Writing Goals in the Instructional Designs of the Greek Preschool Education

Abstract

The official policy documents of the Greek preschool education adopt a functional perspective of writing (i.e., writing for real communicative purposes) which signals an attempt to align the national language policy with the communicative language policy of the European Union. In this article, the consistency of this alignment is examined by focusing on the compatibility between this functional perspective and the writing goals of the official instructional designs of the Greek preschool education. Using a document-based investigation, 76 instructional designs were collected and analysed through a deductive and a descriptive statistical process of content analysis by calculating frequencies between the writing goals of each design with goals which reflect either the functional-pragmatic view of writing (writing as purposeful communication) or the opposite structural one (emphasis on the autonomous layers of language; phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics). It was found that the structural writing goals, appearing in most instructional designs, diverge from the official functional view of writing focusing on the structural phonological goal of how children can learn to correspond sounds with letters (a main feature of the traditional language instruction). This divergence signals a divergence from the European language policy which simultaneously gives emphasis on key communicative competences and the functional communicative language instruction. Therefore, a prerequisite of the instructional designs for fulfilling the European communicative goals is an epistemological shift from language structure to language function.