minds and brought all their innovative thinkingskills into play.

© 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

When young children have not learned how to express themselves with formal writing symbols, it dose not mean that theycannot do anything; on the contrary, they employ other methods including scribbling lines, drawing images and inventingletters to convey their ideas. Attempting to use various writing strategies, children break through the barriers of formalwriting patterns and deliver their thoughts. Previous researches illustrate that both English and Chinese young childrenuse these strategies in their early writing behaviors (Chen, 2010; Diffily, 2001; Strickland & Morrow, 1988; Teale & Sulzby,1986; Wu, 2009). Researchers assert these writing strategies are significant for children’s development (Lonigan, Farver,Philips, & Clancy-Menchetti, 2009; Vass, 2007), and these strategies not only can help children solve the problem in writingand communicate with people, but also stimulate children’s creative thinking (Clay, 2001; Diffily, 2001). With regard tocreativity, researchers agree that creativity refers to the generation of ideas or products that are original, valuable or useful

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 216 223 2606.E-mail address: april19850422@hotmail.com (S. Chen).

1871-1871/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.tsc.2010.09.002

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(Sternberg & Lubart, 1995), and that it needs to impact people besides creator (Sak & Oz, 2009). In language study, creativityis seen to have the following components: (1) fluency, the production of numbers of ideas; (2) flexibility, the productionof a large variety of ideas; (3) elaboration, the development, embellishment, or filling out of an idea, and (4) originality,the use of ideas that are not obvious or banal, or are statistically infrequent (Torrance, 1966). Accordingly, writing skillsmentioned in previous researches indicate the quality of being original, valuable and useful. In other words, skills such asscribbling, drawings and proper writings are ways children have innovated in order to convey meanings, which are critical,valuable, and helpful. Therefore, this paper holds that children’s innovative writing skills can be seen as creative writingstrategies.

Creative writing strategies discussed in this paper include drawing and scribbling, which are essential for young children’searly literacy development. Drawing and scribbling are addressed to be the obvious strategies children used to explorewriting at the beginning (Freeman & Sanders, 1989). To focus on young children’s emergent writing, theorists provideinformation to describe the close relationship between drawing and writing. Researchers observe that when young childrentend to write something, they use both pictures and words (Chapman, 1996; Clay, 2001; Teale, 1988). The pictures andscribbles children call “word” indicate many interesting trends: children firstly scribble randomly, then gradually start todraw directional lines, and show some pictures containing meanings. For instance, a child may draw a tree-like form and tellother people, “This says remember to take me to the park.” (Diffily, 2001). Consequently, children turn to use texts mixedpicture-like forms, “proper” words and real words to convey meanings until they grow to be a mature writer. Schickedanzand Casbergue (2004) suggest that young children may not distinguish pictures and words in a long period of their emergentdevelopment because both of them can express meanings.

Not only can children use drawing and scribbling as writing strategies, they can also learn the writing system throughthese valuable experiences (Freeman & Sanders, 1989). Children begin to understand the communicative function of writing.They try to draw pictures and write words to organize their thinking and construct purposes. In this process their daily-lifeexperiences can be showed (Baghban, 2007). To draw something that children are not able to write can help them break thebarrier of unknown words, on the other hand, the subjects on the pictures will stimulate children to learn how to write outthe corresponding words.

A supportive educational environment is one in which children feel empowered in writing (Mayer, 2007). Effectiveteachers can set good models for children and promote their development. Teacher’s language modeling and explanationof writing process will clarify confusions of early writing (Burns & Casbergue, 1992; Teale, 1995). Besides, many researchesemphasize that emergent writing is a social interactional behavior in which children benefit from working with moreadvanced writers (Chapman, 1996; Teale, 1995). Writing with their peers, children learn from each other. Not only can theyexchange creative writing strategies, but also be inspired by others’ strategies to innovate more.

Previous studies on children’s drawing and scribbling as writing strategies focus on children’s drawing and symbolizationwith syllabic languages such as English and Italian. Vygotsky (1978) asserts that drawing is graphic speech that arose onthe basis of verbal speech and he observes experimentally how children’s drawing becomes real written language. In theseexperiments, there is a tendency on the part of school age children to change from pure pictographic to ideographic writing.In a syllabic language, children’s ability of drawing and scribbling in emergent writing are acknowledged to help childrenfamiliar with the lines and shapes of letters, the appropriate size of words and the direction of sentences (Ritchey, 2008).Researchers consider these benefits increasingly important. However, in a logo language such as Chinese, what advantagesdo drawing and scribbling have in children’s emergent writing?

Although recent studies assert that Chinese emergent writing also begins with drawing and scribbling (Chen, 2010; Wu,2009; Zhou, 2009), researchers provide little information regarding how Chinese language system impacts young children’semergent writing. Unlike a syllabic language, Chinese, as a logo language, consists of both sound and character system. In thesound system of mandarin Chinese there are 23 initial consonants, 24 simple or compound vowels and 4 tones. In additionto the sound system, Chinese language also concludes a character system. All the characters are classified into 6 categories:Hsiang shin, huey yie, chih shi, shien shein, chuan chu and Chia chie (Forrest, 1948). The standard of classification of these sixgroups is how the character is being made. Basically, as a hieroglyph language, Chinese characters mainly come from imageshapes. For example, Hsiang shin characters are made by simplifying drawings of objects the characters represent (Wu, 2009)like sun ( ), moon ( ), fire ( ), water ( ), wood ( ) and field ( ). Other five groups of characters more or less reflectthe world visually and tie closely to drawing.

Because of the fact that Chinese language contains both sound and character systems, and the words are hieroglyphic,there are three factors combined in one single Chinese character: glyph, pronunciation, and meaning. For example, thecharacter “ ” has a certain form that looks like flowing water, meaning water, and pronounced /ʃui:/. Compared with theEnglish word “brook”, an English child who does not know the meaning but has a little phonetic knowledge can guess thepronunciation. However, a Chinese-speaking child can guess “ ” means something relating to water because the charactercomponents “ ” looks like three drops of water, but he cannot tell the sound of it. Chinese characters are somehow consistentwith the children’s visual perspective.

Although there are significant differences between syllabic language and logo language, researchers focus on Chinesechildren emergent writing development indicating little about the specific strategies children accessed based on logo lan-guage and how educators can do to help children learn the language through emergent writing. Also, considering the closerrelationship between Chinese characters and pictures, it would be positive that Chinese young children could have morecreative strategies by using drawings to represent words.

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This paper intends to study the following questions:

(1) What kind of creative writing strategies Chinese children use in communication?(2) How do these writing strategies convey children’s thoughts and relate to Chinese language system?(3) How does educational environment impact Chinese children’s creative writing strategies?

2. Methodology

2.1. Subjects

105 drawings of 32 children (17 boys and 15 girls) aged from five to six who attended a kindergarten class in Chengdu City,Sichuan Province during the 2008–2009 academic year, were analyzed with permission from the kindergarten director, classteachers and children’s parents. All children speak Chinese in both school and family. None of them has any developmentallanguage disorder.

2.2. Procedure

An early literacy curriculum had been taken in the class since 2007. As parts of this curriculum, writing and drawing wereroutine activities. Eight topics related to children’s daily life were discussed. Teachers also provided writing opportunitiesfor children in or after class to help them express their ideas and share information about these topics with others. Usuallyevery week teachers set aside about 30 min after a story telling or community visiting for children to do some drawing andwriting concerning the latest activities (see Table 1).

To make sure that children have enough space to consider what they want to write in alternative ways and reduce theinterference of formal writing symbols, during these processes teachers were not allowed to show children how to writeany Chinese characters; however, children could discuss with their peers. If children asked how to write an unknown word,teachers would encourage him or her to try to write or draw it as whatever he or she likes most. It was critical that teacherswere not involved in the drawing and writing of any child. Then children shared their drawings and writings together bydescribing what they attempted to illustrate. After class teachers recorded what they said about their drawings and writingsrepresented with the help of notes taken in their expression. The teachers of the class kept an archive of children’s drawings,but only the children themselves have the right to delete their drawings. Researchers used this archive to choose 3 or 4drawings from each child to make color copies and return.

In the process of data analysis, children’s graphical representations and writing productions were explored with the aid ofthe record of subjects’ oral descriptions. Also researchers asked teachers and the children to clarify some confusing drawingsor words.

To analyze how Chinese children use drawing as a strategy to communicate, two concepts “pure drawings” and “drawingsconvey character’s meaning” need to be identified. In this research, because of the curriculum requirement, children wereallowed to add pictures of images they wanted to draw on the paper. Researchers only analyze drawings that children (1)drew with simple lines and usual single color; (2) put among other simple pictures or characters and (3) asserted that thispicture represented a meaning or a Chinese character. For example, in Fig. 1, a “pure image” of corn was drawn to show abest healthy food, and some character-like forms were written below. These proper writings will be included in the analysis.

3. Findings

Supportive environment is significant for the data of this research. Teachers provide distinguishingly positive conditionsfor children’s emergent writing. Firstly, in all the series of emergent writing projects, the relationship between writingcontexts and children’s early experiences are emphasized. On the one hand, the writing contexts are well-selected to fitchildren’s daily life experiences, including the discussion on future work, favorite food, primary school wishes, and their bestfriends, which are familiar to children and relevant to their life and social communication; on the other hand, discussionand drawing are arranged before writing to arouse children’s language experience and put their drawing skill into play.Talking to class before writing helps children to build a link between oral and print language, whereas drawings remindchildren what to write in an effective way. Secondly, open attitude of teachers leaves children space to invent writing skills.Without preconception of children’s responses, teachers support children’s every expression and sharing. Thirdly, displayingchildren’s work is critical for teachers to create a favorable emergent writing environment. After the projects, teachersask children to present their drawings and writings in the class with explanation, and other children comment and sharethoughts. Consequently, children obtain valuable experience of communication with print language. Particularly, studyingin this positive writing environment, the accumulating writing experience enables children to explore more complicatedwriting skills and develop creative writing strategies.

Children’s emergent writings present variable representations. Among all the 105 drawings of children, 97 contained bothwriting symbols and simple pictures representing characters. Conventional Chinese characters appeared in a few children’sdrawings, with merely children’s name or very simple and common Chinese words like “ ” (auxiliary word, meaning

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Table 1The context of emergent writing tasks.

Topic Focus questions Writing task Sample

1. My name card 1. What does a name card looklike?2. What does a name card do?3. What information wouldyou like to show in your namecard?

To create a name card showingchild’s name, phone number, apicture of himself or herselfand other information.

2. When I grow up. . . 1. What do you want to dowhen you grow up?2. What will you look like atwork?3. Why do you like that job?

To draw a picture about yourideal future job, and to writeone or more sentences about it.

3. Imagine my primary school 1. What kind of problems youmay come cross in yourprimary school?2. What are the differencesbetween your kindergarten lifeand primary school life?3. What do you want to say toyour primary school teacher inthe future?

To draw a picture about yourimagination of primary schoollife, and to write down one ormore sentences to explain yourpicture.

4. My favorite teacher 1. Who is your favoriteteacher?2. Why do you love her?3. What do you want to say toyour favorite teacher?

To draw a picture of yourfavorite teacher, and to writedown something about her.

5. List my picture book 1. Have you read anyinteresting picture booksrecently?2. Can you recommend anypicture books to otherchildren?3. What are these picturebooks about?

To make a list of your picturebooks by using Chinesecharacters and pictures torepresent the book titles.

6. I am the master 1. Do you have any amazingskills?2. What is/are the skill/skills?

To create a picture that mixesdrawings and characters toillustrate one of the child’samazing skills.

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Table 1 (Continued)

Topic Focus questions Writing task Sample

7. Best healthy food 1. What food do you like best?2. What food is healthy in youropinion?3. Why do you think the food ishealthy?

To draw a picture of onehealthy food, and to write oneor more sentences to explainwhy the food is healthy.

8. My best friend in class 1. Who is your best friend inclass?2. Why do you like him or herso much?3. What do you want to say tohim or her?

To create a picture of you andyour best friend, and to writesomething you want to say tohim or her.

completion of an action), or “ ” (numeral, meaning “one”). Besides, creative writing strategies were showed in 92.83%children’s pictures to express meanings they wanted to share with their peers.

As shown in Fig. 2, the four samples were all selected from the writing task “when I grow up. . .”. Firstly the teacherintroduced the topic by encouraging the children to imagine their jobs in the future. Then the children were given time toput down their thoughts through drawings and characters. The four pictures show that the children’s ideal jobs are pastrychef, spaceman, doctor and air-hostess. All the pictures contain drawings to show their future jobs and sentences to illustratethe reasons for their choices (i.e. “When I grow up I want to be a pastry chef because I love the aunt works at the bakery verymuch and I love bread and cakes”; “I want to be a doctor when I grow up because I can heal patients”). Evidently, children’sproduction of drawings and proper Chinese characters can be seen as the outcome of their creative writing strategies. Thesecreative strategies help them to be understood in class environment (meanings of these representations will be discussedin Tables 2–4). Furthermore, as a graphical language, Chinese character has a close relationship with pictures. The produc-

Fig. 1. A child’s drawing about “best healthy food”.

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Fig. 2. Children’s writing examples of “what do I want to do when I grow up”.

tions of children offer different innovative writing strategies to overcome the barriers of unknown characters and conveymeanings.

3.1. Using pictures to represent meanings

The design of early literacy curriculum offers an inspiring situation to challenge children’s communication skills andwriting abilities. Teachers provide plentiful interesting topics which stimulate children to express their ideas. Experiencedteachers can easily use group talking and other activities to inspire children to write down their thoughts or record theirfindings. However, to put oral language in print requires children to command a certain amount of Chinese characters whichis far beyond their abilities. Although 5 or 6-year-old Chinese children can distinguish between pictures and characters (Chen,2010), they can merely write few words. With the strong willing to write something down, children’s significant problemsalter from “what to write” to “how to write”. To break through the limitation of writing Chinese characters, children turn tocreative writing strategies. Drawing pictures to represent objects or meanings is an appropriate way for children.

In Fig. 3, a child drew a picture to express the ideal work when she would become an adult. The sentences on the rightside of the picture are, “When I grow up I want to be a teacher. I love to be a teacher because teachers can teach childrenknowledge.” ( ). There are altogether 27 Chinese words withfourteen correct Chinese characters and 13 pictures represent what the child wants to say. Some of the thirteen pictorialrepresentations reveal a creative writing strategy of using pictures to represent meanings. Beside pictures, other samples ofthe study also show that the children would use pictures as an alternative way to express their meanings (see Table 2).

The evidences in Table 2 show how young children use drawing to solve the problem with unknown characters. Therepresentations illustrate a writing strategy of using pictures to express meanings. As shown in the table, children drewrelated objects to represent abstract verbs (e.g. grow up, want, read) and abstract adjective (e.g. old). In conclusion, thereare three ways of creative writing strategies children tend to use in representing meanings. First, children draw an image torepresent the character of this object itself (e.g. a child drew a book to express the word “book”). In this way, target charactersor words are all both nouns and have explicit meanings; second, children draw related object to represent a character withan abstract concept (e.g. draw a plant to represent the concept of grow up; a thought bubble to represent the word want);third, when target character is an adjective, children draw an object that contains similar meaning to a part of a Chineseword (e.g. draw an old lady to express the meaning of old).

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Fig. 3. A child’s drawing about “what do I want to do when I grow up”.

3.2. Using pictures to represent characters’ pronunciations

Using pictures to represent characters’ pronunciation as a creative writing strategy is also shown in children’s drawings.When children assume that they have problem to draw a picture to express a character’s meaning, they employ a strategyof drawing something sharing pronunciation with the target character.

In Table 3, all the pictures are produced to express the pronunciation of certain characters. As verbally expressed bychildren, they explained all the meanings of these graphical representations as recorded in Table 3.

As revealed by Table 3, using pictures to represent characters’ pronunciation as a creative writing strategy is shown whenthe target words are hard to explain, or have no concrete meaning. All the twelve pictures express seven abstract verbs (be,

Table 2Examples of using pictures to represent meanings.

Picture Meaning of thepicture

Target character Writing strategy

1 A small plantgrows up

Grow up( zhang)

Using an image of a growing plant to represent theabstract meaning of grow up.

2 A thought bubble Want( xiang)

In Chinese, “think” and “want” share a same character. Thechild uses a thought bubble to represent the meaning of“want”.

3 An old lady Teacher(“ ” “ ” lao forlao shi)

There are two characters formed the word “teacher” inChinese, and the first character is “old ( , lao)”. The childuse a image of an old lady to represent “old”.

4 An eye Read( kan shu)

Using an image of an eye to represent the abstractmeaning of reading.

5 A book Read( du shu)

Using an image of a book to represent the abstractmeaning of reading.

6 A pen Write( xie zi)

An image of pen to express the meaning of writing.

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Table 3Examples of using pictures to represent characters’ pronunciation.

Picture Meaning of thepicture

Targetcharacter

Writing strategy

1 A ring bell Be (a teacher)(dang)

“Ring bell” has the same pronunciation with Chinese character “dang”means being (a teacher).

2 An eagle andan apron

Because(ying wei)

In Chinese, “ying wei” means because, “ying” and eagle sounds thesame as well as “wei” and apron.

3 A weddingcandy

Love(xi)

“Wedding candy” has the same pronunciation with “love” in Chinese.

4 A Chinesecharacter andan ant

Can(ke yi)

“Ant” and “can” share a same pronunciation in Chinese.

5 A pepper Teach(jiao)

“Pepper” and “teach” have the same pronunciation in Chinese.

6 A door Plural form(men)

“Door” has the same sound as that of “ ” in Chinese, which is used asa plural form.

7 A bottle of juice Knowledge(zhi)

“Juice” has the same pronunciation with “knowledge” in Chinese.

8 Bells ringing Become (adoctor)

(dang)

One character in the Chinese phrase “bells ringing” has the samepronunciation with that of the Chinese character “dang” meaning “tobecome” (a doctor).

9 A piece ofclothing and aChinesecharacter

Doctor(yi sheng)

In Chinese, the short form of “clothing” shares the same sound withthat of the first character of “doctor”; while the following characterwritten by the child roughly resembles “ ”, the second character of“doctor” in Chinese.

10 A bottle ofmedicine

Want(yao)

In Chinese, the sound of “medicine” is the same as that of “want”.

11 A flying birdand a Chinesecharacter

Very(fei chang)

In Chinese, “flying” shares the same sound with that of the firstcharacter of “very”; while the following character written by the childhas the same sound as that of the second character of “very”.

12 A mole and aChinesecharacter

Heal(zhi hao)

In Chinese, “mole” shares the same sound with that of the firstcharacter of “heal”; while the following character written by the childis indeed the second character of “heal” in Chinese.

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Table 4Examples of using alternative characters to represent meanings.

Proper character Meaning of theproper character

Target character Writing strategy

1 Stone( , shi)

Teacher( , shi)

The character of stone has the samepronunciation with the character ofteacher.

2 Be( , shi)

Knowledge( , shi)

The character of be has the samepronunciation with the character ofknowledge.

3 Long( , chang)

Very(“ ” “ ”,chang)

The character of “long” and “very”share the same pronunciation.

4 Four( , four)

Be( , shi)

The character of “be” has a similarpronunciation with that of thecharacter of “four”.

can, love, teach, become, want, heal); one conjunction (because); one plural form (men), one adverb (very), and two abstractnouns (knowledge, doctor).

It is a complex challenge for children to use pictures to represent characters’ pronunciation. Before children apply thisstrategy, they should understand the corresponding relationship between print language and oral language. Pictures are akind of children’s print language, however pronunciation belongs to oral language. Unless children understand that bothprint and oral languages convey the same meaning, they cannot produce the creative writing strategy. After that, childrenneed to know a distinctive nature of Chinese language that there are limited pronunciations and one pronunciation conveysmore than one character and indicates several different meanings or objects, which is the critical principle for children touse the writing strategy. Then children need to be familiar with more than one character with similar pronunciations inorder to select appropriate image to represent meanings graphically.

Compared with using pictures to represent meanings, both of the two creative writing strategies share the same feature,which is children employ pictures as characters. Considering the arrangement of the picture, it is apparent that children tendto mix the picture and the character in one sentence, and the pictures are usually the same size as that of the characters. It isextremely interesting that most of the samples researchers collected indicate that children have a concept to use picture asa kind of Chinese character. As a graphical language, Chinese writing system shows an emergent effect on children’s writing.

There is another evidence to show that children use pictures as characters in their emergent writing samples. A childused the No. 3 picture in Table 2 and the No. 1 picture in Table 3 twice to express the same meanings. It can be seen that thechild just uses the pictures as special characters which have specific meanings and usage.

3.3. Using alternative characters to represent meanings

Using alternative characters to represent meanings is a writing strategy that chooses another character which has thesame pronunciation with the target character in their sense. As mentioned earlier, in Chinese, one pronunciation maycorrespond to several characters. Based on this principle, it is possible for children to select an easier or more familiarcharacter to represent the difficult one.

In Table 4, children use the character of stone to substitute the character of teacher. Current research shows that “ ”(stone) is one of the most familiar characters for young Chinese children aged four to six (Chen, 2010) because of its almostsymmetrical appearance. “ ” (be) is one of the high-frequency character in print Chinese. Children can recognize it in thecontext.

However, although children used an alternative character to replace the character they were not able to write, theyfollowed the writing principle that every character represents one meaning. When one child needs to express the samemeaning, she uses the same alternative character. For example, she wrote “ ”(stone) twice to replace the same character“ ” (teacher).

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4. Discussion

4.1. Developing Chinese print awareness

The data from the subjects’ drawings and writings apply information about how children using distinguished writingstrategies to represent meanings graphically with regard to the research questions. In the study, it is interesting to find thatthe subjects were most likely to use the following strategies that (1) pictures of objects or (2) pictures of objects whichhave the same pronunciation of the target characters, and (3) alternative characters which have the same pronunciationswith those of target characters. These strategies are used as creative writing strategies to convey meanings in writing tasks.The evidences have also provided significant findings with regard to how Chinese language as a logo language, with severalcritical writing principles, affects the creation of children’s writing strategies.

Findings of this research enrich the theories from previous researches on children’s emergent writing development byproviding informative explanations about Chinese children’s graphical representations. As asserted by Clay (1975, 1993,2001) and Sulzby (1990), children learned writing skill from scribbling and used drawings at the beginning as a significantapproach in the development of emergent writing. This research reveals the same assertion that Chinese children’s emergentdevelopment also has a tight relationship with drawings. Furthermore, this research accepts the conclusion that the progressfrom drawing to writing in both English and Chinese children’s emergent writing development is common.

However, Chinese children’s graphical representations have a much closer relationship with drawing. Data of this researchreveals the development of children’s emergent writing has a tendency, which is from image to character. Similar to theevolution of Chinese character system, which abstracts object’s image and produces it into graphical representation, Chinesechildren tend to use the same strategy to employ pictures as a special kind of Chinese character to convey meanings. As alogo language, “observe the features of objects and produce them into an image” refers to the critical concept of creatingChinese characters. In this progress, people inspected objects and selected the significant features of them to draw graphicalrepresentations. Research about Chinese character configuration asserts that a key factor in the evolvement of graphicalrepresentation to Chinese character is simplification of image. Abstract image and simple lines replace complex graphicaldrawings (Guo, 1997). This concept shows a profound effect on Chinese children’s emergent writing. The findings of thisresearch have provided information with regard to how children draw objects’ appearances or characteristics to representtheir meanings.

Previous researches of English language children’s emergent writing illustrated that the element of drawing could befound in children’s writing samples (Baghban, 2007). However, this situation usually appeared before children had a phono-logical awareness (Diffily, 2001; Mayer, 2007). After English children separated drawings and writings, they tended to formwords following the phonological principles. For example, children used “WRIT” as “write” or “JRIK” as “drink”. Intrinsically,the way English children using picture to represent meaning is different from Chinese children.

As suggested by the findings of this research, Chinese children use pictures not only as a usual way to convey meaning butalso as a part of a writing system. Pictures in their samples are a kind of “proper” characters which have appropriate size andcertain meaning that can be used in different sentences. We assume this interesting phenomenon is related to the featureof Chinese as a logo language. Unlike English, most Chinese character’s meaning can be shown by its pictures; however,most English word’s pronunciation can be told by its spelling. Particularly, the context children want to convey in emergentwriting task needs a translation from oral expression to written language. In English, with regard to a large number of words’pronunciation closely related to the spelling, children tend to write proper words following the spelling roles in emergentwriting. However, in Chinese, there is no clear relationship between characters’ pronunciations and representations. Childrencan merely tell the form of character through its sound. In drawing, children actually create a brand new system and abandonthe limitation of writing Chinese characters.

Furthermore, the creative writing strategies of Chinese young children using pictures and alternative characters to repre-sent meanings require a complex thinking skills and a further understanding of writing system. Children need to understandthat in Chinese, every character has an appropriate size, and every graphical representation should represent a single char-acter through which people need to express the same meaning. These concepts can be reflected in the analysis of children’semergent writing samples. Children ultimately show their further comprehension towards Chinese language system in theirwriting strategies.

4.2. Developing creative thinking strategies

Writing is assumed to be a complex problem solving process, which contains three components: (1) planning and orga-nizing ideas and information needed for the task, (2) translating and turning the thoughts into text sufficient for the goalsof the task, and (3) reviewing and editing the text (Flower & Hayes, 1980). However, Sharples (1999) illustrates that writ-ing is comparable to creative design rather than problem solving because writing is an open-ended design process whichis without a fixed goal, settled stages or required results. Vass (2007) agrees with Sharples’s assumption that writing ascreative design builds on creativity. Although these results are from researches emphasizing on children aged seven andabove, they can be also inspiring to the study of developing younger children’s creative writing. Analyzing the process ofyoung children’s emergent writing, researchers found that teachers did not set fixed goals or stages for children. Childrenhad chance to discuss the writing topic in speaking, which was also a process that made children organize their thoughts,

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and then express these thoughts by combining innovative pictures and proper characters. After they finished their work,they were given opportunities to explain their writing to others, which was also a reviewing stage for children to reflect onthe innovative writing strategies they just used.

While interpreting the writing strategies of young children, the findings show that Chinese young children actuallydevelop variable creative writing skills greatly in the area of language writing. The conditions teachers set especially forwriting development leaves space to inspire children’s independent thinking and encourage them to communicate throughmultiple ways. According to their life and language experience, when facing unknown characters children exactly selectwriting strategies which are original and correspondent to one of the features of creativity (Sak & Oz, 2009).

Note that at the beginning when children meet with difficulties in writing characters, they set definite goal and try diverseways to settle the problems; rather, children finally convey meanings with the help of drawings and writing alternativecharacters. We assume that these writing strategies reflect children’s development of creativity in virtue of being valuableand useful (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995).

In this research study, the findings illustrate that Chinese children show creative writing ability in the task of emergentwriting; rather, educational programs and environment settings draw support for the development of writing strategies. In asituation that teachers offer children space and opportunity to support their insightful and associative thinking, independentcreativity will emerge. The supporting environment is critical to young children. Findings of this research implicate thatadults should offer children space for creative thinking.

To sum up, the research indicates that educators should notice that Chinese children do have creative writing abilitiesand develop variable strategies to convey meanings. Moreover, the development and improvement of writing strategiesare related closely to Chinese character system and the Chinese culture. Besides, setting a low-constructional educationalenvironment with rich content of literacy materials will enhance children’s development of emergent writing ability. Inthis supportive setting, the interaction and communication between children and teachers and the display opportunity ofchildren’s work are assumed to be the key roles in constructing a quality educational environment for children’s creativity.

Nevertheless, the data analysis provides little information of children’s peer interaction, family education and otherfactors which may affect the results of this research. Also Chinese and English writing systems are far more complicated andthis research has just provided an aspect of comparison based on the evidence of Chinese children’s emergent writings. Infurther research, factors of peer interaction, teacher’s instruction and family impact need to be considered to provide furtherexplanation of Chinese children’s creative writing strategies in emergent writing.

5. Conclusion

Writing as an open-ended design progress that builds on creativity is relevant to children’s thinking skill development(Sharples, 1999; Vass, 2007). Current researches assume that before young children build up the formal writing system,they can also express their ideas through drawings and other strategies (Baghban, 2007; Clay, 2001; Teale & Sulzby, 1986).This study focuses on young Chinese children’s emergent writing strategies and finds that three strategies have been usedby these 5 or 6-year-old children in presenting their meanings in written communication. These three strategies are usingpictures to represent meanings, using pictures to represent characters’ pronunciations and using alternative characters torepresent meanings. These strategies not only make children be understood by others, but also help them comprehendChinese character system. On the basis of this study, further researches will address how children develop their writingskills under the conditions of peer interactions and what educational strategies will benefit the development of children’screative writing strategies.

Acknowledgement

This study was a part of a project Research on the Acquisition Process of Early Literacy Development of Chinese Children andsupported by a research grant from the Ministry of Education of PR China.

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Si Chen is a postgraduate student of the Faculty of Early Years Education & Special Needs Education, East China Normal University. She majors in EarlyYears Education and her research interests include language development of Chinese children and early literacy curriculum in Chinese kindergarten.

Jing Zhou is Professor of Early Years Education and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Early Years Education & Special Needs Education, East China NormalUniversity. Her publications include more than a dozen books and 80 papers in journals and books, plus many conference proceeding papers. ProfessorZhou has served in editorial positions for Chinese early education journals as well as some international journals. Her B.A. (Chinese Language), M.A.(Child Development), and Ph.D. (Education) degrees are from Nanjing Normal University in China, Connecticut College in US and the University ofHong Kong.