The construction of gender in early writing

This longitudinal case study explores issues of gender by examining the writing development of two children, a girl and a boy, who learned to write in process writing classrooms in Australia. Participant observation was used to study the children writing in their Kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 2 classrooms. The systemic functional grammar developed by Halliday (1985) and the models of genre and register proposed by Martin (1984, 1986) provided the theoretical framework and the means for analysing the children’s written texts. The findings reveal that even with free topic choice; a) the majority of texts were of one genre, the Observation genre, where the writer reconstructs and evaluates personal experience with family and friends; b) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre whereby experience was reconstructed by the girl as a passive observer of experience and by the boy as an active participant in the world. A number of implications for classroom practice and future research are suggested.