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By second grade they can use content and genre knowledge (Perez, 2001) and are able to revise for surface and semantic errors (Cameron, Edmunds, Wigmore, Hunt, & Linton, 1997), but their revisions tend to focus more on mechanics than on meaning, and meaning-based revisions tend to involve only small units of text (Fitzgerald, 1987). Vukelich (1986) found that three quarters of second graders inserted information into their texts in response to peers’ questions, most frequently at the end of their texts.

Specific and explicit feedback has been found to be important for young writers because it helps them progress from where they are to where they would like to be, and provides them with information to help them achieve their goals (Schutz, 1993). Children respond positively to specific suggestions to help them improve their writing because it enhances their feelings of control (Straub, 1996, 1997). Preschool Through Elementary Writing 33 In a review of the literature on process writing, Flood and Lapp (2000) conclude that a process approach “is most appropriate for children from a wide variety of language backgrounds because it enables children to write frequently, continually revising the content as well as the form” (p.

They found that most children, especially the younger ones, produced more well-formed texts in the scaffolded condition than the nonscaffolded condition. Wollman-Bonilla and Werchaldo (1999) examined the impact of scaffolding and explicit instruction on children’s writing in response to liteature. Their data led them to conclude that “perhaps repeated modeling, with student participation in constructing the models, may be a powerful instructional tool; explicit instruction may not be as essential as other researchers suggest” (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000, p.