Children can acquire written language skills and abilities through the natural process by which they acquire oral language. If as infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, children are exposed to rich print environments, they transfer assumptions from experiences with oral dialogue to the more focused situations of print. Discrepancies in the ease with which children learn to speak and learn to read largely result from the disruption of natural process by educational programs, as indicated by the fact that as many as 25% of entering first graders in the United States have learned to read without formal instruction. The emerging discipline of psycholinguistics emphasizes that language and reading are constructive processes. Children need to be told that they already know a great deal about how these processes work. Miscue analysis, schema theory, and the language experience approach involves procedures that build on the child's experiences and are based on developmental language learning processes. The axioms these approaches provide teachers are "Begin where the student is" and "Teach to the child's strengths." With a process orientation to writing, teachers can affect the ways children think and can maintain the meaningfulness and joy which motivated children's oral language development. (Author/RH)