Looking After Literacy

A Whole Child Approach to Effective Literacy Interventions

Caroline Walker-Gleaves, David Waugh

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526413659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

This book is about supporting allchildren to overcome their individual challenges to literacy. It is about considering the whole child when exploring options for intervention s and accepting that many children have more than one need. It examines the many factors that can contribute to literacy difficulties and highlights the importance of understanding the wider context when considering them. The text draws on the latest research in education, psychology, neurology and sociology to illustrate how children?s literacy development can be mapped against difficulties in other areas of their lives. This is a ground-breaking and accessible book for all trainee and existing primary teachers working with young children who are experiencing difficulty with reading, written and spoken language.

1 Becoming a Reader and Writer: Looking after Literacy in the Early Years

Sally Neaum

This Chapter

This chapter will explore what we know about the early experiences that enable children to become readers and writers. Becoming a reader and writer starts in children's earliest days as they are held and spoken to and the adults around them respond sensitively and with consistency to their needs. In addition, children need a range of early experiences in their play and in their family life that enable them to come to literacy learning with a high chance of success. In this chapter these early relationships and experiences are illustrated through case studies of one child, Imogen, as she grows and learns in her family. Through these case studies and exploration of the significance of her experiences a picture is built of the relationships and everyday activities and interactions that look after young children's literacy.

Case Study

Understanding Children's Reading ‘Biographies’

Imogen is now five years old and has just begun Year 1. She loves school. She is able to read and enjoy early chapter books, although sometimes prefers to share the reading, reading alternate pages with an adult. Today she got 8/8 in her first spelling test. At the end of her reception she had made wonderful progress with phonics and was able to apply her knowledge and skills from this in her reading and writing. She was always delighted to read to her teacher who commented that it was a pleasure to listen to her reading as she was developing fluency and would share her thoughts on what she had read. Imogen had lots of ideas for her writing and thought carefully about the presentation of her work. She was able to use some punctuation and make good phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words, for example ‘orinj joos’ (orange juice), ‘rais’ (race) and ‘enjen’ (engine).

At home Imogen has a range of favourite books, rhymes and songs that she knows off by heart. She looks at her books on her own and is able to read some of the text. She sits engrossed, sucking her fingers, as books are read to her. She finishes each day with a bedtime story. Her current favourite book, Maps (Mizielinska and Mizielinski, 2013), produces discussion about animals and plants, geographical features, cultural events and places of interest around the world. Imogen is very chatty. She can initiate conversation and respond in discussion, recall things that have happened, recount incidents, and joke and play with language and words. She asks myriad questions, and answers questions fully and with interest, often including her own ideas and opinions. Imogen loves role-play and uses her emerging writing skills in her play, for example, writing down appointments and prescriptions at the opticians, taking orders in a cafe, and writing numerals and number words as a judge while watching Strictly Come Dancing on the TV.

It is clear that Imogen has moved into school with ease, and is becoming literate with success. She is able to confidently leave her parents at the start of the day, to manage her needs in school and to regulate her behaviour so that she is able to meet the school's expectations. So what has enabled this to happen? What early experiences have enabled Imogen to start school and learn with confidence? And how has her literacy been looked after in her early years so that she has moved into becoming literate with ease, enjoyment and success?

Ready to Learn

Research shows us that there are a number of important relationships and experiences that contribute to children being able to learn at school. These happen in children's families and communities long before they start school. These necessary early experiences include the development of:

• bonding and attachment;
• executive function skills;
• physical skills: balance, proprioception, crossing the midline and sensory awareness and integration.

Bonding and Attachment

School readiness has as much to do with social and emotional development as cognitive development. (Moullin et al., 2014, p.7)

John Bowlby (1953, p.13), author of the original report from which the concepts of bonding and attachment emerged, describes it thus:

An infant and young child should experience a warm intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in whom both find satisfaction and enjoyment.

Bonding and attachment are fundamental to a child's flourishing. They create a secure base from which a child can explore, learn and relate to others. The security that they bring enables children to learn how to manage their own feelings and behaviour, and develop confidence and self-reliance. Bonding and attachment develop in a child's earliest years from warm, sensitive and consistent care from adults. This includes everyday interactions such as holding the child, making eye contact, smiling, singing, laughing, talking and playing, as well as anticipating their physical needs to be warm, clean, fed and safe. This ‘tuning into’ a child and responding to their needs provides the child with a dependable source of comfort, and reassures them that they are lovable and their needs will be met (Moullin et al., 2014). This warm, responsive care is internalised by the child and forms the basis of their ability to regulate their feelings and guide their behaviour as they grow and learn.

There is strong international evidence that secure bonds and attachment have a positive impact on children's learning at school (Moullin et al., 2014). This security fosters the development of skills that enable children to move out into the world with confidence in skills such as self-reliance, autonomy and resilience. It has also been shown to have a positive impact on children's language development that is fundamental to learning. It is thought that the reason for this is the adult's interest and enjoyment in interaction with the child, and the child's receptiveness and motivation to learn from the adult. In addition a secure bond has an impact on the development of executive function and self-regulation skills (Moullin et al., 2014): the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions and juggle multiple tasks successfully (Harvard University, 2016).

Executive Function Skills

Executive functioning skills are necessary for learning, and are a strong predictor of children's readiness and ability to learn at school (Whitebread and Bingham, 2014; Blair and Diamond, 2008). School-based learning requires the ability to filter distractions, prioritise tasks, set and achieve goals, and control impulses (Harvard University, 2016). It is the development of executive function skills that enable children to achieve this. Executive function has a number of aspects:

• Working memory: this governs our ability to retain and manipulate distinct pieces of information over short periods of time.
• Mental flexibility: this helps us to sustain or shift attention in response to different demands or to apply different rules in different settings.
• Self-control: this enables us to set priorities and resist impulsive actions or responses.

Young children learn these skills in everyday interactions in the home and at pre-school (Bernier et al., 2010; Whitebread and Basilio, 2012). They develop through reliable, supportive and responsive interaction that establishes daily routines, scaffolds a child's growing independence and models appropriate social interaction. The development of these skills is closely aligned with bonding and attachment as it requires adults who are ‘tuned in’ and responsive to a child's needs to scaffold and mediate tasks and experiences, so that a child can become increasingly independent and able to self-regulate, plan, focus and persist.

Case Study

Developing Executive Function Skills

Imogen, aged 18 months, has decided that she wants to choose her own clothes and dress herself. She has a clear idea about what she wants to wear and is adamant that she is going to do it ‘on my own’. At times this works well. At other times it doesn't: Imogen chooses clothes that are not suitable for the weather or the day's activities, and she finds some aspects of dressing herself, such as pulling things over her head, buttons and zips, frustrating. Helen, Imogen's mum, supports Imogen's desire to become more independent in dressing herself in a number of ways.

• With a routine of talking about what they are going to do that day and looking out of the window at the weather to decide what sort of clothing is needed, Imogen then chooses which clothes to wear within some boundaries.
• Initially Helen chooses two or three things for Imogen to put on herself and is helped with the others. Helen guided Imogen towards the simpler items of clothing so she can practise and gain confidence in her ability to dress herself. As Imogen has become more skilled and confident she can now put more of the items on without help.
• For the tricky aspects such as buttons and zips Helen uses opportunities that arise to model how she manages these on her own clothes, and Imogen helps her. When dressing herself Imogen started by doing one button or finishing fastening a zip that Helen had started, and now does more as her confidence and fine motor skills have developed.
• When Imogen becomes frustrated by not being able to do something, they have agreed that she will have three goes on her own before they do it together.

Through these interactions Helen scaffolds Imogen's learning. She acknowledges Imogen's desire to do things independently and adapts her interaction to facilitate this. She focuses Imogen's attention on making appropriate choices, supports her in using her fine and gross motor skills in new ways, and encourages Imogen to focus on the task and persist when it is frustrating. These ‘tuned-in’ interactio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration List
• 1 Becoming a Reader and Writer: Looking after Literacy in the Early Years
• 2 Language, Literacy and the Learning Environment
• 3 Phonics and Reading
• 4 Communication and the Spoken Word
• 5 Supporting Struggling Learners: Teachers, Learners and Labels of SEN
• 6 Severe Learning Difficulties and Children's Language Development
• 7 Supporting Deaf Learners
• 8 Expanded Noun Phrases, Adjectives, Adverbs and Beyond: Helping to Create a World Full of Colours and Sounds in Children's Writing
• 9 L2 Language Acquisition in the Classroom: Perspectives, Problems and Children's Lives
• 10 Using Multicultural Narratives to Explore Loss and Grief
• 11 Digital Stories: Helping Children to Develop and Prevail with Digital Media
• 12 The Language of Mathematics and the Particular Difficulties of Children with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
• 13 PMLD and Language: The Impact of Teachers' Beliefs upon the Pedagogy of the Unspoken Word
• Concluding Thoughts
• Index