The Really Useful Literacy Book

Linking theory and practice in the primary classroom

Tony Martin, Chira Lovat, Glynis Purnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136512278
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gouvernement et monde des affaires

Now in its third edition, The Really Useful Literacy Book is the definitive guide to the high quality teaching of literacy in your primary classroom. Written specifically for primary school teachers and student trainee teachers, this book offers inventive ideas for the classroom together with an accessible and informative summary of the theories that underpin them. It explores creative approaches to literacy teaching as well as offering a range of units on all areas – speaking, listening, reading and writing.

While this book provides creative ideas that can be taken by teachers and developed for their own classrooms, it clearly explains the theoretical rationale for these ideas. It can also be used by school literacy leaders to develop whole school approaches and high quality teaching throughout the school.

This accessible and engaging text will be an essential companion for all primary teachers, at any stage in their career, looking to motivate, engage and challenge their children in their literacy lessons.

1 The big ideas

Why do we teach as we do?

Teaching literacy is not simple. The ways in which children learn to read and write, and the teaching strategies which will best help them to do so, have been debated and researched for hundreds of years. Not only because of its complexity but also because it is so vitally important, we believe it is the most fascinating aspect of teaching and learning. In the classroom the fascination constantly manifests itself. How come that four-year-old can already read, while the child sitting next to her has hardly begun? Why does that ten-year-old find it so easy to produce three- or four-page stories in which the ideas are imaginative and the sentences flow, when the child sitting next to him sweats out, almost painfully, half a page of disjointed text? What lies behind that seven-year-old’s ‘ability’ to spell in contrast to the child sitting next to her for whom spelling seems to be a total mystery? And what sort of teaching will help each of these children?

However, while literacy teaching and learning are complex, because learners are complex, this does not mean we are just faced with a tangled web of ideas and approaches (and it can look like this on the staff-room bookshelf where the ever-growing pile of government publications offering advice totters against the latest literacy scheme from one of the well-known publishers, which in turn slumps against the pile of journals and educational magazines advocating the latest good ideas). In fact, underpinning the ways we teach and the ways learners learn are a small number of ‘big ideas’ which lead to a set of powerful principles and practices. This rationale informs the ways we plan and the ways we teach. It lies at the heart of high-quality classroom practice, and clarity about it gives teachers the professional freedom to think through their classroom practice.

The Big Ideas

• Contexts and coherence
• Motivation
• Content and process

Contexts and coherence

Contextualised literacy

Reading and writing are all around us. Young children are exposed to it from birth – on the television, in newspapers and magazines, on bottles, cans and packets. They see other children and adults engaging with print in different ways. In terms of learning to read, then, comprehension is where it starts: making sense of the print in terms of what it stands for and its purpose. This means that the learning of literacy does not take place in a vacuum, and the school and the classrooms within it are not laboratories. The importance of these everyday contexts in which children learn to read and write is well researched and at its most powerful with regard to very young children:

All surveys coincide in a very simple fact: if the child has been in contact with readers before entering school, s/he will learn to read and write more easily than children who have had no contact with readers. What does this pre-school knowledge consist of? Basically in a first immersion in a ‘culture of literacy’: having listened to someone reading aloud, having seen someone write, having had the opportunity to produce intentional marks, having taken part in social activity where reading and writing made sense, having been able to ask questions and get some sort of answer.

(Ferreiro 2000)

This quotation has two important implications in terms of ‘contexts for literacy’ in the classroom, whatever the age of the child. First, there are the literacy contexts themselves – the different ways in which written text is produced and used in the world around us. We can either ignore them and create an artificial ‘school literacy’ in which the reading and writing reflect only the school and the classroom, or we can bring the everyday literacies into our classrooms and use them as the basis of our teaching. Margaret Cook (2002) reports the impressive development in Reception children’s writing as a result of such an approach. One unit of work involved a visit to the local McDonald’s and the subsequent building (by the children as well as the teacher) of a McDonald’s role-play area. Different types of ‘structured play’ involving speaking and listening, reading and writing for different purposes over a number of weeks led to a range of writing from the children, all highly purposeful and all embedded firmly in a shared experience. Cook reports the impressive progress in writing attainment resulting from this work.

The second implication from the Ferreiro (2000) quotation in terms of ‘contexts’ is connected to the first. The literacy contexts in the home and in the example of Reception children visiting McDonald’s all make sense to the child. This ‘making sense’ is one of Brian Cambourne’s ‘conditions for learning’ (Cambourne 2001); learning has to be contextualised, i.e. it must make sense to the learner. Taking this idea a stage further leads to the importance of learners having the ‘big picture’ clear to them in terms of why they are learning what they are learning. They see where the learning is going and how it links to previous learning and learning in other contexts. Successful learners make connections.

Research by Charmian Kenner leads her to the conclusion that the first element in what she calls an ‘interactive pedagogy’ for bilingual children is ‘a teacher who sees bilingualism as a resource rather than a problematic condition, and wishes to expand her knowledge about her pupils’ home and community learning’ (Kenner 2003).

The challenge and opportunity of digital contexts

All of us, teachers and children, now live in a digital age. The pace at which this has developed since the mid-1990s is incredible and shows no sign of slowing: since the second edition of this book a whole new phenomenon, tweeting, has taken the digital world by storm. Who knows what will be next? The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (2009) defines a text as ‘the medium through which ideas, experiences, opinions and information can be communicated’. Within this definition is included ‘digital communication, social networking and the other forms of electronic communication encountered by children and young people in their daily lives’. And children certainly do engage with digital literacy. In May 2009, 3000 pupils aged 8–16 from England and Scotland completed an online survey for the National Literacy Trust. There was an almost equal gender split, with 48.6 per cent of boys and 51.4 per cent of girls taking part; 75 per cent of these young people said that they wrote regularly, and technology-based formats were most frequently written (Clark and Dugdale 2009).

Such rapid developments give rise to both challenges and opportunities for teachers of literacy. One thing is certain: these new texts represent powerful, meaningful literacy contexts for primary school children. Locke (2003) asked two key questions which we feel are still as relevant today:

• How can we utilise ICT to achieve our current teaching/learning objectives?
• If the rapidly changing nature of ICT is changing the nature of literacy, how are these changes reflected in our learning objectives, our pedagogy and our visions of the future of classroom programmes?

The first question is already being answered in primary classrooms across the UK. Many now have digital projectors and interactive whiteboards installed and being used on a daily basis in literacy lessons. Websites are visited. Texts are displayed and annotated on screen; the writing of teachers and children is saved and returned to later in the week. Children have access to computers at school and examples of them producing presentations and web-based, multimodal texts appear regularly in literacy journals (Graham 2009, Stone 2011). Not so long ago an article entitled ‘www.wikis, word clouds and web collaboration to support primary literacy’ would have mystified teachers (and for some, may still do!). At its best such work is exciting and motivating for both teachers and children but we would like to raise two issues which can be asked of any method, approach or resource we might use in the classroom.

First, does all of this ‘interactive’ technology result in interactive, engaging lessons? Betteney (2009) critically reviews the use of interactive whiteboards and draws attention to research by Fisher (2008, p. 22) in which an interactive whiteboard was used to display the guided reading text for a group of Y4 children. The text is an extract and untitled. The teacher

asked a series of closed syntactic questions of nominated children . . . there was no peer interaction, and all responses were expressed hesitantly. After 10 minutes the children took it in turns to read aloud . . . in the remaining teaching time the teacher posed a number of comprehension questions. However the first inferential question was not asked until 15 minutes had elapsed.

Just because a resource is called ‘interactive’ does not mean it produces interactive teaching.

Second, there is always a danger of classroom practice becoming ‘ritualised’ in the sense that what occurs, occurs every day: so, now there is the daily ritual of turning on the digital projector so that the text can, yet again, be displayed and read on a screen. Is there an issue with screens? Should we worry about the child who has already spent an hour or more staring at a screen in the morning at home (watching the cartoon network) before arriving at school, then spending the literacy lesson staring at a screen followed by a numeracy lesson staring at a screen and who will go home at the end of the school day to spend more hours staring at a screen? We are as excited as anyone by the new technologies, but we believe schools need to carefully monitor the amount of ‘screen-based learning’ undertaken on a daily basis by children. In terms of literacy, specifically, the question is always about the most appropriate way to present a text to children. This will depend on the text type and its purpose.

The second question posed by Locke is very challenging. We are not sure it is yet clear how ICT is ‘changing the nature of literacy’ but we would like to consider two particular issues. The first is the impact on written language of the new methods of communication such as email, texting, blogging and tweeting. In Chapter 13 we describe a literacy unit which investigates the difference between spoken and written language on the basis that ‘writing is not speech written down’. However, email and, especially, texting and tweeting are beginning to blur this distinction. Texting and tweeting are very close to speech, as their purpose is to have written conversations. Exactly how will these new ways of communicating affect and alter the nature of writing? What exactly will writing be like in another fifty years? Of course, the one certainty is that it will change, as language always has (or we would all be writing like Chaucer!). David Crystal (2010), a world-renowned expert on language and language change, draws attention to the fact that the use of abbreviations has actually been with us for a very long time. The Victorians would make up parlour games in which letters would stand for words, for example 2CU 2morrow! Crystal’s research shows that it is usually the best spellers who are also the best at texting. They need to know the letters that are missing in order to understand how to abbreviate the words. He shows how dyslexic children/adults have difficulty in texting as well as in expressing themselves in non-abbreviated language.

The second question posed by Locke, then, is about how far we should incorporate emailing, texting and other digital forms (e.g. blogging) into our objectives, pedagogy and programmes. It is certainly exciting to see seven-year-old Lauryn (Coniston Primary School, Cumbria) emailing the Iron Man in role as the character Hogarth:

I’ve been wondering if you could answur some questions, heres one, how did you climb up the cliff and why did it not crumble under your big feet? I’m surprised at all the metal you’ve been eating! The farmers are furius, without veicals there’s no crops. Lukly my horse Charles didnt die of fright. My dad is calling a meeting and if there plan doesn’t work I might have to move.

Of course, Lauryn receives a reply:

I will try and answer your questions.

When you are very tall it is easy to climb up if you place your feet very carefully. My problem was falling down the cliff, not trying to get up it. I am sorry if I caused any trouble by eating your machines. I just thought that I had found a special place where someone had left out lots of treats for me to eat.

Iron Man

These are literacy practices which make sense in terms of context to children. Indeed, we may now be faced with a striking phenomenon that, for the first time ever, many of the children we teach are writing more outside school th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Really UsefulLiteracy Book
• The Really Useful Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The big ideas
• 2 Principles and practices
• 3 Foundation Stage: ‘Tell me a story’
• 4 Foundation Stage: Playing with role: ‘Little Boy Blue’
• 5 Foundation Stage/Y1: Time for rhyme
• 6 Y1: Outside in, inside out, or reading and writing out and about: Environmental print
• 7 Y2: Dance your way to a story
• 8 Y2: Reporting back: Reading non-fiction and writing non-chronological reports
• 9 Y3: Shapely poems and calligrams: Starting not from text, but from vocabulary and visual images
• 10 Y3: Dear Giant – Dear Jack: Creating a sequence of letters
• 11 Y4: Cyclones! Information books on same or similar themes: literacy across the curriculum
• 12 Y4:Where did our writing come from? Exploring the writing process
• 13 Y5:Writing is not speech written down: Spoken language and written language: a language-based unit
• 14 Y5:Whatever happened to Lucy Gray? Classic poetry
• 15 Y6:‘We made the story!’ Developing vocabulary and making whole stories with underachieving, uninterested boys
• 16 Y6: Enjoying a good argument: Writing discursively
• Index