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This paper describes how one group of Euro-American, middle-class two-year-olds living in the southern US learned to form and enact locally appropriate textual intentions and literate identities as they participated in writing events. Data were collected during a nine-month ethnographic study of two-year-olds' and adults' interactions at a preschool writing table. Adult talk functioned to elicit information about the children's writing, to guide their participation, and to showcase adult writing activities as demonstrations. Children observed adult writing, initiated their own graphic activities, and co-authored with adults. A large portion of children's talk involved verbal or gestural descriptions of their intentions. Microanalysis of intertextual connections in adult-child talk showed how children learned intentionality through joint participation in writing, focusing on five key patterns: a) the joint negotiation of textual intentions in face-to-face interaction, b) the forceful nature of the "pedagogical mode of address," c) children's use of existing resources to take up roles as writers, d) changes in participation, and e) children's agency in shaping their participation as writers.
This article is about the beginnings of writing. Research has shown that by age three, some children already know a good deal about writing (Yaden, Rowe, & MacGillivray, 2000). Though it makes sense that the literate performances of three-, four-, and five-year-olds have their roots in even earlier writing experiences, we know very little about children's interactions with writing before age three (Lancaster, 2003). This study is designed to address this gap in the literature. The research reported in this article describes how one group of Euro-American, middle-class two-year-olds living in the southern US constructed understandings about writing as they interacted with their teachers at a preschool writing table. The study is designed to show how these two-year-olds went about forming the kinds of basic understandings about writing that have been previously documented for older preschoolers. In particular, I focus on a watershed understanding for young writers: intentionality-that is, the understanding that written marks are cultural objects that signify (clay, 1975; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984).
I use sociocultural perspectives on early learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, Mistry, Goncu, & Mosier, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978) and literacy, especially those associated with the New Literacy Studies (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Bloome & EganRobertson, 1993; Gee, 1999;...