Developing Early Literacy 0-8

From Theory to Practice

Virginia Bower, Virginia Bower, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446255339, 9781446255322
• eBook ISBN: 9781446297629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

?Developing Early Literacy presents an interesting range of literacy-related topics which address issues of current importance to early years practice and, in places, question current thinking. There is an excellent balance of theoretical background and case study examples which would make this a relevant and practical text for both students and early years professionals.? - Mary-Louise Maynes, Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, Bishop Grosseteste University

Providing clear guidance on how to develop early literacy, this book offers support with the planning and teaching of this vital aspect of the curriculum using innovative and exciting methods.

Linking theory with practice, topics covered include:

• babies and very early communication
• the importance of role play corners
• outdoor learning and literacy
• how rhyme and repetition help to develop literacy
• teaching literacy to children who have English as an Additional Language (EAL)
• literacy and diversity
• using picture books to develop literacy
• supporting transitions
• different approaches to the teaching of phonics and early reading.

Each chapter has learning objectives, case studies featuring younger and older children from the Birth to 8 age range, a summary and suggested Further Reading. This text is essential reading for those on Early Childhood Studies, Early Years, Primary PGCE and Early Years teacher education courses.

Virginia Bower is Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Part 1

Environment

1

Baby rooms

Kathy Goouch

Chapter Objectives

• to identify how rich literacy practices with babies can be promoted to support their natural development

• to understand the importance of environment on babies’ development of very early literacy

• to explore the importance of appropriate levels of knowledge and understanding about literacy and language for those working with babies.

This chapter will cover:

• research supporting the idea that babies arrive in the world curious,predisposed to learn and already experienced in tuning in to the sounds and patterns of their mother tongue

• how these early dispositions can be acknowledged, celebrated, supported and developed

• the potential of home and daycare environments to shape babies’ and very young children’s literacy learning.

C A S E S T U D Y 1

‘Where do you get them words from?’

A class of six-year-olds were given their Monday morning task. On the flipchart was written, ‘At the weekend I went to …’. As a result, the most advanced of the young literacy learners wrote fairly low-level sentences, including examples such as, ‘At the weekend I went to my nan’s’; ‘At the weekend I went to the shops’. The next group wrote, ‘At the weekend I went to …’ and thought they had completed the task; the rest were not engaged and tended to become distracted. One child made his way to the observing adult, who was recording the difficult situation, and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ She said ‘I’m writing’. The child asked, ‘Are you copying from the board?’ When the adult replied that she wasn’t, he said, ‘Well, where do you get them words from, then?’

This salutary tale, a very real incident, is still disturbing some ten years or more after the event. This child’s lack of knowledge of the relationship between words, language and literacy, his world and his own power to create text by using oral and written language, is a valuable lesson regarding what needs to be achieved if children are to be inducted into the richness and joy of language and literacy experiences throughout their lives.

Where we ‘get’ words from might depend very much, it seems, on our cultural beginnings. It is claimed that ‘the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by the age of five’ (Wolf, 2008: 20). Of course, as with all research, the details of this kind of claim need to be questioned, but, nevertheless, it offers at least an indication of the issues to be faced. While there is clearly a need, an urgent one, to scrutinise claims that children from so-called ‘non-privileged’ families are set to fail as they are perceived to be linguistically deprived, recent research suggests that, while material disadvantage is not in itself a reliable predictor of poor attainment in school, the range and extent of the infant’s early communicative experiences is a clear factor (Roulstone et al., 2002).

International research and literature across disciplines provide evidence that babies arrive in the world curious and predisposed to learn and they learn from the people, routines, behaviours and customs surrounding them. How such predispositions and early infant learning can be acknowledged, celebrated, supported and developed in relation to literacy will be helpful in national plans to improve teaching practices in literacy and learning outcomes for all children. Although, in England, national ‘benchmarking’ of two-year-olds will acknowledge difference in children in developmental terms, this is already rather late in terms of acknowledging the kinds of lived language experiences and early linguistic capabilities of these infants. What it seems is needed is a relatively seamless journey for babies and their families, the creation of sensitive pedagogical links and a literacy curriculum to consolidate, reconcile, support, enrich and enhance early infant experiences, for their intrinsic value and also their foundational uses. This chapter will discuss how rich literacy practices with babies can be created to support their natural development.

A further fact to consider is that, while some babies spend their babyhood predominantly at home, with parents, family or other carers, many babies and young children (from about 6 weeks’ old upwards) now spend as many as 45 hours a week in daycare settings – baby rooms – while parents return to work. In this chapter, therefore, reference will be made to a research project that has been undertaken in the UK – The Baby Room (Goouch and Powell, 2013) and these dedicated environments and the underpinning principles informing literacy practice with the babies spending their time there will be considered.

Evidence from The Baby Room project suggests that the political and commercial interests now dominant in the Early Years sector in England and in some other English-speaking countries may introduce tensions about care and education and these will be discussed in relation to the potential for literacy to be foregrounded, or neglected, in the early lives of babies and young children. Additionally, there is the troublesome notion to consider that all services provided before school, even for the youngest infants, are simply in existence to ‘ready’ children for the specific demands of nationally designed school curricula. Before considering these issues, however, it is important to acknowledge babies and babyhood, who babies are and what they are capable of in their early literacy journey.

Babies, babyhood and literacy

Research evidence has demonstrated that, before birth, after birth and in the first days and weeks of babies’ lives, they are already processing information about the sounds and patterns of their mother’s language (Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, 2001; Blakemore and Frith, 2005). Babies are predisposed to develop knowledge of the tunes and patterns of sounds around them – that is, babies have a genetic predisposition to become attuned to tones, patterns and structures of language, even before birth. When babies are born, they emerge into a wild cacophony of sounds, including spoken language, and, incredibly, from this babies are each able to distinguish the particular sound of their own mother’s voice – the voice most familiar to them. Attuning to the sounds coming from people – voices rather than sounds made by objects – is evident moments after birth (Murray and Andrews, 2000) and it is this attention to and special interest in ‘people sounds – the sounds of language … [which enables babies] to become perceptually tuned to the phonological, prosodic and morphologic elements categorising their native language’ (Goswami, 2002: 4).

The demonstrable brilliance of babies at tapping in to the human voice and, further, one voice in particular, supports subsequent developmental experiences. That is, intimate interactions with significant adults in their environment ensure that children’s speech sounds imitate those of the speech sounds around them. They also learn the power of articulated sound to fulfil immediate needs and that sound articulation provokes responses.

The fascinating world of linguistic, cognitive and neurosciences, combined with psychological and educational studies, have enlarged and exposed understandings of how, through experience, exploration and experimentation, babies are able to develop their own highly culturally specific sounds in the first weeks of life (see, for example, Gopnik et al., 1999; Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, 2001; Blakemore and Frith, 2005). In these first weeks, babies are learning to ‘map’ both the sounds they hear and the sounds they are making themselves through the development of a ‘mouth to sound’ map, culturally filtered to mirror the sounds heard (Gopnik et al., 1999). Through a whole range of experiences, very young babies demonstrate the ability to learn by watching, listening, exploring, experimenting, playing, rehearsing, but, most importantly, the intimate events with significant people around them.

The success of these early encounters, measured by the attention and responsiveness of people who matter to them, is the propulsion needed to launch babies into the symbolic world around them, where names and language stand for something meaningful to them. It is from such representations that later vocabulary ranges and competence in literacy evolve, as sounds develop importance in their attachment to meaning and meaningful actions (Vygotsky, 1986).

In his exploration of theories of the development of thought and language, Vygotsky (1986: 48) discusses the essentially social nature of the emergence of language in the growth of ‘communication between the consciousness of a child and the consciousness of others’. Throughout this vibrant, fast-moving early stage of language growth, the influential presence and responses of significant adults matter as ‘one of the most powerful influences on development is what happens between people’ (Hobson, 2002: 7), in the families and communities in which babies grow and learn. This begins when babies are first welcomed into the world and continues as they are inducted into family lives, routines and patterns of behaviour; into the sounds and rhythms of home life; into the cultural narratives of families. Indeed:

learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading. (Wolf, 2008: 20)

Stories are central in mediating culture and cultural practices, in transmitting values and traditions, initiating and shaping beliefs and behaviours and in gifting a vocabulary to babies and young children as story collaborators. In fact, as well as vocabulary memorised from told narratives, ‘words from books will be one of the major sources of the 10,000 word repertoire of many an average five-year-old’ (Wolf, 2008: 87), gained from years of listening to, co-constructing, retelling and rereading familiar stories until that age. Wolf (2008: 90) also claims that, ‘as children gain familiarity with the language of books, they begin to develop a more subtle awareness of the visual details of print’ and, as stated above, the time spent affectively listening to stories told and read is a key predictor of later reading:

The full sum of this tacit knowledge – the similar sounds in ‘hickory, dickory, dock’; the multiple meanings of ‘bear’, the fearful thoughts of Wilbur the pig – prepares the young child’s brain to connect visual symbols to all that stored knowledge. (Wolf, 2008: 223)

Researchers, including Wolf, acknowledge that such tacit learning does not begin in school or in instructional sessions, but, instead, has its roots firmly in infancy – in intimate, affective encounters and interactions situated in intimate, affective relationships. The inclusion of books and other print-related material resources in home and daycare environments is frequently considered to be a measure of the status ascribed to literacy.

So, at this early stage of human development, the key essential ingredients for building on genetic predispositions towards the development of language so essential to later literacy development seem to be:

• an environment in which babies are immersed in ambient language

• close attention from interested others

• one-to-one, face-to-face rewarding interactions with people who matter to them.

Early oral language experiences are an essential element in a child’s ‘evolving understanding of words and their multiple uses in speech and in written text’ (Wolf, 2008: 85) and the environment that surrounds them is key to this.

Home environments

The environments that babies encounter are considered to be crucial to brain development (Greenfield, 2000) and therefore crucial to the development of literacy. While babies’ brains are busy doubling in size during the first year of life, the kinds of experiences and encounters that are enriching their lives are helping them to create and revise their understandings of the words and worlds surrounding them (Goswami, 2002).

The research undertaken during the last 30 years and even in the last decade has indicated that, while preference for the human face has been duly noted, babies frequently begin to move towards peripheral patterns at one month, patterned objects at two to three months and then, ‘at four months, infants have the ability to attend to and discriminate between visual symbols reliably such as those that might exist in environmental print’ (Neumann et al., 2012: 234). The suggestion by researchers is not that babies are ‘schooled’ or instructed towards print at such an early stage but simply that we should be aware their early experiences are, as with speech, being filtered and mapped by them through positive and rewarding encounters in social contexts and it is helpful to both acknowledge and support this very early part of children’s literacy learning journeys. Thus, via the most straightforward and common print encounters with, for example, food packaging, soap and washing labels, mediated in their everyday lives, babies are collecting both language and print information from visual stimuli and verbal interactions. As ‘infants prefer to imitate people … coupled with a probably innate propensity to attend to and inter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• About the editor and contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Environment
• Part 2 Provision for all
• Part 3 Promoting language
• Part 4 Inspiring readers and writers
• Index