The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy

Joanne Larson, Jackie Marsh, Joanne Larson, Jackie Marsh

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781473971240
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

This new edition of the much-loved Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy has been revised and updated to retain its cutting-edge focus on emergent and important areas of research. This comprehensive work guides the reader through current social, cultural and historical analysis on a global scale.

The new edition contains a greater range of methodologies, and chapters on:

- space and literacy

- disabilities and early childhood literacy

- digital literacies

- indigenous literacy

- play and literacy

- policy

In the Handbook, readers will find coverage of all the key topics in early childhood literacy. The exceptional list of contributors offers in-depth expertise in their respective areas of knowledge.

The Handbook is essential for Undergraduate students; Masters students; PhD students; CPD students; researchers, and literacy-centre personel.

?The second edition of this internationally respected and widely used text encompases a myriad of new issues and insights, both through new contributions and thoughtfully revised chapters which raise fresh questions and challenges for research and practice. In pushing the boundaries still further, the handbook retains its rightful place at the forefront of research into early childhood literacy practice in the 21st century?

-Professor Teresa Cremin, Open University UK

?This handbook provides in-depth knowledge of insights and theories about the dynamic process of how children come to know literacy as thinking humans in social and cultural spaces. There is a rich array of research perspectives of children?s meaning-making through family and digital liteacies, play and literacy, and in-school and out-of-school literacy experiences?

- Yetta Goodman, Regents Professor, University of Arizona

PART 1

Perspectives on Early Childhood Literacy

1

The Emergence of Early Childhood Literacy

Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall

In this chapter we explore, rather briefly, how the approaches researchers bring to studying young children and written language have changed across time, and how in the process critical concepts have been redefined leading to the emergence of early childhood literacy as a major research focus at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We are making the claim that research into early childhood literacy is a very recent phenomenon. This may surprise many people; after all, formal research into the ways in which children have learned about written language has been going on for well over a century, and if an informal definition is adopted then it would be over many centuries, maybe even millennia. However, we want to claim that there are specific attributes of the term early childhood literacy research that distinguish it from the many earlier meanings that have underpinned the ways in which previous researchers have examined young children’s relationships with written language.

The story of how early childhood literacy emerged as a distinctive and dynamic research area is a fairly complicated one and to do it full justice would require more space than is available to us. To keep control of our account and to contain it within the space allowed us, we have decided to focus on a small number of themes, each of which we see as significant in the emergence of early childhood literacy as now understood. There is, to start with, a crude historical direction the order of our themes; however, this becomes more difficult to sustain as we move towards the end of the twentieth century and at this point considerable overlap is unavoidable. We are conscious that in this short chapter we have to be selective about the choices made for discussion. We select mostly book-length studies for particular emphasis; for, although ideas tend to find their first output in journals or theses, they are then consolidated more comprehensively in books. Our choices are necessarily personal ones and we do not claim that we always use the most significant texts of their kind (although they may be), or that they are themselves the most influential texts, and neither do we claim that together they represent a completely coherent story. We reflect our perceptions of the changing nature of attitudes, values and influences of the particular shifting intersection among disciplines that constitutes research into learning and using written language in early childhood.

THE MOVE TOWARDS ‘LITERACY’ AND ‘CHILDHOOD’

Psychology, written language and young children

We have chosen to start at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time in which researchers from one discipline had begun to take a specific interest in young children’s relationship with written language, although we are certainly not suggesting that it had been completely ignored before this. At this point it would be very unusual to find anyone researching literacy as, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘literacy’ was first used in print in 1883. In the nineteenth century researchers, and anyone else, talked about reading and writing rather than literacy.

Even as the modern discipline of psychology emerged in Wundt’s laboratories, it took a research interest in reading. The major theme of this early work was that reading is primarily a perceptual activity centred on sound/symbol relationships. The linking of sound and vision made reading susceptible to the interests of perceptual psychologists partly because they focussed upon individual behaviour and partly because aspects of perceptual behaviour could be measured (Catell, 1886). Another theme was acceptance of the notion that learning was unlikely to take place unless children were ‘ready’ (mentally and physically). The notion of readiness in association with reading appears to have been used first by Patrick (1899), was supported by Huey (1908), and remained a dominant concept in young children’s reading for the next 60 years. Huey’s seminal work typifies these characteristics. A lot of it is devoted to visual perception and reading, while in the pedagogy section Huey seeks to reconcile psychological evidence relating to readiness with the contemporary practice of starting children early on reading. His answer seems in some respects to be quite contemporary: root early written language experiences in play.

It was readiness, however, that won. In 1928, two US psychologists began to explore reading readiness formally (Morphett and Washburne, 1931). They claimed that reading readiness was closely linked to mental age and, more specifically, that ‘It pays to postpone beginning reading until a child has attained a mental age of six years and six months.’ This position was supported by a later study that claimed, ‘A mental age of seven seems to be the lowest at which a child can be expected to use phonics.’ (Dolch and Bloomster, 1937). That these studies were based on ludicrous and arbitrary notions of what counted as reading (and for a stunning critical review of these studies see Coltheart, 1979) and ‘satisfactory progress in reading’ did not stop the educational world from falling in love with their propositions. For the next 50 years books about teaching reading repeated the readiness mantras of these four researchers. A number of consequences followed these research studies. First, an industry emerged concerned with promoting and selling reading readiness, usually with non-print-related activities and materials. Second, the limited definition of reading perpetuated a notion of learning to read as an associative activity, centred on perceptual identification and matching. Third, it supported an absolute distinction between being a reader and not being a reader.

The emphasis on measurable behaviour was abetted by the dominance at this time of behaviourism which, in its various guises, claimed to be able to control reading development through systematic reinforcement systems. By breaking down reading into narrow skills and by linking the learning of these skills to reinforcement systems children were supposed to acquire mastery of them (Skinner, 1957). Like much research into children’s reading, it was based on a number of assumptions: that children’s agency was insignificant, that children could learn nothing for themselves, that they were objects to be manipulated by teachers, and that that reading and writing were individual acts involving sets of discrete perceptual skills. Behaviourist theories of language learning were dealt a severe theoretical blow by Chomsky (1959) in a major review of Skinner’s book, Verbal Behavior. On the whole, behaviourist approaches to literacy learning only survive in some areas of special education or in more experimental situations using mastery learning.

The major consequence of behaviourism and reading readiness theories was that for much of the twentieth century researchers seemed to have believed that there was simply no point in investigating, or even thinking about very young children’s thinking about, understanding of and use of reading and writing; the possibility of this had been defined out of existence until they arrived in school and faced a teacher.

New disciplines and literacy

To a large extent the Second World War provided a new impetus for research into literacy, although the driving notion was ‘illiteracy’ and it was mostly associated with adults. It was this war with its increased requirements for more advanced skills that really brought home the significance of low literacy levels. The concept of functional literacy emerged during the war and was widely adopted in development education within mass literacy campaigns (Gray, 1956; see Akinnaso, 1991, for a personal perspective on this area) and later in adult and employment education. The notion of functional literacy for the first time forced researchers to be interested in what literacy was for and what people did with it in their everyday lives. Almost for the first time research began to consider reading as something more than simply a decoding process, and that it had a social element. It also led to the realisation that it was not only reading that needed to be considered, but also writing, although it remained true that reading received much greater attention than writing.

Another way in which the Second World War influenced research into literacy was through the emergence and consolidation of newer disciplines: cognitive psychology, the general area of information and communication studies, and psycholinguistics. These disciplines consistently revealed that communication, especially written communication, was a complex, multi-layered, and highly skilled process involving a reflective and strategic meaning-orientated approach to behaviour. While much of this work was related to adults, one book began to pull threads together and powerfully apply understandings to children learning to read. This book was Frank Smith’s Understanding Reading (1971). It was not a research study itself, but it used a mass of evidence and theoretical work deriving from these newer disciplines. This evidence came from new studies into the cognitive perception (Neisser, 1967; Gibson, 1969), skilled behaviour (Miller, Galanter and Pribram, 1960), communication and information theory (Pierce, 1961; Cherry, 1966; and Miller, 1967), linguistics (Chomsky, 1957 and 1965), developmental psycholinguistics (McNeill, 1966), developmental cognition (Bruner, Goodenough and Austin, 1956; Bruner, Olver and Greenfield, 1966) and those educationalists who were beginning to make use of these new disciplines (Goodman, 1968).

Smith’s book immediately attracted both huge support and massive opposition and severely divided educationalists. It would not be unfair to describe this division as ‘war’, with such vitriol were these differences manifested. Despite this substantial opposition, Smith’s book regenerated and broadened reading-related research, which swiftly flourished and began to move in directions that even Smith had not anticipated.

Smith’s analysis and synthesis had a number of consequences for the emergence of early childhood literacy:

• Reading could no longer be seen simply as an associative process. It had to be recognised as a much more complex activity involving cognitive and strategic behaviour. The approach of young children to print reflected this complexity and use of strategy.
• The narrowness of research into reading was breached; the area was opened up as a topic for scrutiny and influence from a much wider set of disciplines than psychology (although this was only a beginning).
• Meaning could no longer be seen as simply sitting there in a text. It was readers who assigned meaning to print and children did this in similar ways to adults, although drawing on different experiences.

What Smith had not done in 1971 was (a) move beyond a reading-oriented understanding of print usage, and (b) follow through his own logic and consider whether children who had all these complex abilities were applying them to comprehending and making sense of print long before they moved into formal schooling. However, these newer disciplines had begun to reposition the understanding of written language as a much more dynamic and interactive process. It was these meanings that were carried forward and developed by other researchers.

The emergence of ‘emergence’

At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s the relationship between childhood and written language was changing dramatically. There had long been interest (mostly from psychologists) in how some children arrived in school able to read (Durkin, 1966; Clarke, 1976; and Forester, 1977) but such early engagement with literacy (and again it was always reading) was studied because it was believed to be unusual. Asking explicitly how young children made sense of literacy had begun with psychologists such as Reid (1966) and Downing (1979) but had extended to a crop of studies appearing in the late seventies and even continuing to the early eighties. These tended to focus on children in early schooling (Johns, 1976/7; Tovey 1976). At the same other researchers were exploring this issue in what was ultimately a more powerful way. Clay (1969), Read (1970) and Goodman (1976) became interested in the strategic behaviour of children engaging in literacy and it was their approach that led to some major shifts in the conceptualisation of early childhood and literacy. Rather than ask explicit questions of children, something that is always going to be problematic, they looked at the actual behaviours of children engaged in literacy. They saw that while many of the children’s literacy behaviours were technically incorrect, they nevertheless revealed how children were strategic in approaching literacy and were working hard to develop hypotheses about how the system worked. If children aged 5 and 6 were bringing sense-making strategies to literacy, and if research from developmental psychology was demonstrating that young school-aged children were actively making sense of their worlds then how were even younger children responding to literacy? As Ferriero and Teberosky in their seminal study put it:

It is absurd to imagine that four- or five-year-old children growing up in an urban environment that displays print everywhere (on toys, on billboards and road signs, on their clothes, on TV) do not develop any ideas about this cultural object until they find themselves sitting before a teacher.

(1982: 12)

A number of individual case studies, by researchers studying their own children, began to focus explicitly on the period before schooling. Lass (1982) started with her child from birth, Baghban (1984) from birth to 3, Crago and Crago (1983) from 3 to 4, Payton (1984), the first British case study, across the fourth year, while Bissex (1980) followed her son during his fifth year. All showed clearly how their children were paying a lot of attention to print. Literacy was certainly beginning before schooling. At the same time researchers began reporting on broader studies involving a wider range of children (Clay, 1975; Mason, 1980; Hiebert, 1981; Harste, Burke and Woodward, 1982; Sulzby, 1985). A revolution was taking place that demanded a revaluation of literacy as something that moved beyond any conventional ability to read and write. Rather than literacy development being something that began at the start of schooling after a bout of reading readiness exercises, it was becoming a much broader continuum that had its origins in very early childhood and drew its meaning from making sense rather than formal teaching (Hall, 1987).

The rich range of studies during th...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• International Advisory Board
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• PART 1 PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY CHILDHOOD LITERACY
• PART 2 EARLY CHILDHOOD LITERACY IN FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, AND CULTURES ACROSS MEDIA AND MODES
• PART 3 EARLY MOVES IN LITERACY
• PART 4 LITERACY IN PRESCHOOL SETTINGS AND SCHOOLS
• PART 5 RESEARCHING EARLY CHILDHOOD LITERACY
• Index