Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Learning to Read

Culture, Cognition and Pedagogy

Kathy Hall, Usha Goswami, Colin Harrison, Sue Ellis, Janet Soler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135150686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Learning to Read brings together different disciplinary perspectives and studies on reading for all those who seek to extend and enrich the current practice, research and policy debates. The breadth of knowledge that underpins pedagogy is a central theme and the book will help educators, policy-makers and researchers understand the full range of research perspectives that must inform decisions about the development of reading in schools. The book offers invaluable insights into learners who do not achieve their full potential. The chapters have been written by key figures in education, psychology, sociology and neuroscience, and promote discussion of:

• 
  
  

• comprehension
• gender and literacy attainment
• phonics and decoding
• digital literacy at home and school
• bilingual learners and reading
• dyslexia and special educational needs
• evidence based literacy
• visual texts.

This book encompasses a comprehensive range of conceptual perspectives on reading pedagogy and offers a wealth of new insights to support innovative research directions.

Part I
Families, communities and schools

Chapter 2
The ghosts of reading past, present and future

The materiality of reading in homes and schools

Jackie Marsh

Introduction

I have chosen this Dickensian title for the chapter because it characterises, albeit in a rather melodramatic fashion, the key argument made here that the present imaginaries for reading in homes and schools are haunted by spectres which shape specific understandings of reading, spectres that are very different in nature in both domains. I want to begin by sharing a recent reading experience of my own. Figure 2.1 is a screenshot taken inside the virtual world, Second Life. A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment in which users may have avatars, which are virtual representations of themselves. In this screenshot, my avatar in Second Life can be seen floating through a sea of words in the ‘15 seconds of poetry – a game of words’ virtual installation. In this installation, Second Life users can choose to let their avatars drift through a collection of poems that appear on the screen before them.

The experience of floating past and through poetry was enjoyable and was certainly a unique way to read poems. I was then able to share this reading experience through the chat messaging system in Second Life and reflect with others, in geographical locations very distant from mine, on the poems themselves. This experience offers an example of the way in which reading all types of texts, including poetry, is changing in an age of rapid technological change (Kress 2003). The aim of this chapter is to outline these developments and their impact upon young children and to examine how far the reading landscapes of home and school that they experience relate to each other. In the first part of the chapter, recent research relating to children’s reading on screen in homes and communities is outlined. The chapter moves on to consider the outcomes of a material culture analysis of two early years classrooms and compares the findings to what we know about children’s out-of-school reading experiences. The conclusion considers the implication of this analysis for reading curriculum and pedagogy. This focus is important, I argue, because of the need to ensure that the classrooms of the twenty-first century prepare children for the reading demands of the digital future.

Figure 2.1 Floating through poetry.

Reading on screen in homes and communities: the ghost of reading present

Reading in the twenty-first century is becoming an ever more diverse and screen-based process. The following vignette was developed for the QCA ‘Taking English Forward’ Consultation (available at: http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_5676.aspx), following an analysis of cumulative data from a number of studies I have conducted that have explored young children’s use of media and new technologies in the home (e.g. Marsh 2003; Marsh et al. 2005). I use this composite picture to illustrate the way in which children in these studies move across a variety of texts in homes and communities.

Yvette’s family live on a publicly owned housing estate in a northern city. Yvette’s father is employed in a local factory; her mother works as a part-time shop assistant. Yvette has an older sister, aged eight and an older brother, aged twelve. The family own two televisions (one with cable), one DVD player, one desktop computer, a PlayStation 2, two CD players and two mobile phones. The family connected to broadband about six months ago, as part of a package with the phone and television channels. When she was a very young baby, Yvette used to sit on her dad’s lap as he played games on the PlayStation 2. She became interested in the games and, when she was two, began to sit next to her brother as he played on it, using a second set of controls which were not plugged in. Now she is three, Yvette can navigate a vehicle on a track and can recognise some of the on-screen instructions, e.g. ‘Wrong way’. She likes to look at the covers of the games and the computer magazines which feature her favourite games.

When Yvette was two, she began to use the desktop computer with her sister. In the first stages, Yvette simply banged the keys indiscriminately, but her sister introduced her to games on the website of a popular television channel and Yvette soon learned how to interact with them. Just before her third birthday, Yvette began to turn on the computer independently, use the mouse to find the Internet connection and then, once on the web browser, find her favourite Internet site by remembering where it was on the Favourites menu.

Yvette also uses the computer’s word-processing package to input letters on the screen, and plays with a range of games which develop knowledge of letters, sounds and images. She has learned how to print out using the print icon on the tool bar and so prints off a range of texts and images for various purposes. Yvette has discovered the games on her brother’s mobile phone and constantly pesters him to let her play some of them. She likes to tell her brother when he has a text message, as she recognises the bleep which means that a message has arrived. She asks him to read them to her, but he doesn’t like to share all of them! Yvette also enjoys playing games on the interactive television set and can navigate some of those independently. She loves to watch television and especially likes to view her favourite DVDs repeatedly. Yvette can use the remote control for the television and DVD player in order to put her films on and rewind them when necessary. She can use the EPG (electronic programme guide) on the screen as she has memorised where her favourite channel is, which is perhaps easy for her as it is the same name she has to find on the Favourites menu on the computer!

Yvette owns lots of printed texts that relate to her favourite films and television programmes, such as books and comics, and is beginning to ask for some of the computer games which also link to these narratives. Yvette is looking forward to starting nursery next month as, on a recent visit, she saw a computer in the corner of the nursery.

At three, Yvette has already developed a range of skills, knowledge and understanding in relation to media and new technologies, as this vignette illustrates. She has, from birth, been involved in a range of family social practices in which technology is an integral part, her family providing the sort of scaffolding which has enabled her to learn the meanings of these practices and the processes involved in them. Printed texts are still a central part of her life, but they integrate and overlap with other media in complex ways. The convergence of different kinds of media is requiring new sorts of skills, skills that Yvette has already begun to acquire through these emergent digital literacy practices.

Although Yvette is a fictional figure, this vignette is drawn from a range of data which indicates that there are many young children in England who have the experiences and skills that Yvette demonstrates and this is supported by further

Table 2.1 Reading in homes

evidence from international studies (Rideout, Vandewater and Wartella 2003). Table 2.1 summarises the range of texts that young children encounter in their homes, drawn from data from a number of my own studies (Marsh 2003; Marsh et al. 2005). This correlates with the findings of other research that has examined children’s use of new technologies in the home (Bearne et al. 2007; O’Hara 2008; Plowman, McPake and Stephens in press).

In summary, it can be seen that reading in homes involves a great deal of reading on screen. In addition, this reading is embedded in children’s popular cultural interests and is central to children’s identity construction and performance. What the cultural theorist Appadurai (1996) refers to as ‘mediascapes’ – flows of ideas, images, narratives and texts from the media that move across nations in an age of globalisation – permeate children’s out-of-school reading. Whilst it would be unrealistic to expect that reading in homes and schools could ever be the same in nature, one would hope that there is sufficient overlap in order to ensure some continuity between the two domains. In the next section of the chapter, I move on to examine how far this is the case.

Material culture analysis

Evidence from a number of studies suggests that early years settings and schools offer a more limited repertoire of ICT practices than that experienced by children outside of school (Jewitt 2008; Marsh et al. 2005; O’Hara 2008; Rideout, Vandewater and Wartella 2003). It would seem, therefore, that opportunities for reading on screen are more restricted in classrooms than in homes. However, there is a need to look in further detail at the kinds of reading supported in both environments in order to determine how far the two domains support the same understandings of reading as a social practice. In the next section of this chapter, I outline a detailed material culture analysis of two classrooms in order to identify the ways in which the environments of home and school may differ. The classrooms were host to children aged four and five and the classes were known in the first school as the ‘Foundation Stage 2’ class and in the second school as the ‘Reception’ class. The two schools featured in this study were chosen because they served very different communit...

Table of contents

• Routledge Psychology in Education
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Families, communities and schools
• Part II Comprehension
• Part III Beginning to read print
• Part IV Challenging research, policies and pedagogies
• Part V Teacher education
• Index