Learning outcomes

Research focus: rules and conventions
Bunting maintains that there are two main aspects of punctuation: rules which must be used and conventions which are more open to interpretation. She provides the following examples of rules in English.

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  Capital letters at the beginning of sentences.
  
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  Full stops to end sentences.
  
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  Question marks at the end of sentences which are questions; apostrophes to mark elision (don’t) and possession (John’s) (its is the possessive exception).
  

(Bunting, 1997, p.44)
What we know about young children learning to punctuate
As we saw in Chapter 1, children come to school with a lot of intuitive knowledge about grammar and how to make meaning. Graham and Kelly (2003) draw attention to examples of young children’s earliest writing attempts that contain punctuation-like symbols, although they are clear that there is a significant difference between using a symbol and understanding its significance.
Research focus: children’s attitude to punctuation
In his study of children learning to punctuate, Hall (2005) compares two young writers. One of the children saw punctuation as serving no function other than being demanded by the teacher. Without a grasp of what punctuation was for, the child had omitted punctuation marks or randomly interspersed them within the text. The child’s explanation for the placement of full stops included ‘because it’s a bit long’ or ‘I didn’t put one in that line so I put it there’. The other child was curious about punctuation and was noticing it in her reading. She had worked out the basic relationship between punctuation and the structure of written language. Punctuation was used to demarcate units of meaning: it was an intrinsic part of the writing process. Hall points out that appreciating the basic relationship between punctuation and the structure of written language is the first major conceptual leap for children.
Hall writes that punctuation must be a very strange object for beginning writers (2001, p.141). His research into how young children learn to write also suggests that punctuation may be fairly low down their list of priorities, and hard for them to focus on, particularly as it is the least visually salient aspect of writing (2001, p.144).
However, the National Curriculum for English requires children in Year 1 to be introduced to the use of capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks to demarcate sentences. By the time they are assessed at the end of Year 2, the knowledge they need to demonstrate includes the use of commas in lists and apostrophes to mark contracted forms. When children sit the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test (GP&S) the end of Year 6 they will need to have a sophisticated understanding of punctuation, including the accurate use of semi-colons, colons and dashes and hyphens. The broad progression for what needs to be covered in each year group is outlined below (DfE, 2013, pp.75-79).

Year	Punctuation
1	Separation of words with spaces. Introduction to the use of capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks to demarcate sentences.