Response to Language Stories & Literacy Lessons

Literacy embedded in social practices: Alison "reads"

Language Stories & Literacy Lessons by Harste, Woodward and Burke offer compelling research that shows that children have already experienced interaction with text way before they enter a classroom.  One of the implications in the study is that teachers' attitudes can adversely hamper the natural curiosity and experimentation with text due to the restricting nature of skills-based instruction. This type of instruction is devoid of any social context. This point is made clear when the authors looks at the case study of Alison. Alison, they argue, has been a reader for a very long time, even before she stepped foot into a classroom. Through her assumptions about the interpretation of highway signs, Wendy's cups and many other common textual sightings, she has been a "reader" since she was 3 years old.

This has profound consequences for the assumptions the way we approach the instruction of reading and writing. If it is true that students already come prepared with a rich encounter of texts, then how can we exploit that in classroom?

Oftentimes I would sit with my little cousin and we would goof around. She was just getting acculturated into the process of writing, dexterously manipulating a pencil as her chubby fingers wrapped around a no. 2 pencil. I would watch her write her name: Elizabeth. Sometimes half completed with missing vowels, or with the "b" written as a "d." Watching her do it, she would make me read it out loud and sometimes when she would misspell her name I would pronounce it the way she wrote it phonetically and she would laugh. It was a little game we would play: read silly nonsensical things she wrote and make her laugh.

Turns out this little game we would play is actually serious business for kids! Learning about how this process affects a child is key into becoming a developing reader/writer. My little cousin had a nascent phonemic awareness and she was beginning to realize: words on the page actually had a pattern. In the coming years she would grow to discern that pattern. After reading excerpts from Language Stories, it made me wonder about how my cousin was doing in school. She's eight years old now, and I would hate to think that that sense of wonder and curiosity that drove her first experiences with writing and reading is no longer there.