Abstract
First grade students can start the year barely knowing their letter sounds and writing strands of letters and drawing pictures to communicate. California Language Arts Standards for first grade require that students select a focus when writing, use descriptive words; print legibly, and space letters, words and sentences correctly (California State Board of Education, 1997). As a first grade teacher these standards can be overwhelming when students with limited English and low socioeconomic status enter first grade as emergent writers. However, McCarrier, Pinnell and Fountas (2000) stated that emergent writers can successfully transfer writing skills taught whole class to independent writing through a teaching method called interactive writing. According to the claims of these authors, first grade teachers can help their students develop from emergent writers to meet California State Standards using interactive writing. The current study allows for experimentationand focus on interactive writing to see how the instruction transfers to first grade students' independent writing. This study was conducted using pre-test, post-test non-randomized control and treatment group, quasi-experimental research design nine. The control group consisted of eleven students, while the treatment group consisted of eighteen students. In order to determine if the skills taught during interactive writing transferred to the students' independent writing, a pre- and a post-test writing sample was administered and collected from each participant in the control and treatment group by each group's respective teachers. The pre- and post-writing samples for the control and treatment classes were analyzed using a holistic rubric score, and a tally system that recorded a variety of skills (number of: words written, correct spaces, incorrect spaces, correct capital letters, incorrect capital letters, periods, question marks, exclamation points, correctly spelled irregular words, correctly spelled short vowel words, and correctly spelled other sound out words). Interactive writing contextualized the conventions of writing. The data indicates that students' meta-linguistic awareness while participating in interactive writing increased as indicated by the students' independent writing. While the basal had a positive impact on students writing, the students who participated in interactive writing took more risks with punctuation marks and word choice. Interactive writing positively affected first graders' independent writing.