Early literacy learning
The 'basics' of literacy
learning involve an awareness of what literacy is good for, and a familiarity
with the language of books, as well as knowledge of the alphabet and the
sound/symbol relations of the orthographic code.
(Clay, 1972; Wells, 1981; Bussis et al., 1985; Solsken, 1993; Pressley, 1998;
Raban and Coates, 2004)
Literacy learning doesn't start with formal education. To enlist children.s intentional learning
energies, to enable them to invest the necessary purposeful effort in the task
that literacy learning requires, children need to become aware of what literacy
can be used for - how it can enrich and extend their power as communicators and
their understanding and enjoyment of the world.
Hearing texts read aloud familiarises them with the language of the
written word, which differs from spoken language in its greater formality,
tighter and more patterned structures and wider range of vocabulary. While knowledge of the alphabet and of the
sound/symbol relations of the English writing system are essential to progress
in learning to read and write, without an awareness of what written texts can
do and a familiarity with written language, children can only approach the task
in a bitty mechanical way. Raban and Coates have shown that comparisons between
groups of children given different opportunities to learn these lessons can be
particularly instructive.
Implication
'Underground' learning about the purposes and possibilities of literacy is
hugely powerful and should be supported and extended in school.
Much powerful literacy
learning takes place at home, both before and after children start school. This learning can be usefully inform teaching
and learning in school.
(Hewison and Tizard, 1980; Hannon, 1995; Wade and Moore, 1998;
Barrs et al., 1989; Wasik et al., 2001; McDonnell et al., 2003)
In recognition of what we know of the power of children's pre-school literacy
experiences, increasing numbers of young children and their families are
involved in projects such as Books for Babies, Bookstart and Family
Literacy. Research projects by Hannon
and by Wade have shown the value of interventions that encourage and support
parents in taking part in enjoyable and meaning-focused literacy activities
with their young children. Children who
have participated in such projects are more successful than those who have not,
when it comes to learning to read in school.
Some 30 years ago, research by Tizard and colleagues showed the value of
enlisting parents' support in helping their children learn to read, by giving
the children books to take home each night, with accompanying notebooks for
parents and children write their comments in.
In their pioneering study, they demonstrated that even parents who were
not proficient readers themselves could help their children, by attending to
the sense of what the children were reading.
Since then a plethora of studies has supported these findings and the
practice has become almost universal.
In The Primary Language Record,
(Barrs et al., 1989) Barrs et al. created an instrument for setting up a
two-way communication with children's parents.
Reasoning that parents' close knowledge of their children is an
unparalleled resource, they formalised the sharing of this information through
parent-teacher conferences, resulting in a written record, agreed and signed by
both parties, which becomes part of the overall record for the child.
Implication
Parents
are partners in their children's education, with important knowledge of their
children as learners, through engaging them in a range of literacy practices
outside school. They can also profit
from teachers and student teachers sharing their professional knowledge of
literacy teaching and learning, in ways that are respectful and engaging.
Different communities
have different uses for literacy and different sets of social practices
involving literacy.
(Heath, 1983; Taylor, 1997; Gee, 2000; González, Moll, and Amanti, 2005)
As Gee states:
Literacy involves ways
of participating in culturally, historically and institutionally situated
social practices
(Gee, 2000, p. 113)
Heath's classic study of three communities in a southern part of the United States
shows that the economic and cultural differences between groups are reflected
in differences concerning literacy. While for the white, middle class
'Maintown' community she studied, literacy was a personal, individual matter,
this was not the case for those in 'Trackton', the poor rural black community. There, making meaning from the written word
was a social, collaborative enterprise, whether through using written text as a
base for acts of extemporised prayer and song in church, or working together to
puzzle out letters from official bodies.
Powerful though this literacy was in the lives of their families,
children from the Trackton community found, when they started school, that
their out-of-school experiences were not given the same status as those of the
Maintown children.
Taylor has
shown that even in the poorest and most marginalised inner city communities,
literacy plays a part in enabling families to make sense of the world and to
interact with it.
The term funds of knowledge refers to
those historically developed and accumulated skills, abilities, ideas,
practices or bodies of knowledge that are essential to a household's
functioning and well-being. González,
Moll and Amanti developed the concept and put it to use in various
investigations into the lives of children from low socio-economic homes, most
in Tucson, Arizona.
These investigations have brought teachers and university-based
researchers in education and anthropology together to enter minority households
and discover knowledge and other resources. The results have led them to
conclude that schools marginalise much relevant knowledge that children bring
from home, and to propose teaching approaches that instead draw on these
strengths.
Implication
It is enormously important to recognise and value the various experiences of
literacy that children bring to school and that shape parents' expectations of
what their children will learn in school.
Very many children first
experience literacy through digital technology and multimedia texts, but find
little recognition of this experience in school.
(Talley et al., 1997; Fisch et al., 2002; de Jong and Bus, 2004;
Carrington, 2005; Marsh, 2005;
Hassett, 2006; Bearne, 2007; Levy, 2009; Merchant, 2005)
Carrington and Marsh and many others have shown clearly that many children now
enter their early years of education as competent and frequent readers of
multimodal texts. In a close study of 12
young children, Levy has shown that the ways in which they interacted with
screen texts enabled them to develop strategies to make sense of print among a
variety of other forms of symbolic representation and argues that computers in
particular encourage young children to develop understandings about texts and
also the skills needed to read them. It seemed to the researcher that the
children were using print,
holistically as one of
many symbolic modes on the path to meaning and that it did not carry a specific
requirement to be decoded.
(Levy, 2009, p. 87)
However, this study also shows that many of the children lost
confidence in their ability to use print as they encountered literacy education
in school.
Hassett asserts that the nature of young children.s experience of literacy is
now so changed as to make it necessary for alphabetic print literacy to be
redefined within the school discourse on reading. Merchant argues persuasively for a wider
recognition of the role of technology in literacy learning, suggesting that
teachers need time for experimentation and professional development to allow
them to respond appropriately to new digital literacies in the classroom.
Underlying this empirical work is a changing conception of what constitutes a text. Carrington writes of the shifting
text landscape, using the term 'text' to denote the product of many different
media, woven together, combining to form a unified representation, which may be
transmitted through a book, magazine, computer screen, video, film or radio.
Multimedia texts are now pervasive and have transformed the nature of
literacy. Indeed, Bearne argues that the
availability and accessibility of digital technology have made literacy take a
spatial turn. So, to develop an
understanding of literacy learning, we now need to look beyond linguistics to
semiotics. In concrete terms, this means
including such matters as gesture, movement, image, music, sound and colour
alongside language. Like language, these
forms of representation have their own grammars, their own sets of patterns
that make them comprehensible to particular communities. However, concepts of design and
intentionality are central to multimodality, allowing space for individual
agency within the conventional patterns of representation. Children's experience of multimodal texts,
through screen, paper or live performance should thus be seen to contribute to
their potential for composing and understanding other texts.
As to e-books, often presented as an aid to conventional literacy-learning,
researchers seem generally agreed that although they should not be seen as a
substitute for conventional storybooks, they and other on-screen texts can
improve children's opportunities for meaningful reading. Such texts can increase children's interest
through animated features, and consequently increase their reading engagement,
vocabulary and comprehension. They also
introduce children to print as one aspect of a multimodal reading experience,
enabling rich multi-layered meaning-making.
Implication
We need to recognise the increasing dominance of multimedia texts in the wider
world, be hospitable to such texts in the classroom and develop pedagogies that
involve children in producing and construing such texts, and that allow them to
draw on the digital funds of knowledge
they have developed outside school.
e-books and other on-screen texts have an important part to play in the
classroom, in validating children's out-of-school experiences and giving them
experiences of multimodal meaning-making.
But this experience should not be at the expense of sharing conventional
storybooks with children on a whole class, small group or one-to-one basis.
Popular culture now
frames very many children's experiences of literacy out of school.
(Dyson, 2001; Millard, 2003; Marsh et al., 2005; Marsh, 2005, Wohlwend, 2009)
The term popular culture is now used
almost universally to refer to the products of multi-national media
conglomerates, rather than the works of art and other artefacts produced by
working people outside formal institutions of education. But there is no doubt that the marketed
products of these media conglomerates have a hugely important place in the
lives of young children.
In virtually all homes in the developed world, films, television programmes,
toys and computer games provide a source of material that informs children's
reading, writing and oral activities outside of school. Dyson has shown how, when they are allowed to
do so, young children can incorporate elements from this 'popular culture' into
their school compositions. Marsh and
others argue strongly that schools should recognise this reality of children's
lives and welcome the Teletubbies, Batman and other iconic figures into the
classroom. Indeed Wohlwend writes:
'by banning Barbies and Bratz from our classrooms, we take ourselves out of
the conversation, ceding our influence to corporations and missing
opportunities for critique and engaged learning'
(Wohlwend, 2009, p.80)
This need not mean relinquishing literature that has not been absorbed into
'popular culture'. Elaine Millard argues
persuasively for a transformative literacy of fusion, in which teachers support
children in bringing the different cultures together. She cites, as an example, an upper primary
classroom in which, in their explorations of quest narratives, the children
drew on their experiences of such films as the various Star Wars epics, the Harry
Potter and The Lord of the Rings films, bringing these together with a class
reading of Tolkien's The Hobbit. As well as analysing the various quest
representations, the children created their own, exploring aspects of their own
identities in spaces where they could choose to persuade or entertain on their
own terms.
Implication
If the
classroom is to build on children's out-of-school experience, it should be
hospitable to popular culture, while also introducing them to wider horizons,
through engaging them in experiences with folk tales, picturebooks and other
literature. [See also entry in section
(e) on powerful reading lessons learned through powerful texts.]
Children who are read to
at home in the pre-school years learn to read more effectively than those who
are not.
(Durkin, 1966; Clark, 1976; Wells, 1981; Bus, 2002; McWilliam et al., 2003)
Learning to read is an effortful process, made easier and more meaningful if
the learner has some familiarity with written language, and some understanding
of its uses. (See Clay (1972) and
Goodman (1972) referred to above.)
Studies by Durkin in the US some forty years ago, and Clark in the UK a
decade later, of children who could read on school entry, indicate the
experience of being read to in the early years to be a key factor contributing
to this early success. As children are
read to, often through repeated readings of the same stories and poems, they
gain pleasure from the act of collaborating in the construction of the
narrative, and at the same time, familiarity with the patterns of written
language.
Of course, only a small proportion of children can read on school entry. None could in Wells' study of young children
in Bristol. But recordings of these children's verbal
interactions at home from as young as 15 months give a more reliable picture of
their pre-school experience of literacy than we have from the studies of Durkin
and Clark. Wells' work shows clearly
that engagement with substantial and coherent pieces of text, in the form of
narrative or poetry, is more closely correlated with children.s subsequent
success in learning to read at the age of seven than are other literacy
activities, such as writing shopping lists or browsing through mail order
catalogues. This connection is now so well
established that, rather than replicating earlier work, more recent studies
examine particular contexts, types of interaction and genres of texts shared.
Implication
Engagement
with connected text, particularly narrative, plays a key role in literacy
learning so should be a central part of the school (and pre-school) experience
of all young children.
All young
children starting school have ideas about literacy - how it works and what its
uses are.
(Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1979; Solsken, 1993; Marsh, 2005; Lancaster 2007)
Not just those who are read to, but all young children who see those around
them engage with the written word develop ideas about what it is good for. Ferreiro and Teberosky's study of pre-school
children in a poor quarter of Mexico
City shows us the minds of these four and five year
olds actively engaged in the process of understanding the social and practical
functions of literacy, and also working out the relationships between the
spoken word and its written equivalent.
Written language pervades the life of nearly every family on the
globe. Ferreiro and Teberosky show us
that young children neither ignore it nor take it for granted, but actively try
to puzzle out what it does and how it works.
In a close study of twelve children under three years old in England, Lancaster
shows that:
children under three years old have the
capacity to use graphic marks in highly intentional and reasoned ways deploying
some resources from conventional symbolic systems.
(Lancaster, 2007, p. 149)
As to a wider view of the purposes of literacy, in her observational study of
children just starting formal schooling in a middle class American suburb,
Solsken shows us how their engagement with school literacy takes subtly
different forms according to their pre-school and out-of-school
experience. For some boys, literacy is
seen as primarily a female concern, one that plays no major part in the social
identity they are constructing for themselves.
For others, literacy is seen as an essential element in the work
patterns of other males in the family.
Solsken shows us that children's views of school literacy are rooted in
and framed by their construction of social relations and identity within their
families.
More recently, a number of studies of children engaging with on-screen print at
home have shown their awareness of what screen literacy can be used for, as
well as how they can engage with it.
Marsh, in particular, has richly documented the ways in which older
family members scaffold young children's experience of family social practices
involving digital technology, enabling them to learn the meaning of the
practices as well as the processes involved.
Implication
Experiences
of literacy and ideas about it shape young children.s literacy learning. These experiences and understandings must be
respected, and children helped to extend them productively in their school
experiences.
Reflection and
metacognition play a key role in children's literacy learning.
(Clay, 1972)
Learning to lift the words off the page - and to set them down - is a complex
process requiring, in addition to a knowledge of written language and an
awareness of its purposes, the ability to articulate the kinds of knowing
involved and to reflect on what one is learning.
Implication
As well
as visible signs of their growing control over the processes of reading and
writing, we need to be open to children's thoughts and developing conceptions
about literacy.
 
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