Understanding Literacy Development

A Global View

Anne McKeough, Linda M. Phillips, Vianne Timmons, Judy Lee Lupart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135608941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The acquisition and maintenance of literacy is of pressing interest and concern to educators and educational policy makers worldwide. What are the common themes, the common questions, and the unique circumstances and initiatives that spring from this interest and concern? To address these questions, Understanding Literacy Development: A Global View brings together leading experts from around the world to explore ways to best provide teaching and learning opportunities, tailored to specific educational needs, to help all children become better readers.The premise is that current generic "one-size-fits-all" approaches are inappropriate for many children and can lead to underachievement and failure. The contributors write from a stance that reflects not only their own particular expertise and experience, but also sheds light on literacy development across cultures, countries, and circumstances. Taken together, chapters in this volume target a wide and comprehensive set of literacy issues, and offer an extensive exploration of the complexities of literacy development, including issues related to early literacy, school instruction, family literacy, adolescent and adult literacy, and teacher development.At a time when education is burdened by increasing economic pressure to do more with less, it is imperative that educators and decision makers at all levels have access to current, broad-ranging, and in-depth information and evidence to inform their choices. This volume, compiling critical research on a wide spectrum of literacy concerns, is an invaluable tool for scholars, teacher educators, professionals and graduate students in the fields of literacy education, early childhood education, educational psychology, educational policy, and related areas.

1
Developing Literacy:
Themes and Issues

Anne McKeough
Marya Jarvey

University of Calgary

Until fairly recently, most volumes on literacy development focused primarily on techniques and strategies aimed at fostering students’ skills in academic contexts, and although this focus remains an extremely important one, more current work has evidenced a broadening in what is seen as central to literacy development (Kamil, Mosenthal, Pearson, & Barr, 2000). The range of questions now being addressed includes the following: What literacy instruction practices have strong research evidence to support them (Slavin, 2002)? What role do teacher knowledge and beliefs play in the type of literacy instruction offered (Olson, 2002; Olson & Torrance, 2001), and how can teacher development best be supported (DuFour & Eaker, 1998)? What is the role of culture in literacy development (Bruner, 1990)? How do families interface with schools’ efforts to develop early literacy (Dunst, 2002), and how might elements of popular culture influence literacy development (Storey, 1996)? What do we know about the nature of language processes, in particular, about written languages across cultures that might inform teachers of literacy (Ingram Willis, Garcia, Barrera, & Harris, (2003)? Finally, what are the particular challenges faced by diverse groups of learners and their teachers (Allington, 2002; Kamil, Manning, & Walberg, 2002; Taylor & Pearson, 2002)?

In this book, we bring together the seminal work of scholars who have contributed to and indeed shaped this new view of literacy development. Taken together, their insights into literacy offer a global view of this centrally important domain, one that is thorough and comprehensive. As such, the volume offers a combined focus on content knowledge: what the field has come to know about understanding literacy development (e.g., phonemic awareness and phonics, cross-linguistic requirements, and comprehension) and on participants in the literacy enterprise (i.e., children, parents, teachers, and the culture at large). To assemble such a wide-ranging picture, it was necessary to include scholars who live and work outside of North America to show how literacy issues have been approached in other national and cultural contexts, the commonalities and unique features of efforts being made to understand and support literacy development around the world, and the reforms that are called for. Thus, the title of this volume, Understanding Literacy Development: A Global View, is meant to convey two things: (a) that the volume provides a broad and encompassing look at current issues and questions under study in the field of literacy development and (b) that the list of contributors is international, providing views of literacy theory, research, and practice from around the world.

Such an array of issues and perspectives on literacy development requires a framework to organize the work. Although the topic of literacy development could be parsed in a number of ways, in this book we have chosen to explore three main thrusts: In Part I, “Improving School-Based Literacy Development,” we present research-based practices that promote literacy in early life, from preschool to the early school years. In the second part, “Literacy Development Beyond the SchoolWalls,” broader cultural contexts for literacy development—non-school-based literacy environments that influence preschool and school-aged children, struggling adolescent readers, and adult learners—are addressed. In the final part of the book, “Changing Literacy Practices,” the focus turns to an often-ignored component of supporting literacy: teacher professional development. In each of these sections, the volume’s contributors shed light on literacy development across ages, backgrounds, and societal beliefs and circumstances.

IMPROVING SCHOOL-BASED LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

How do we make sense of the competing ideas and the myriad instructional programs and teaching resources? How do we sift out the best of what we know about supporting literacy development in the early years and at school? The authors of the chapters in Part I approach these questions from a research base. Each calls for reforms in the way we think about and approach literacy development, either at the level of understanding students’ learning or at the level of understanding teachers’ effective practice.

Ingvar Lundberg begins this first section with a call for a balanced approach to literacy development, arguing for attention to what he refers to as the two tracks to literacy—decoding and comprehension—and highlighting challenges to literacy development, viewed from the perspective of these two tracks. Decoding difficulties, he proposes, which can originate in infancy from deleterious social, physical, and environmental factors (e.g., second-hand smoke and poor medical treatment), influence infants’ hearing and hence their perception of the patterns in speech sounds. The precise quality of phonological representations is subsequently linked to phonological awareness. Robust European and North American research findings point to a link between limited phonological awareness and risk for reading failure. Improving chances for successful literacy development, then, means addressing the factors contributing to infant health. Moreover, because the quantity and quality of language interactions in children’s home environments influence vocabulary acquisition and, in turn, reading comprehension, Lundberg also calls for increased awareness of the impact of children’s social environment. He cites Swedish research to demonstrate that helping children to attend explicitly to these aspects of language at the preschool age reduces later literacy development challenges. Thus, further reform advocated by Lundberg involves developing early child care training programs and broadening our notion of where and by whom such instruction should be offered. Parent education programs, community literacy resource centers, home visits by literacy specialists, and cooperative parent support networks are his alternatives to more traditional preschool environments.

The next three chapters address literacy development as the child enters school. Tom Nicholson and Richard C. Anderson and Wenling Li focus primarily on decoding, and Michael Pressley and Katie Hilden focus on comprehension.

Nicholson endorses the centrality of phonemic awareness and phonics to literacy development, targeting the problem of not using the best of what research has uncovered and calling for reform in what literacy students learn and how they are taught. He builds a strong case for the need to build phonological awareness and phonetic components into reading programs to balance the current focus on text comprehension and interpretation. Drawing on research from New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, Nicholson documents how and why neglecting to offer explicit instruction in phonological coding skills results in a failure to meet the literacy development needs of a significant number of children. He further calls for changes in how and where reading programs are delivered, sympathizing with resource-strapped families who may not be able to provide children with the skilled adult attention or material supports necessary to help their children at home and advocating that society has a responsibility to help these children. Besides providing appropriate in-school programming to assist struggling students, he advocates using resources beyond the school, services such as family literacy centers, after-school programs, and summer schools.

In chapter 4, Pressley and Hilden echo Nicholson’s call to use the best of what we know about understanding and supporting literacy development, but here the emphasis is largely on reading comprehension strategy instruction. Their view is that a balanced literacy instruction program needs to reflect research that has shown the importance of precisely teaching specific reading strategies, along with building fluency through decoding instruction and building word knowledge through vocabulary work. They cite 30 years of research that has shown that explicitly teaching cognitive comprehension strategies (e.g., predicting, questioning, seeking clarifications, summarizing, attending to elements of story structure, constructing mental images, and connecting to prior knowledge) leads to improved reading comprehension. And again like Nicholson, these authors go on to call for reform in society’s role in supporting literacy development. Whereas schools can and must use what has been shown by research to be effective instruction, other social institutions (e.g., libraries, booksellers, and children’s television program planners, as well as local and national governments) need to play an active role in supporting students’ literacy development by providing them with improved access to world knowledge, another proven factor in the literacy equation.

In chapter 5, Richard Anderson and Wenling Li use a cross-linguistic lens to highlight what they consider critical elements in the reading process—elements that demand instructional attention. Their discussion of universals in reading Chinese and English, languages with very different literacy demands, underscores the centrality of metalinguistic awareness to literacy development. They first focus on the role of phonological awareness in decoding written text and argue that, although aspects of phonology are weighted differently in each language (e.g., in English, phonemelevel awareness is critical in correlating speech to text, whereas in Chinese, syllable awareness is far more important, as Chinese characters are pronounced with a single syllable), it plays a critical role in both languages. Anderson and Li identify a second metalinguistic component, morphological awareness (i.e., the ability to identify, consider, and manipulate word parts that hold meaning) that is similarly central to literacy development. Morphology has received less attention in literacy circles than has phonology, and the research presented in chapter 5 is recent and seminal. The authors demonstrate that although Chinese morphology is more transparent than its English counterpart (i.e., in Chinese, each syllable represents one morpheme and corresponds to one character, whereas in English the relations are more complex), research findings point to a strong relationship between morphological awareness and reading proficiency in both languages. Their convincing argument for the universality of these two metalinguistic factors, and hence instructional focus on them, provides a clear direction for understanding and supporting literacy development.

In Part I of this book, then, the authors offer concrete suggestions for reform. Across three continents, calls are issued to attend to those aspects of literacy development that research has shown to be important during the early and middle years of childhood and to offer appropriate learning supports in school and community contexts. In Part II, this second context, the broader community/cultural context, becomes the focus as authors explore its influence on literacy development and suggest reforms that extend beyond the school walls.

LITERACY DEVELOPMENT BEYOND SCHOOL WALLS

In chapter 6, Donna E. Alvermann extends the analysis of the cultural impact on literacy development. She examines traditional school culture, with its promotion of certain normative ways of reading texts, arguing that privileging school literacy over other forms of literacy is likely not in the best interests of struggling readers. She calls for reform in the degree of emphasis placed on these normative ways of reading because their usefulness is waning as new media and interactive communication technologies emerge. To replace these outmoded approaches, Alvermann advocates teaching for critical awareness using media and technology. Arguing that developing adolescents’ critical awareness of how all types of texts (e.g., print, visual, oral, or Internet mediated) positions them as readers and viewers within their cultural, social, and historical contexts, she calls on all who are engaged in the literacy enterprise to reexamine their beliefs and practices, challenging us to analyze our assumptions about what it means to be literate in the 21st century and what literacy development should entail.

Heather Sample Gosse and Linda M. Phillips also examine links between cultural contexts and literacy development, in chapter 7. They discuss the influence of home environments on infant development and see the family as a social system that is foundational to literacy development. How society values (or undervalues) the home environment, the way in which families are supported through social policies, and the attention given to the home by the culture at large all have implications for the quality of literacy development that goes on there. A research-based rationale for family as foundational convincingly positions Sample Gosse and Phillips to argue for the necessity of facing current challenges to literacy development that arise from diverse demographics. Paramount among these challenges is effectively supporting families to socialize their children into literacy, given the difficulties faced by families of visible minorities, families of lower socioeconomic status, and families whose mother tongue is not English. Such support involves knowing the underlying beliefs, attitudes, values, and expectations that families hold about literacy, methods used to assess them, and diverse ways of enhancing literacy development. Sample Gosse and Phillips maintain, however, that if teaching emergent literacy skills in the home and the community is divorced from what is taught in formal educational settings, children may experience a setback or discontinuity in their literacy development. In fact, it is often the explicit wish of families that the two curricula interface. This latter point takes up and expands on the call made in Part I for increased societal involvement in the literacy development of children.

In chapter 8, Mary Hamilton, like Sample Gosse and Phillips, argues that understanding literacy learners’ social contexts is a prerequisite to providing them with appropriate literacy support. Her look outside the school walls extends to adult learners who use literacy for a wide range of self-determined purposes (e.g., writing minutes of meetings, compiling family histories, and completing welfare benefit entitlement forms). Within this broader view that she advocates, the focus shifts from a deficit model of literacy development to one that encompasses the diverse ways people engage in literacy activities and how these are differentially valued by society. Citing European and North American research, Hamilton argues for a major paradigm shift—from a purely psychological model of literacy to one that includes sociological aspects as well. Such a shift requires that our emphasis moves from cognitive skill sets and instructional methods to the purposes to which literacy is aimed and the historical and cultural settings of literacy learners. Thus, knowing is increasingly understood not so much as an individual cognitive matter but as a social, relational process. chapter 8 ends with a call to question existing perceptions of literacy, reflect on practices, and see literacy and learning within the larger context of a changing society.

Contributors to this middle section of the volume amplify the calls for societal involvement issued in Part I. They elaborate on the role of social contexts in literacy development across the life span and highlight the many purposes for which literacy is needed and aimed. Taken together, they expand our view of literacy development toward a broader, global perspective.

CHANGING LITERACY PRACTICES

Having explored literacy learners’ development (Part I) and the social contexts of literacy development (Part II), in this final section attention is turned to an often-overlooked component: teacher development. Although the three contributors to Part III span diverse cultural contexts, they are uniform in their call for reforms in teacher development practices and revisit the cost of failing to attend to factors shown through research to be critical to literacy development. Seok Moi Ng examines teacher professional development from a systemic perspective, Ileana Seda-Santana describes problems associated with changing entrenched conceptions of literacy; and Michael W. Kibby and Debra Dechert discuss particular requirements of individual teacher change. Together, these three chapters offer a road map to effective teaching.

Ng’s chapter 9 centers on answering the following question: How can we put what we know of literacy development into practice? Her extensive review of literacy research positions her to extend her work meaningfully into the domain of practice. Ng asserts that teacher development is critical to educational change and that such work must consider the interplay among teacher beliefs, instructional practice, and students’ literacy achievement. She cites research from North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore to support her call for adequate and appropriate teacher development programs and infrastructure that supports innovative practice. Beyond this, Ng maintains that underlying beliefs and attitudes of students, parents, and others in the community can impede or support change and that their involvement is critical in building support for educational change.

In chapter 10, Seda-Santana affirms the importance of attitudes and beliefs in teaching, looking at the specific conceptions of literacy students and teachers hold. Her position is that the approaches students and teachers ta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1: Developing Literacy: Themes and Issues
• I: Improving School-Based Literacy Development
• II: Literacy Development Beyond the School Walls
• III: Changing Literacy Practices