The author deliberately included some thoughts from the L1 Emergent Literacy scholars to provide a general overview of the emergent literacy in the L1 context in the beginning, then move on to the more specific discussions of studies that investigate the similar phenomenon in the bilingual children context. Clay, Goodman and Goodman, and Chall are three distinguished scholars whose concepts of emergent literacy are included for this purpose. The studies they conducted were populated by first users of the language (L1) and were aimed to analyze the emerging literacy development of children in their L1. The inclusion of the L1 Emergent Literacy scholars is based on two considerations. First, Johns (1990), identified that in the early development of second language writing field, theories of L1 were largely used to explain the phenomena and the pedagogy of second language …show more content…
At the precommunicative stage, children understand that writing is different from drawing and that it delivers messages. At the semiphonetic stage, children are able to differ between letters and sounds. At the phonetic stage, bilingual children realize that most words are written differently in one language from another. Achieving transitional stage, according to Rubin and Carlan, children use common spelling patterns as well as sounds they hear in words. At the last stage, i.e., conventional stage, bilingual children spelled most words correctly by using knowledge about letter sounds, letter patterns, morphemes, and other words that have been