Written language development: Kroll's stages, spelling development, the move from speech-like to written forms, and the development of genre and organisation in children's writing.

What this topic is asking

AQA wants you to describe how children's writing develops: the recognised stages, how spelling progresses, how writing moves away from speech-like forms, and how children gain control of genre and text organisation. In a data response you must place a writing sample in a developmental model, quote features at each level, and frame errors as evidence of learning rather than as failure.

Kroll's stages of writing development

The most useful idea here is that early writing is speech-like. Young children write the way they talk: short, additive, loosely connected and informal, because spoken language is the system they already command. The developmental journey is, in part, the gradual differentiation of writing as a distinct mode with its own conventions (planning, paragraphing, formal register) that speech does not need. When you analyse a sample, the degree of separation from speech is one of your best clues to the stage.

Spelling development

The exam point about spelling is interpretive. A child who writes "skool" or "thay" has accurately mapped the sounds onto plausible letters; the only thing missing is knowledge of the irregular English convention. That is rule-application, not carelessness, and it supports the cognitive and nativist view that children actively construct the system rather than copy it. As children read more and absorb morphology (the stable spelling of a morpheme such as "-ed" or "-tion" regardless of how it sounds), their spelling moves towards convention.

Genre, organisation and cohesion

When analysing child writing, work across three levels. Physical features (letter formation, directionality) tell you about motor and orthographic control. Orthographic features (the spelling stage) place the child on the phonetic-to-conventional path. Discourse features (cohesion, sentence variety, genre markers, organisation) reveal how far writing has differentiated from speech. Reading all three together lets you place the sample confidently in Kroll's model.

Try this

• Take a child's writing sample and label one physical, one orthographic and one discourse feature.
• Rewrite an invented spelling and explain what sound-to-letter rule the child has correctly applied.
• Decide which Kroll stage a "speech-like" sample (clauses chained with "and then") most likely fits and justify it.