Children's Early Text Construction

Clotilde Pontecorvo, Margherita Orsolini, Barbara Burge, Lauren B. Resnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135446819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by questions of how children learn to read. Especially among Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on reading has been the only approach to studying written language education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have revealed that when young children are asked to "write, " they show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this understanding long before they can read conventional writing on their own. The rich structure of meanings involved in the word text provided the glue that brought together a group of scholars from several disciplines in an international workshop held in Rome. Reflecting the state of the field at the time, the majority of the workshop participants were scholars working in languages other than English, especially the romance languages. Their work mirrors a linguistic and psychological research tradition that Anglophone scholars knew little of until recently. This volume provides English-language readers with updated versions of the papers presented at the meeting. The topics discussed at the workshop are represented in the chapters as follows: * the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts;
* the reciprocal "permeability" between spoken and written language;
* the initial phases of text construction by children; and
* the educational conditions that facilitate written language acquisition and writing practice.

PART
II

WRITING AS A SYSTEM OF REPRESENTATION

CHAPTER
6

THREE ACCOUNTS OF LITERACY AND THE ROLE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Liliana Tolchinsky Landsmann

Institute of Educational Sciences University of Barcelona

During the last decade, increasing interest has developed about the description and explanation of children's knowledge about writing prior to being formally taught to read and write. Researchers have studied children from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as from a range of economic levels. There seems to be no doubt that children in all of these conditions are sensitive to the formal features of writing and to the different functions that written language fulfills (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979/1982; Gibson & Levin, 1975; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984). It also seems that the hypotheses children build about the writing system “are not idiosyncratic but developmentally ordered” (Ferreiro, 1986, p. 16). Moreover, empirical studies in different languages (e.g., Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Catalan) have proved that some of these hypotheses¹ reappear in different linguistic environments and in Semitic as well as Latin orthographies (Tolchinsky Landsmann, 1991a). The fact that some of the children's ideas about writing are developmentally ordered and recurrent in different environments has led some researchers to characterize the acquisition of writing as a “psychogenetic process, in the Piagetian sense” (Ferreiro, 1986, p. 16) or to speak about the “ontogenesis of written language” (Scinto, 1986, p. 30). They hint at a sort of self-propelled, natural process of acquisition.

The object of knowledge, that is, the writing system, is a cultural artifact. The process of becoming literate occurs in a web of social interactions (Scribner, 1984) and is mediated by different cultural representations of literacy (Sperber, 1984; Street, 1984). On this basis, another account emphasizes the need to distinguish between natural and cultural phases in the acquisition of written language (Luria, 1929/1978). Still other perspectives stand in sharp contrast with the previous one by postulating that reading and writing must be carefully and laboriously taught.

My aim in this chapter is to characterize some of these perspectives about reading and writing.² Specifically, I look at the way diverse perspectives have dealt with the spontaneity and universality implied in the notions of ontogenesis and with the cultural and social determination implied in the notion of literacy. In the first part of this chapter, I present three of these perspectives: the reductionist, the sociocultural, and the constructivist. In the second part, I argue that the reductionist and the sociocultural accounts have a definite view of the role of the environment in the process of becoming literate, whereas the constructivist account does not yet. I further suggest a number of questions that should be formulated concerning different kinds of contexts if we aim to spell out a constructivist theory of the role of the environment in literacy.

THREE CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE PROCESS OF BECOMING LITERATE

“More profound in its own way than the discovery of fire or the wheel”—this is how Diringer (1961, p. 19) described the impact of writing on the course of human history. The writing revolution was the first of the great communication revolutions in the history of mankind. The next came several thousand years later with the advent of printing. It is not a trivial matter to remain outside of these revolutions. On one hand, it is certain that, both at an individual and at a social level, illiteracy and poverty nearly coincide. On the other hand, however, similar social conditions do not provoke similar ease in learning to read and to write. It is not surprising then that the study of these processes has been a constant theme in psychology.

The psychological description of the way individuals become literate has been approached from different perspectives. I focus here on the reductionist, the sociocultural, and the constructivist. Each of them has provided alternative explanations of the language component that ultimately explains the process of learning to read, the mechanisms involved in this process, and the relative role of the subject and the environment in this process. In spite of these differences, many researchers within the three frameworks seem to coincide in their conception of the relationship between spoken language and writing. They share the “Greek tradition,”³ a tradition for which the spoken is the real, the natural language, whereas the written is a derivative, an imperfect representation of speech. Although these researchers recognize the existence of other writing systems, they judge them under the “tyranny of the alphabet” (Harris, 1986, p. 30). Accordingly, they interpret the history of writing (and the ontogenesis) as teleologically oriented to attain the best form, alphabetic writing. This conception of writing is so widespread and rooted in modern linguistics that it is not surprising that it stands as the basis of almost every psychological explanation of the ways individuals become literate. Some developmentalists (Scinto, 1986; Tolchinsky Lands mann & Teberosky, 1992) have only recently departed from this conception. Based on some of the ideas of Prague functionalists (e.g., Vachek, 1966, 1973); we look at the spoken and the written forms as two equipollent systems of language. Because they are equipollent, although functionally distinct, they affect each other.

The Reductionist Account

I include under the rubric of reductionist several diverse lines of thought that share the conviction that the ability to read and the ability to write can be decomposed into a number of simpler components. These all view the simplest component, the ability to manipulate phonemic segments, as ultimately responsible for learning to read. These lines of thought differ, however, in whether they think this ability is very specific or the result of a general learning mechanism. This difference has led to contrasting positions regarding the role of the environment in the learning process.

A clear illustration of a reductionist account is the simple view proposed by Gough (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986). In the simple view, reading ability is composed of two factors: decoding and comprehension. Decoding is the process that leads to word recognition: “Learning to break the code of written text is partly dependent on knowing that words are sequences of meaningless sounds (i.e., phonemes) which can be independently manipulated.… Comprehension is the process by which the meanings of words are integrated into sentences and text structures” (Juel, 1988, pp. 2–3).

The phonological component is viewed as the component ultimately responsible for learning how to read. Similarly, the ability to write can be decomposed into two basic components: spelling and ideation. Spelling, which also requires a “certain degree of phonemic awareness” (Juel, 1988, p. 4), is viewed as the inverse of decoding: It enables composition of words. Ideation is “the ability to generate and organize ideas into sentence and text structures” (p. 6). Both the basic abilities and the learning process are defined by reducing complex composites to simpler components: Knowledge of texts is explained in terms of knowledge of words, knowledge of words in terms of knowledge of sounds. Not only the normal learning process but also difficulties in the learning process or in performance are explained by the same reductionist principle.

Poor lower order processes may impede the development of higher order processes. Until the lower order process of spelling is somewhat automatic… the attention of the writer may be diverted from higher order composing processes.… The development of automatic lower level processing of words may also be required for attention to be fully focused on comprehension when reading. (Juel, 1988, p. 6)

As long as lower level processes are not automatized, higher level processes cannot be attended to. Differences between written and spoken language are minimized because a single underlying process is seen as producing both reading and listening comprehension. The view of a single general mechanism underlying every learning process and across-the-board difficulties has exerted a strong influence on remediation and teaching practices up to now.

The reductionist outlook is a clear outcome of the “Morgan canon” by which, whenever possible, higher mental processes have to be interpreted “as an outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale” (Lloyd Morgan, 1894). British empiricism provided the basis for this reduction-ism, because on this account universal ideas result from a comparison of complex ideas, whereas complex ideas are an outcome of simple ideas and simple ideas are produced by the impression of the qualities of the objects. Higher forms of knowledge can be reduced to a series of associative habits that explain the laws of attraction of the ideas that are produced by exposure to the object. The same serie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I Written and Oral Forms in Children's Language
• II Writing as a System of Representation
• III Learning Different Uses of Written Language
• IV Written Language in Educational Contexts
• Author Index
• Subject Index