This article reports on a study using Piagetian clinical methodology to examine the early writing development of 56, urban, Spanish-speaking preschoolers in a metropolitan area of the United States. In addition, the article draws upon findings by the Expert Study (Flippo, 1998) to underscore the types of instructional environments that have proven the most efficacious for the literacy growth of young, second-language learners. Following much of the same protocols of the classic study by Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) in Argentina, the study attempted to replicate some of the patterns found in Latin American children's early writing with those from similar backgrounds in an urban area in the United States. For the most part, the developmental patterns found twenty years earlier were also observed in the U.S. sample of preschoolers, with the exception that the four-year-old children in the present study were performing more at the level of the five-year-olds in the South American sample.