Multimodal text creation from day 1 of school with draw, talk, write, share

To become truly literate, children need to learn to create, comprehend and use single mode (written, visual or spoken) and multimodal texts. In this paper, a pedagogical approach to early writing is described. This approach,referred to as “Draw, Talk, Write, Share” (DTWS), is based upon research conducted by the author (Mackenzie, 2011,2014) that identified strong relationships between drawing, talking and early writing. DTWS utilises the two modes of meaning-making children often use very successfully when they start school: drawing and talking. The approach, is discussed from the perspective of children speaking or learning English, although there is no reason why DTWS could not be used with other languages.