Literacy in General

Literacy and literacy learning can be seen as operating on four levels of practice: decoding, semantic, pragmatic and critical.
(Freebody and Luke 1990)

Public discourse often equates literacy learning with decoding, or, at most, reading a text to extract items of literal meaning. But pragmatic literacy - putting reading to use in a range of situations - is necessary if the learner is to operate with any degree of autonomy in the world. And critical literacy is essential for a healthy democratic society. Both can be taught from the early stages of literacy learning in school.

Implication: We have to stress to student teachers the need to teach children to operate effectively at all levels.
Literacy learning must involve both the 'large shapes' such as story patterns and meanings, and the 'small shapes' of phonics and spelling patterns.
(Clay 1972; Goodman and Goodman 1977; Bussis et al. 1985; Barrs et al. 1988)

Children need to learn to ‘decode’ the marks on the page and to ‘encode’ spoken language in letters, and this learning does not come easily to all. However, they also need to learn about how a story can draw you in, the predictability of certain story patterrns, how different types of text work and the kinds of meaning that can be made through them. They need to learn what literacy can do for them, if they are to invest the amount of effort that learning to read requires of them and if they are to become confident, effective, efficient and engagd readers.

Implication: We need to help student teachers develop a balanced view of literacy teaching and learning as about both the large and the small shapes - from the earlliest stages of literacy learning.
Fluent reading is not a bottom-up, synthetic process in which we first recognise letters, then build them into words, but a highly complex process involving many kinds of knowledge in the initial perception of words.
(Cattell 1886; Miller 1956; Clay 1972; Rumelhart 1976)

It has been known for over a hundred years that perception is not a passive process in which images register on the retina as on a photographic plate. We see what we know. The brain plays an active part in detecting units in the incoming data, so that a competent reader can ‘see’ and remember a whole sentence in the same time as she takes to see a few randomly ordered words or letters. When we encounter a new piece of text, our perception of the words is guided by our expectations of what it might be about. The more we know about the topic, the less visual information we need to identify the words on the page.

However, at the same time, we do notice particular letters, and these also prompt ideas about what the words might be. So we have ‘top-down’ hypotheses - ideas about words and then letters generated by our overall expectations - and ‘bottom-up’ hypotheses - ideas about words generated from the letters we have taken note of. Where they agree, our reading can be smooth. Where they conflict, we need to look back, with extra attention, checking both the accuracy of our word identification and the sense we have made of the text so far.

Implication: Our students need to be helped to become aware of how they read, if they are to teach children to read fluently and effectively.
Children use fundamentally different processes to recognise words as they make progress in learning to read.
(Bussis et al. 1985; Frith 1985)

In the early stages of learning to read, which are likely to start long before they encoounter formal tuition in school, children recognise words as whole entities, or ‘gestalts’. They tend to pay more attention to their overall shapes, colour and appearance than to the identity and order of their component letters. They cannot work out new words for themselves, but are dependent on picture cues or being told what the words are. Children in the ‘logographic phase’ as Frith tterms it, may learn a large sight vocabulary. But to read new texts with fluency, they have to enter what she calls the ‘alphabetic phase’, in which they learn to relate the letters in a printed word systematically to the spoken sounds they represent. Most children need considerable support and persuasion to enter this phase and progress through it. It is hard work - particularly for children learning to read in Engllish. However, as they become fluent, they enter the final or ‘orthographic phase’, in which they ‘recognise’ new words almost automatically, without having to work their way through them, having by now internalised the spelling patterns of our writing system.

Implication:We should teach our students that close, sequential attention to the letters of a problem word is fine for those in the middle stages of learning to lift the words off the page, but that other approaches must precede and prepare for this, and others must follow, if children are to become fluent readers.

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