Learning to Write Words

Learning to produce the written forms of individual words is an important part of writing. In this article, I review research on how children acquire this skill. I begin by discussing young children’s knowledge about the visual appearance of writing and then consider how learners of alphabetic writing systems begin to use letters to symbolize the sounds they hear in words. The English writing system, the focus of this review, is complex. In the final section of the article, I discuss how older children learn about its subtler patterns. Implications of the research for how children learn and for how spelling should be taught are considered.