ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, many important aspects and problems of the teaching and development of writing in primary school, including kindergarten, have been intensively investigated, from emergent literacy to early writing to the development of composition skills in various genres. Moreover, these multiple issues have been analyzed from both the cognitive and the social-constructivist perspectives. The cognitive approach emphasizes the complexity of writing as a basically solitary enterprise, whereas the social-constructivist approach underlines the social and cultural dimensions of writing as closely related to other literate practices in classroom activities. However, studies of teaching of writing during these years have tended to examine the focus of instruction rather than the mode, as Hillocks (1986) distinguished between the content of instruction and the teacher’s role in planning and carrying out instructional activity.
