Early Years Non-Fiction

A Guide to Helping Young Researchers Use and Enjoy Information Texts

Margaret Mallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415253376
• eBook ISBN: 9781134525874
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This lively and informative text examines children's first experience of non-fiction during the pre-school and foundation years. Its careful consideration of different kinds of quality non-fiction, including books, posters, charts and computer software will provide a helpful framework from which early years teachers can work.

Annotated lists, notes, and suggestions for further reading make this is an ideal source of inspiration and stimulation placing literacy teaching in a fresh, modern context.

This book offers a rich resource of information, with illustrated case studies and many examples of children's responses to non-fiction providing:

• coverage of pre-school and foundation years for children up to six years of age
• references to research findings on the place of non-fiction in early years
• references to the National Literacy Strategy, Early Learning Goals and the National Curriculum for English
• a substantial glossary of terms relevant to non-fiction reading and writing.

The author's zest and expertise helps to give this book an infectious enthusiasm that will permeate the classroom, providing the nursery and primary school teacher, student teacher, or classroom assistant with an invaluable guide and resource tool.

Chapter 1 Language and learning in the early years: Some guiding principles to inform non-fiction reading and writing

Early-years educators now accept that, through actively engaging with the world around them and generating and testing their hypotheses about their experiences and observations, young children bring a great deal of knowledge and a number of established and productive learning strategies to school.

(Ann Browne, 2001:32)

A coherent and imaginative approach to helping children use and learn from non-fiction texts needs to be underpinned by an understanding of some relevant theories and thinking. There are strong reasons for student teachers to build this understanding because it will help them to play their part in developing early years practice rather than being simply reactive to the prescriptions of others. Journals like Early Years: TACTYC; Reading, Literacy and Language (UKRA) and the International Journal of Early Years Education all provide a forum for sharing discussions about research, training, advancement and co-operation in teaching young children.¹ Their international perspective helps put our own beliefs and the guidelines we follow in a broader perspective. They remind us that our own practice has developed in the context of our cultural assumptions and is subject to the societal beliefs which influence what is taught in the early years and the ways in which we teach it.

In the United Kingdom there is some tension between the perception that some current official requirements stem from a utilitarian view of literacy and therefore are in conflict with the rich experience of language and learning which early years practitioners want for children. Creative teachers believe that they can work within the guidelines while using their professional skills and judgement to provide the right contexts for exciting work—a belief reflected in the case studies to be found throughout this book.

This chapter looks first at three guiding principles, informed by relevant thinking, which I believe inform good practice in the classroom. These guiding principles and some of the research and thinking behind them will be familiar to early years practitioners and can be observed ‘in action’ in the good practice of early years teams. These principles are: children learn actively, learning is social and collaborative, and the role of the adult is crucial. I start this book here because I believe they offer a foundation for developing the non-fiction or informational aspects of children’s learning. I then move into a discussion of what has been written about the different ways in which we talk and write about what we know and have done, in other words, about ways of representing experience. This is important because these ideas describe the roots from which informational kinds of thinking develop. And this takes us to the central question of this book: how do we help children integrate learning from first hand experience and learning from secondary sources? If we can find powerful and imaginative ways of doing this, then we will help children see writing and reading as a positive and worthwhile part of all their activities and interests.

I end with a model of how this might be achieved in practice.

Some guiding principles

Children learn actively

Children actively engage with their world from very early on in their lives. As Ann Browne reminds us in the quotation that opens this chapter, they are not passive but constantly interact with others and soon try to make sense of everything that surrounds them. For me, Piaget’s adaptive model, first described in the 1950s, best captures the notion of the child as an active learner. He uses the metaphor of the digestive system to indicate how we take on new knowledge and information: a new episode of learning is ‘assimilated’ or adapted so that it can be absorbed just as food is changed within the digestive system so that it can be used by the body. At the same time, the learning structures that the child already has in place change to ‘accommodate’ the new knowledge just as the digestive organs adapt to the incoming food. This model makes learning seem as natural as eating. If we do not adjust the material we use in the classroom—whether it is on frogs, rivers or supermarkets—to make it appropriate for the intellectual stage children have reached, learning will be as difficult for them as eating raw potatoes would be a challenge to a digestive system. Piaget did not research and write directly for the classroom although some of his ideas have relevance there. You can read about his work in many books and articles. Margaret Donaldson’s account in Children’s Minds is helpful because it puts his work in the perspective of other developmentalists— Bruner, Vygotsky and Macnamara (Donaldson, 1978). If you want a lively new evaluation of Piaget’s work I recommend How babies think by three American experts on the science of infant minds (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, 1999). This book reminds us how Piaget, with the help of his wife Valentine who was herself a psychologist, recorded developments in the unfolding lives of their three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent, in some remarkably detailed baby diaries. Piaget’s work reminds us that children have powerful learning mechanisms that help them build an internal picture of the world. This internal representation of the world guides action and thought from the earliest stage. Young children behave very much like immensely active research scientists when the urge to learn and ‘make sense’ comes upon them.

Other cognitive psychologists—Bruner and Macnamara, for example—have agreed with Piaget that the young child has cognitive abilities which are language-free or relatively language-free. But while Piaget tends to underestimate the role of language, they believe that once language is acquired children’s intellectual capacities become much stronger and more flexible. Language is a crucial tool in active learning because it helps extend and organise children’s actions and thinking.

The child’s urge to mean and actively ‘make sense’ of the world around them is also built into psycholinguistic approaches to language acquisition. This ‘meaning-making’ capacity has been illuminated in a fascinating case study of the author’s own child in M.A.K.Halliday’s book Learning how to Mean (Halliday, 1975). Written some decades ago, this book still shows us powerfully that the urge to make sense and communicate is evident long before a child becomes verbal.

All those working with young children find that they are likely to learn best when they are deeply engaged in their activities and understand the purposes of their learning. An active learner, like a scientist, develops theories and expectations about the world and tries them out. We should encourage risk-taking and regard ‘mistakes’ as part of the learning process. This is why early years practitioners resist an emphasis on getting things right first time. When supporting children’s early attempts at spelling, for example, we praise their intelligent and creative attempts to use all their existing knowledge to make meaning while nudging them gently towards the accepted conventions.

The picture that emerges from this selective review of some of the research evidence is of a young child active in the environment from the earliest stages—at stages when the child knows the world through action and perception. Later there comes the pedagogic challenge of combining learning from first hand experience and learning from secondary sources. Any book on the early use and enjoyment of non-fiction needs to show how these can be effectively combined and I make a start on this with the model of non-fiction learning described towards the end of this chapter.

Learning is social and collaborative

Good early years settings take account of a child’s need to work alongside others. This helps develop the ability to co-operate on a joint task and to learn from others—from what they do and what they say. There are strong implications here for informational kinds of learning. Perhaps we have too often expected children to research and study alone when the company of others helps animate the ‘finding out’ and helps them clarify their thinking. In small group work, one child’s comment or question can cause the others to reflect and modify their opinions. I remember five-year-olds discussing a video-film that showed a whale eating a seal. Some of them judged this ‘cruel’ but one child pointed out that if seals were what they ate ‘it was not cruel for the whale to kill the seal’. The other children were helped to consider another viewpoint even if they found it hard to accept. And of course, one of the most joyous aspects of finding out is sharing your discoveries with the teacher and the group or class.

An approach which recognises the essentially social nature of learning gives a high priority to speaking and listening. These language processes enable children to organise their thinking and to communicate information, thoughts and feelings to others. Children need to control the spoken language for different purposes and in different situations inside and outside the classroom.

The average five-year-old knows at least 2,000 words and may understand many more (Crystal, 1987). By school age children also control most of the phonemes or sound units of the speech used in their home and community. They command a range of sentence types and are aware of grammatical correctness (Browne, 2001). It is Vygotsky who demonstrates most powerfully the social impetus to learning to talk and the continuing importance of talking through ideas and information to clinch understanding of concepts (Vygotsky, 1986). There is more about Vygotsky’s ideas under ‘spontaneous and scientific concepts’ in the glossary.

Socio-linguistic theories of language acquisition demonstrate that young children begin to ‘mean’ even before they have words. Halliday, for example, proposes seven functions of ‘language’ (Halliday, 1975). An attractive feature of socio-linguistic models of language acquisition is that they explain how a child learns the functions and purposes of language, including the social functions, while at the same time increasing vocabulary and control over language structures. You can read about Halliday’s model and other theories of language acquisition in Marian Whitehead’s book Language and Literacy in the Early Years (Whitehead, 1997). The strength of her analysis lies in its presentation of a range of theoretical positions from the point of view of an early years educator.

It is the use of language as a learning tool by children, Halliday’s heuristic function—‘let’s find out’, which is of particular relevance to a study of non-fiction learning. This function emphasises the social aspects of ‘finding out’ not least because children constantly ask questions of adults and other children. It is also through talking with others that children acquire some meta-linguistic terms to talk about their own language and learning. They might, for example, hear a parent or caregiver remark ‘I am trying to answer all your questions’. The heuristic function has the potential to engage the child in all sorts of learning situations in and out of the classroom. Although the world is first explored by action and spoken language, a child’s questions are later taken to secondary sources.

Halliday’s seventh language function, the representational function—‘I have something to tell you’—is also of great importance to understanding the social impetus to learning. It develops after the other functions and involves sharing ideas and propositions (Halliday, 1975). Here is the root of some of the more challenging ways of using information and knowledge—perhaps to set out a theory, argue a case or persuade. Children do this first through talk, often modelling what they say on an adult’s speech, and later in writing.

The role of the adult is crucial

In the pre-school years it is the parents, older siblings and other caregivers who introduce the young child to the world. They speak and listen—interpreting, repeating, extending and supporting—and they interact with babies, as if they can hear and understand, from the earliest stages. The social impetus to becoming verbal is a lynch-pin of Vygotsky’s theory of development (Vygotsky, 1978). When playing with very young children, adults model important elements of interaction like eye contact and turn-taking. We seem naturally to tune into the needs of the very young as conversational partners. Colwyn Trevarthen has shown that children sometimes take the initiative and adults are the ones who follow their gestures and facial expressions.² Some adults seem to have the ability to talk to children in particularly supportive and effective ways, linking new learning with what children know already. Gordon Wells finds that this ability is not limited to one gender or one social group. In the Bristol study ‘Language at Home and School’, which he directed during the 1970s and 1980s, Gordon Wells followed a representative sample of children from their first utterances to the end of their primary school years. After a careful analysis of the data Wells and his team pinpointed four things which were critical for an adult to keep in mind when promoting children’s learning through conversation. I list them here as I think they apply helpfully to the sort of conversation we might have with children in school in a ‘finding out’ context.

• treat what the child has to say as worthy of careful attention
• do one’s best to understand what he or she means
• take the child’s meaning as the basis of what one says next
• in selecting and encoding one’s message, take account of the child’s ability to understand; that is, to construct an appropriate interpretation

(Wells, 1986:218)

Wells’ work has had enormous influence in the United Kingdom and beyond on how we think about talk and learning. My student groups found the many examples of children talking at home and in school in Wells’ books extremely helpful in reflecting on the right way to intervene to develop children’s talking and thinking. Interestingly, the Bristol team found that talk in home contexts seemed more tuned into children’s preoccupations and interests than in some classrooms. Many of us were affected by the evidence provided by Wells which showed the dangers of a teacher becoming too concerned with managing the development of a topic and not supportive enough of the young child’s efforts to make sense of something. Chapters 4 and 5 of The Meaning Makers are packed with examples of children’s talk in different settings accompanied by useful analysis.

Many of us adjusted our practice in the light of these observations (Wells, 1986). But early years practitioners are concerned that there may be a move away from more child-centred approaches, which put a high value on oracy, now that there are prescribed programmes and imposed timetables for even the youngest children. No new initiative should be allowed to cut into the amount of time spent listening and responding to what children want to say. In a recent study, Jacqueline Harrett of the Cardiff School of Education, analysed the personal stories and anecdotes of 32 children in an inner city multicultural primary school. She detected ‘a lack of vivacity’ in many of the children’s tellings and wonders if lack of time to practice personal story telling may be a factor. This is a cause for concern since the ability to recount personal history contributes considerably to oracy development and to early writing (Harrett, 2002). It is most important to spend time listening and responding to what children have to say as they ease into a new topic or theme. Their personal experiences, and their feelings and attitudes towards them, help build a bridge to new learning whether through practical activity or through secondary sources like information books.

Conversations around stories read aloud at home and school are judged by Wells and others to be a particularly valuable way of supporting children’s intellectual and linguistic development. I believe talk around what I term ‘information stories’—narratives which incorporate much factual information—can also lead to interesting and mind-stretching conversations between adults and children. Let me give an example here: Nicola Davies’ One Tiny Turtle, Walker Books, tells the story of a loggerhead turtle’s life from being in a turtle nursery and ‘no bigger than a bottle top’ to when she is ‘as big as a barrow’ and about to lay her eggs on the beach where she was born. An American study shows how boys and girls showed an increasing liking for this kind of text as they progressed through school, particularly if the teacher discussed the scientific and social concepts involved (Brabham, Boyd and Edgington, 2000).

The teacher’s own effective use of language is central to children’s learning: he or she explains, questions, describes and supports developing ideas. Teachers do all they can to extend the child’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Language and learning in the early years: Some guiding principles to inform non-fiction reading and writing
• Chapter 2 Early experience of pictures and print: Environmental print; board, bath and cloth books; word books and books functioning as toys
• Chapter 3 Alphabet books: Enjoying letters, words and illustrations
• Chapter 4 Counting and concept books: Books to enjoy and learn from
• Chapter 5 Reading and writing non-fiction at home: Orla’s books and writing: Beginning to control your world
• Moving forward
• Chapter 6 Early informational writing three to six years: Making a start with informational genre
• Chapter 7 Non-fiction texts and resources three to six years: Choosing and using quality texts
• Chapter 8 Early reference books: Dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopaedias and atlases
• Chapter 9 Learning from television and film: Making viewing an active experience
• Chapter 10 Information and communication technology: Computers and learning
• Chapter 11 The role of fiction in informational learning: Securing a personal foothold
• Glossary of terms relevant to non-fiction reading and writing
• Appendix 1 Official frameworks: their guidance on non-fiction writing and reading
• Appendix 2 Non-fiction books for under-threes: Twenty-five star books
• Appendix 3 Non-fiction books for three to fives: Twenty-five star books
• Appendix 4 Non-fiction for five to sixes: Thirty star books
• Bibliography