What is it about?
Punctuation is an integral part of written language. How do children learn to punctuate? How do they understand the uses and functions of punctuation? This study answers those questions. Sixty primary school children, between 7 and 12 years of age, were asked to introduce punctuation into an unpunctuated comic strip and to then discuss their decisions. The results show an evolution in the children's answers that progresses from punctuating by using graphic criteria to punctuating using textual criteria, enabled through the use of modality markers; and from using punctuation marks to express their own reactions to the text to using punctuation to guide another reader's interpretation of it.
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Why is it important?
This study makes a significant contribution to the field of Psycholinguistics due to the methodology used and the comprehensive explanation of the processes involved in the understanding and development of punctuation in children. These results are also useful in didactic research.
Perspectives
I hope that researchers and teachers will find clues in this article to understand the complexity in the learning of punctuation. I want to show that learning to punctuate involves a long journey of coordinations and cognitive processes around a lot of information about textual genres, different positions of the reader, communicative intentions, functional polyvalence of some punctuation marks, among much more. You will see that children`s reflexions go beyond than knowing the punctuation rules.
Dr Amira Davalos Esparza
Secretaría de Educación de Querétaro
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Children’s reflections on the uses and functions of punctuation: the role of modality markers / Reflexiones infantiles sobre los usos y funciones de la puntuación: el papel de los marcadores de modalidad, Journal for the Study of Education and Development, July 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02103702.2017.1341100.
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