Early Literacy Assessment: Development and Validation of a Model

This research addresses the influence of autonomous writing productions of students at the early childhood education level. Its aim was to determine to what extent the early introduction of this type of writing improves the quality of the written productions. With a sample of 48 4-year-old students from two schools, following a quasi-experimental design (pretest and post-test), written discourses related to a given classroom task were assessed. In the experimental group multidimensional and autonomous writing strategies were used, while in the control group the writing was approached via explicit instructional practices. The results indicate that students in the experimental group show a greater development at all levels in the written text. Also, it has been shown that the learning of the textual superstructure precedes learning of other levels of the language, as providing the written discourse with a communicative purpose encourages the development of the textual macro and microstructure.