Word-focused activity and orthographic genesis in young pupils
The teachers we have observed focus their students’ activity on the word as the fundamental unit of writing and expert practices. According to our hypothesis, because they rely on their teachers’ knowledge, students—from the beginning of their formal learning—enter a world of spelling-based writing without having an explicit definition of “word” or a knowledge of spelling rules. Our observations reveal how, by incorporating the ways of doing things suggested to them in classroom lessons (scenarios), students write using graphical segmentation. Their actions and verbalizations indicate that they process graphic units as orthographic forms upstream of any explicit grammatical instruction. Word-focused activity, in our view, leads to students’ secondarization of scriptural habitus and can serve as a basis for orthographic genesis.