Formation of writing skills

Chapter I. Formation of writing skills

1.1. Letter as a type of speech activity

Unlike such types of speech activity as speaking and listening, writing (as well as reading) is mastered by a person in the process of purposeful learning. Until relatively recently, the inability to read and write was not considered a sign of a child's unpreparedness for school, but at present, due to the growing amount of information included in the school curriculum, there is a trend of teaching children to read and write before school.

Written language is very important in the development of the child's psyche. Its role in the mental sphere of children is, first of all, the formation of conscious and arbitrary oral speech: the child begins to realize his speech and perform speech tasks. L.S. Vygotsky noted that grammar and writing allow the child to rise to the highest level in the development of speech. Written speech acts as an apparatus for articulating and understanding the structure of the language, and the visual-logical nature of written speech is of great importance here. Written speech not only reinforces the vocabulary and syntax of the language in the process of its assimilation, but also forms articulation , stable definiteness, and coherence of oral speech. In written speech, the structure of thinking takes on a detailed, logical character. In the unified development of oral and written speech, the communicative and logical functions of speech are formed, and thus the style of communication and thinking.¹
A.R. Luria wrote: “... written speech begins with an analysis of the sound complex that makes up the spoken word. This sound complex is divided into parts, the constituent words of the unit - phonemes - stand out. In acoustically complex words, including unstressed vowels, consonants acoustically modified due to their position, consonant outflow, this process turns into a complex activity, including distraction from secondary acoustic features of sounds and the selection of stable sound units. Acoustic analysis and synthesis is carried out with the closest participation of articulation.
For a long time, when teaching writing and reading, these two types of speech activity are associated with speaking. “In the organization of our movements and articulations, not only direct motor (efferent) impulses play a role, but also sensitive (afferent) excitations. In order for the movement to receive the necessary organization, it is necessary that the impulses be directed to the corresponding muscle groups and that the direction and strength of these impulses take into account the position in which these muscles are already located and those movements that were performed by these muscles by the beginning of the act. Therefore, you need a constant preservation of afferent impulses that signaled the position, the scheme of organs at a given moment. These functions are performed by the parietal posterior central areas of the cerebral cortex. These departments synthesize kinesthetic sensations and create appropriate schemes for future movements. Every writing process, especially in a subject with insufficiently automated writing skills, needs to be refined. This clarification is carried out by pronouncing the recorded word, which at first is loud, then whispered, and later becomes a pronunciation to oneself. This pronunciation allows you to separate close sounds from each other and turn insufficiently clear nuances into clear phonemes.
“The selected phonemes must be arranged in a known sequence and recoded with the corresponding optical structures - graphemes, which have their own visual-spatial features and already at the last stage must be re -encoded into a system of motor acts. This is a complex process with the help of a complex of means, the participation of which is noticeable in the initial stages of the formation of the letter .”