Beyond Early Literacy

A Balanced Approach to Developing the Whole Child

Janet B. Taylor, Nancy Amanda Branscombe, Jan Gunnels Burcham, Lilli Land

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136981364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For early childhood classrooms – where curriculum is increasingly shaped by standards and teachers are pressed for time – Beyond Early Literacy offers a literacy method that goes beyond simply developing language arts skills. Known as Shared Journal, this process promotes young children's learning across content areas – including their communication and language abilities, writing skills, sense of community, grasp of diverse social and cultural worlds, and understanding of history, counting, numeracy, and time. Pairing interactive talk with individual writing in the classroom community, this rich method develops the whole child.

Special features include:

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• sample lesson plans, rubrics, and templates throughout the book

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• children's artifacts, including examples of oral and written work

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• teacher accounts examining the use of Shared Journal in the classroom, including strategies and suggestions

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• a Companion Website with templates, additional resources, and video clips of in-classroom teaching and examples of exciting ways to use new technologies.

This two-part book is first framed by current theory and research about children's cognitive, language, and literacy development, and an extensive body of research and case studies on the efficacy of the method. The second part features strategies from on-the-ground teachers who have used the process with their students and explores how Shared Journal can be used with new technologies, can meet standards, and can be appropriate for diverse populations of children. This is a fantastic resource for use in early childhood education courses in emergent literacy, language arts, and curriculum.

part one
The Child as Learner

Part One examines all aspects of children’s learning, particularly through Shared Journal. It presents the theoretical underpinnings of how children construct relationships, understand their cultures, and make sense of the physical world through their daily interactions with others in their immediate environments. This theoretical understanding is instrumental in the effectiveness of Shared Journal.

Chapter 1, “The Child as Learner,” utilizes a constructivist framework to summarize the child’s early cognitive and language learning. It includes sections on difficulties with language learning, English language learners, and the adult’s role in early learning.

Chapter 2, “The Process of Shared Journal,” details the procedures used to prepare for and implement Shared Journal. It explains each step and offers examples and suggestions for implementation.

Chapter 3, “Learning in the Communicative Arts,” and Chapter 6, “Learning in the Content Areas,” examine Shared Journal within the context of the school curriculum. Chapter 3 is devoted to explaining how Shared Journal addresses the Communicative Arts, which include the language arts of speaking, listening, reading, and writing and the visual arts of viewing, designing, creating, and producing. It also documents all of the communicative abilities children develop through participating in Shared Journal on a daily basis. Chapter 6 identifies and documents the content, strategies, and processes children learn in the social studies, mathematics, science, and technology as they participate in Shared Journal. It recounts how children come to better understand themselves, their classmates, and their communities by engaging in the daily use of Shared Journal. In addition, it explains how children and teachers can use Shared Journal stories to embark on studies in science, mathematics, and the social studies.

Chapter 4, “The Reading/Writing Connection,” explicates how the intimately connected processes of reading and writing are learned through the daily process of Shared Journal. It documents how participation in Shared Journal fosters growth in the development of phonemic awareness, phonics, oral language/vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Furthermore, it explains how Shared Journal fosters the natural interaction and integration of reading and writing for authentic purposes.

Chapter 5, “Developing the Narrative Voice,” defines narrative voice as well as describes the role of the narrative voice in helping the child create credible stories that others value and enjoy. It also documents how children experiment with and use literacy constructions and devices to create their stories. Finally, it offers evidence of how personal narratives provide the foundation for children’s advancement from oracy to literacy.

one
The Child as Learner

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to document what and how young children learn during the first few years of their lives. It is designed to help teachers think about this early learning and about the scientific explanations of how and why this learning takes place. This introductory chapter provides the theoretical and scientific framework for understanding the success of the content found in this book. This framework is based on the work of Jean Piaget (1983).

Young children learn to think though their own actions on objects and their interactions with others. This kind of learning is natural and comfortable for children. They develop theories about the world in which they live as they act on objects and discover what happens through those interactions. This motivates them to continue to experiment with the objects. These interactions foster children’s continuing abilities to think about and reflect on the world in which they live without any kind of formal instruction.

The ability to reason develops through four major stages that include the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational (see Table 1.1). This development proceeds through these stages in order, but the rate of development varies according to the individual. This chapter will focus on the earlier stages, since they are the foundation of thought.

Within each stage, children construct mental relationships that form the structure of their thought (Piaget, 1969). Recent brain research provides confirming information about the biological structures that Piaget identified earlier (Rushton, 2001). Scans show that the brain is made up of neurons connected at the synapses to form “neural pathways.” These neural pathways are consistent with what Piaget described as the construction of mental relationships that form the foundation of learning. Wesson (2003) explains that, when new learning occurs, a corresponding neurophysiologic connection is created in the brain.

Children learn to use language to communicate what they have come to know about their worlds. For example, they learn most of their native language without anyone specifically teaching it to them. From the moment they utter their first cries, children begin learning language by using the sounds they can make to imitate the voices around them. The specific language they begin to learn and the rate at which they learn it depend on the home and community language into which they are born. Scientific theories about how children learn language differ. Some linguists (Chomsky, 1975; Pinker, 1994) hold that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and

TABLE 1.1 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

constrain language learning, while others (MacWhinney, 1999; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969) hold that language learning results from general cognitive abilities and the social interaction between young language learners and their surrounding communities. While the topic of whether language learning is innate or the result of general cognitive abilities remains debatable, the processes by which children acquire language are well-researched and have been expanded to include research on early brain development. Interestingly, this recent research into the developing brain also supports the Piagetian theory about language development. For example, researchers have documented that the developing brain needs interaction with other people and objects (Perry & Pollard, 1997). Piaget identified this as social interaction, a process that is strongly supported in this text.

Language learning includes four different kinds of development. These are phonological development (the ability to hear, discriminate, and produce the phonemes or sounds of the language), semantic development (the ability to use words to make meaning), syntactic development (the ability to use word-combining rules), and pragmatic development (the ability to understand the conventional ways language is used). Most of this development takes place during the first five years of a child’s life.

Early Cognition and Language Learning

Birth to Six Months

Early language learning refers to the learning that occurs during the first two years of life. The cognitive correlate of the early language-learning period is the sensorimotor period of intellectual development (Piaget, 1970). During this period, infants think, not in the way we know the term, but rather by using all of their senses and some motoric activity to come to know about the world into which they were born. During this time the infants learn to lift their heads, turn over, and sit up with support. They begin to differentiate objects to be sucked or grasped. For example, they may reject the pacifier if they want milk.

Infants begin to learn language as they listen and start to make and manipulate the sounds in their environment. They experiment with all of the speech sounds that are possible for humans to make. Early in their development, they are able to discriminate between speech and environmental sounds, and they play with the different rhythmic and intonation patterns of the human voice. They learn to use different cries depending on what they want, and adults quickly respond to those they recognize.

As infants listen to adults in their immediate environments, they begin to imitate the speech sounds they hear. By six to seven weeks of age, they are able to produce long drawn out vowel sounds through their cooing. They respond to a distinctive kind of talk that many adults adopt when they talk to infants. This talk, sometimes referred to as motherese, uses a soft loving tone and a slower more exaggerated form of speech. As infants listen to this talk, they begin to engage in turn-taking with the adult speaker by cooing and gurgling. They are able to communicate their feelings through laughing, fussing, and crying, and they respond to being talked to by making noises and moving both arms and legs.

Six to Eight Months

Cognitively, infants at this age build on earlier learning and begin to act intentionally and are active in their home or other environments. For example, as they lie in their beds, they use developing eye–hand coordination to swing their arms and make the mobile move. They also learn to repeat actions to produce certain effects. For example, if they are on the floor, they may push the ball over and over to see where it goes.

After six or seven months of experimentation with speech sounds, infant vocalizations change so that they begin to use mainly the speech sounds of the language into which they are being raised, and they begin babbling using consonant–vowel syllables. Additionally, they begin to lose the ability to produce those sounds that are not part of their native language (Lindfors, 1991). This is particularly important for teachers to understand as they begin to work with children who use a dialect that differs from Standard English or for whom English is a second language, as these children may be unable to produce and/or discriminate many of the English speech sounds. However, when young children are exposed to more than one language in the home from birth, they are not confused, nor do they experience language delays. The outcome of experiencing multiple languages from birth is that children differentiate between the two languages and experience normal vocabulary growth in both languages (Petitto, Katerelos, Levy, Gauna, Tetreault, & Ferraro, 2001).

Eight to Twelve Months

Infants at this age are still in the sensorimotor stage of development. During this time, children continually seek new ways and actions to explore their environments. They have learned to sit up without assistance, crawl across the floor, and to stand without help. Most learn to walk with adult support and are able to use their thumbs and fore-fingers to grasp and hold objects. This ability provides many opportunities for them to explore a variety of objects of different shapes and sizes.

Also, during this time, infants begin to control their sound patterns so that their syllables become more adult in nature. Their babbling becomes more varied by using strings of sounds that begin with a consonant followed by a vowel, such as “mama” or “gaga,” and their speech utterances begin to conform to the intonation features of the language they are learning through their use of stress, rhythm, and pitch. Parents often respond to this kind of babbling and act as if they are having a conversation with the infant, and they repeat what the child says to encourage the child to say it again. These parental interactions are essential, as they help the infant move from isolated sounds to the use of sound patterns that symbolize a specific meaning (Anning & Edwards, 1999). By ten months, infants begin to respond more eagerly to words that name the objects that are of interest to them (Pruden, Golinkoff, & Hennon, 2006). Thus, at this early age, infants are learning many new words even though they do not yet speak them. This leads to the beginning of the infants’ use of one-word expressions that may have different meanings depending on the context. For example, “Go” may mean, “I want to go with you,” or it may mean, “Please, Mommy, don’t go.” The meaning of the word is conveyed through the infant’s actions and intonations.

Twelve to Eighteen Months

Cognitively, these infants are in the latter part of the sensorimotor stage. They have learned to walk by themselves, are able to climb stairs and on to furniture, to roll balls, and to use eating utensils such as spoons and cups. This improved mobility allows them more opportunities to coordinate their reflexes in relation to objects. Additionally, they are able to feed themselves using their fingers. These infants enjoy interactions with their caregivers while eating, diaper changing, and playing.

From twelve to eighteen months of age, infants begin to develop understandings of objects, places, actions, and people and produce words that are holophrastic in nature, in that one word represents a whole idea. They use these holophrastic words to name people or objects, to express actions, such as “go” or “eat,” and to express negation,...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• part one The Child as Learner
• part two The Teacher as Facilitator
• References
• Contributor Biographies
• Index