Print Literacy Development: Uniting Cognitive and Social Practice Theories

Print Literacy Development Print Literacy Development m UNITING COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL PRACTICE THEORIES V I C T O R ...

Author: Victoria Purcell-Gates | Prof. Erik Jacobson | Sophie Degener

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Print Literacy Development

Print Literacy Development m

UNITING COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL PRACTICE THEORIES

V I C T O R I A P U R C E L L - G AT E S ERIK JACOBSON SOPHIE DEGENER

H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright 䉷 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Purcell-Gates, Victoria. Print literacy development : uniting cognitive and social practice theories / Victoria Purcell-Gates, Erik Jacobson, Sophie Degener. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-674-01518-0 (cloth) ISBN-10 0-674-01518-5 (cloth) ISBN-13 978-0-674-02254-6 (pbk.) ISBN-10 0-674-02254-8 (pbk.) 1. Literacy—Social aspects—United States—Case studies. 2. Cognitive learning— United States—Case studies. 3. Adult education students—United States—Case studies. I. Jacobson, Erik. II. Degener, Sophie. III. Title. LC151.P86 2004 302.2'244—dc22

2004052606

This book is dedicated to the countless students and teachers with whom we have worked and from whom we have learned about how people learn to read and write through both instruction and by participation in their social worlds.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge and thank the following people for their efforts related to the Literacy Practices of Adult Learners Study (LPALS): Marta Soler Gallart, who worked alongside us to gather data, manage far-flung research sites, and theorize the study; Jennifer Mott-Smith, who served as an outstanding project manager; Jocelyn Glazier for data analysis; Mark Reckase and Ken Frank, statistical consultants; Joseph Martineau, who provided painstaking data analysis and reports with a complex and multilayered data set; and Andreá Wilder, supported by the Azadoutioun Foundation, who helped to pilot instruments and locate research sites. We particularly wish to acknowledge John Comings, director of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL), for his unwavering support of the LPALS study and for his inspiring leadership of NCSALL. We would also like to thank Hal Beder, Gregory Brooks, Catherine Snow, and the anonymous reviewer for their readings of and suggestions for an earlier draft of this book. We also thank Nell K. Duke for her last minute reading of Chapter 5. Stephanie Collins also stepped in at the last moment to provide editorial assistance for which we are grateful. Finally, we thank Elizabeth Knoll of Harvard University Press for pursuing the idea of this book and for persisting in her efforts to move it beyond a research report to the theoretical statement it now is.

viii 䡠 Acknowledgments

From the beginning of the LPALS study to the final editing of this book, our families have supported and encouraged us in our work. Thank you Joel, Shirley, Aki, Teo, Miki, and Luke. The LPALS study was funded by the Educational Research and Development Centers program, Award Number R309B60002, as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement/ National Institute of Postsecondary Education, Libraries and Lifelong Learning, U.S. Department of Education, through contract to Harvard University and as part of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL). The contents of this report do not necessarily represent the position or policies of the National Institute of Postsecondary Education, Libraries and Lifelong Learning, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the U.S. Department of Education, and the reader should not assume endorsement by the U.S. federal government.

Contents

1

To Learn to Read and Write: Students Who Fail and Succeed 1

2

The LPALS Study

3

How Does Print Literacy Develop?

4

Literacy as Social Practice

5

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development

6

The Seeming Incommensurability of the Social and the Cognitive 63

7

Print Literacy Development through a Widened Lens

8

The Course of Print Literacy Development in and out of School 126

9

Signs and Symbols: Research Implications for Best Practice 159 Notes

175

References Index

203

187

12 23

29 41

81

Print Literacy Development

m

CHAPTER ONE

To Learn to Read and Write: Students Who Fail and Succeed It feels good (to be learning to read). I wish I had just had all this power back then. But it’s never too late. ADULT PARTICIPANT IN LPALS STUDY

This book is about success and failure. It is about why some individuals are successful in becoming fully literate while countless others fail. This book is not only about individuals, however; it is about individuals as members of social and cultural groups. This distinction is important because success and failure in developing literacy is— and always has been—marked by social status, income, race, ethnicity, and language. To explore this relationship, we primarily address theory in this book, but we do so as an extension and discussion of the outcomes of a study of adult literacy students, their adult literacy classes, and the impact on their literacy lives of what we have termed authenticity. What is authenticity? It is a construct that captures a type of literacy instruction that involves students in reading and writing real-life texts for real-life purposes. This concept will be further explored as we go along. Adult literacy students in the United States are excellent informants for those who wish to understand the failures of the schools to teach children from all sociocultural groups to read and write to equal levels of achievement. Adult literacy students are the products of those failures. These failures do not occur solely in the United States; in fact, they are endemic around the world, in developed as well as developing countries. Many adults from other countries end up in adult classes in the United States. They, too, are represented in our adult literacy sample.

2 Print Literacy Development

By listening to adult literacy students and exploring the instructional elements that contextualize their ultimate successes, we can learn something about good, effective literacy instruction for everyone. This was the underlying purpose, or rationale, for the Literacy Practices of Adult Learners Study (LPALS). We will begin by letting our participants describe themselves.

Struggle and Persistence: Adult Literacy Students The adult literacy students who participated in the LPALS study represent the range of students who are working to improve their reading and writing abilities in literacy classes in the United States today. They were both native-born and foreign-born, and they ranged in age from 18 to 68. They all failed to become fully literate as children for a variety of reasons, and they were currently learning in classes or in tutorial arrangements that reflected a range of configurations: Adult Basic Education (ABE), GED (General Educational Development), Family Literacy, Evenstart, and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). These classes were spread across the mainland United States. Their personal histories reflect the economic and social struggles typical of poor and marginalized groups. Throughout their lives they have learned coping strategies to make up for their literacy difficulties, leaning on others as well as finding their own inner strengths. At some point, for different and varied reasons, each decided to make another commitment to learning, and each was succeeding to differing degrees. Since adult students do not persist in programs where they feel they are unsuccessful and since we only included those students who were currently attending classes, we can state that all of the participants in this study were experiencing academic success at the time we were involved with them.

Personal Histories The students whom we interviewed reported varied histories, many of them reflecting backgrounds of poverty, hardship, and schooling difficulties. Their histories seem representative and familiar to those who have worked with adult literacy students. One ABE student, a

To Learn to Read and Write 3

father of two, related that he found himself living on the streets at a fairly young age: I got my own place; then I had an injury. I had a lot of trauma . . . it was getting hit by a vehicle. I ended back in the hospital and then from there a group home . . . for 3 1⁄2 years. Now I’m in my own apartment finally after all that. I was like 27 when I first got my apartment after all of this havoc.

Another woman, working with a tutor, wove memories of her learning difficulties throughout her stories of personal struggle: It was about in the third grade when I realized that I was not able to read too well. I was 15 when my brother was shot and killed . . . I was never actually a teenager since that. I washed dishes in my mother’s and daddy’s cafe´ and then I married and then I became a mother at 17. When I was 21, I divorced him and married my husband that died in ’95. When I was in the third grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. K——, and she wanted to spend the summer with me to teach, you know, teach me how to read. Well, somethin’ had come up and my aunt wanted to go visit Grandma and Grandpa in California, so my uncle, he told my aunt to take me. So I went to California and the day after I left, my teacher come to pick me up. So that was the end of that. I went to special ed, and I thought that I was doing pretty good. They seen an improvement. So they took me outa there and put me in the fifth grade. Well, that threw a shock on me. Because I wasn’t wanting to leave. I wanted to stay there because I was doing so good. I went to the bottom of the class again, and, right then, it just seemed like it was more down hill. I don’t know why but my mind just closed. Up ’til the eighth grade. And that’s when they kicked me out.

After her children left home, she attended a literacy program for two years. However . . . It was after that that my son died and I lost my memory. I had had it lost for five years, after he died. My daughter also died. My husband died in ’95. So, I found my boyfriend and I found a literacy school and I stayed. My daughter got me into it ’cause she was going to try to get her GED.

Immigrant ESOL students often related stories tied to poverty, exclusion, and violence. One woman from Guatemala reported: I was in school in Guatemala. I have to walk three hours. I have to get up by five o’clock in the morning. I don’t remember if I eat breakfast

4 Print Literacy Development or not, but I have to get up early to walk to the school, and the school start by 8 o’clock [and] it’s a long walk. I was 10 when I started school. [I went] only three years. Because there was no school closer to where my family lived, so I can’t go anymore. [It was] dangerous. In 1993 I was in third grade. So at that time there was people getting killed and everything. And the guerrillas and the government were fighting, so there was no way I could go to school. There were no kids going to school at that time. The teachers, they returned to the city.

Stories such as this one were quite similar to those related by the Salvadoran women in the adult literacy class in the Victoria PurcellGates and Robin Waterman (2000) book, Now We Read, We See, We Speak: Portrait of Literacy Development in a Freirean-Based Adult Class. While clearly not all ESOL students arrive in this country having experienced trauma or having had no prior access to schooling, many of those who are trying to learn to read and write— for the first time in any language—do arrive that way. Their lack of experience with schooling and with books are critical factors for teachers to consider as they design instruction.

Reported Personal Reasons for Failure For many who did have prior access to schools and who had attended for different lengths of time, the blame for their lack of success at reading and writing fell squarely on their own shoulders. Many of the participants also reported internal characteristics that accounted for their failure to learn to read and write as children. This phenomenon of self-blame has been reported elsewhere about ABE students (Purcell-Gates, 1995; Purcell-Gates & Waterman, 2000). For example: • I was a weird person back then. I’m serious; I couldn’t, like I

said, I couldn’t remember nothing. You know my mom would send me to the grocery store to get a gallon of milk and some bread. I would walk out the door, and I had to turn back cause I didn’t remember what she said . . . and I guess hanging around with the wrong crowd didn’t help either. • I had no confidence . . . I had my goals too low and I just had

to realize that I need to take care of my needs. • It’s really hard for me . . . with words that sound the same and


they’re spelled differently. Like “there,” “they’re,” and “their.” That was hard for me cause I was always using the wrong “there,” you know (chuckle). • I knew I had a lotta good tales I could tell. But I just couldn’t

get it all down, you know,’cause it’s still difficult for me to talk ’cause I have a speech impediment. And I thought it would help writing it down ’stead of trying to talk. Every time I opened my mouth, they was kids all around making fun of me. So it was hard. But if I’d have realized then that every child had their own little piece of something that was wrong. I thought I was the only one. • It don’t stick in my brain. It’s back there; I just have to open

it up. • I couldn’t keep it in my head. That’s what was going on with

me. I don’t like to read. I mean I am lazy at it anyway. • I walked through the doors here with a third-grade level

reading. Pronouncing out words is still awful hard for me— even hearing out the sounds, that’s a struggle. • When I started school here, I didn’t hardly know how to read

and write and nothing. There were words that I should have been able to spell and all, I wasn’t able to spell ’em. Things that I should have been able to understand, I didn’t understand them.

Extrinsic Attributions for Failure Often, the same students would offer up other explanations for the barriers they saw as standing in their way to full literacy: • I was in a special education schooling system and they didn’t

even want to teach me. I was treated really badly at school. The kids made fun at me. They kept saying stuff that beat me down. • I was in the doctor’s office and they found out that in my right

ear I have 75% no hearing in it. And my left ear is perfect. I have problems with my ‘l’ sounds, and when I do hear I have to look at people. They don’t know if it’s due because I had a


manic fever when I was a child, or because of my mechanical micro valve, and I’m not getting enough blood or oxygen to my brain and hearing area. • My parents had died and left me, the oldest boy, to take care

of the rest of the older ones, so I didn’t have a chance to go to school to learn to read and write because I had to start working when I was very young. I was about 11 years old when I started on a public job. • My family broke up when I was very young. We were in foster

homes for a while, and then from there we went to [an orphanage]. I tried going back to school, but I felt like I was being shunned from the other kids . . . So I just told my mother I wasn’t going anymore. I was going to go and work and help her out. • I was classified as MR. That stands for “mentally retarded”

and things like that. I was told that I would have to have someone watch over me the whole time, and you know being in the room with people talking not with you. You’re just there. They’re talking to someone else, so you’re just another body, and they think so incapable, and I was at the point where I felt that I was so incapable that I better have everyone talk to someone for me this and that and stuff. I had no confidence. Other extrinsic attributions included stories about lack of access to schooling and violence reported by many immigrants, described earlier.

Sources of Support and Motivation Despite such difficulties, all the participants in this study were fully engaged in continuing their education, and a common theme of support emerged from the interviews. This support came from different places, people, and sources, but it all was important and key to the motivation driving these students to attend class and work on their literacy skills. Often, teachers were credited for providing critical support and encouragement: • There’s sometimes things are a little bit too personal; you don’t

wanna talk about it, but I would talk to [a teacher] about it,


you know, and it feels good; it feels good to let it out. It feels good because you feel like you lost ten pounds, you know. • There was no boring time. Sometime I’m really tired from

work or something like that, and talking to [the teacher], she always give me something to make me feel better, taught me something . . . if I just really felt lousy going to school, I’ll talk to her. She’ll ask how’s ——— and I tell her what’s wrong with ——— and things like that and then she will talk to me and after that I feel okay and do my homework. • I have my reading tutor for a year and a half now. She’s been

very, very patient with me. She’s been helping me build up my sounds and show me how to do [math]. We learn things together . . . I’ll do just anything for the Adult Learning Center for their helping me out and being very patient with me. • The woman that teaches us helps us quite a lot. Any problem

that we might have, she tries to help. • We got a lot of teachers in here and you can go to them and

ask them different things and they’ll try to help you, or show you. They are very lovely people. These adult students also reported receiving significant support from family members. At times this support was given to encourage the individual to continue schooling. At other times, family members provided the support needed to get by in life with low literacy skills. Occasionally, participants told us about family members’ attempts to teach them to read and/or write: • [My husband] took care of everything. He tried to teach me,

but he went at it the way that I didn’t think it shoulda been. I’d be ’writing a story or trying to spell something and I’d ask him, and he would go into what other meanings the word has. But I was wanting to know how to spell it. And I’d swear up and down I wouldn’t try again, but then a month or so I’d bug him again. • [My husband] he’d come in and he’d set down and, you know,

he’d help me read and he helped me a whole lot with the writing. But, he started to work so that cut that down. But before long, it’d be winter [when he doesn’t work as much] and


we’ll be able to stay here, and when you’re together twentyfour hours a day, you might can do a little bit. • My husband, he always read. He read to me and the kids. • Before, I couldn’t go out alone. I had to go with my husband

so he could help me. He used to do all, everything. • He [first husband] took care of everything. I didn’t need to

[read and write], no. • Yeah, they [her parents before she got married] took care of

everything [reading and writing tasks]. • My mother, when they run the cafe´, I waited tables and I

didn’t have to know how to write to do that ’cause I could go tell my daddy, and he had a memory, you know, like a horse. You tell him, and he’d keep it all in order. • My wife, she used to help me do everything. She used to have

to make up all the [church] program, do all of the reading and writing going on. Support and encouragement were also offered by people other than family members: • Reading, like, all these letters that I’ve been getting for child

support. I used to have people read ’em for me. Even friends would write to me, and I would have people read ’em for me. • [My case worker] she sent me in. She just said, “Okay, now, go

to school.” • Well, this other girl was going to join it [adult literacy pro-

gram], and she didn’t really want to be alone in the class, so she asked me, why don’t I join it? I says, “sounds interesting.” So I tried it, and I’ve been there ever since. • Sometimes I can’t understand what the words are . . . but at

least I try to read and somebody, people especially in the store, [will help]. • but I know now that the Lord was dealing with me in studying

and then learning about his word and everything, so I was able to learn more about how to spell different things in the Bible than I did in history.

To Learn to Read and Write 9 • Actually, God is first, you know, and I study going to church

and talk to God. I talk to God a lot, and He helped me out a lot. He’s pushed me a lot, you know. • I guess God chooses that day for you, you know, and I guess

this is my year. Although the participants stated that many people helped and were still helping them in their struggle to learn to read and write, they also talked a lot about their intrinsic motivations, which ranged from personal feelings of empowerment to the desire to be better workers or better parents. Following are selected observations reflecting these feelings: • It feels good [to be learning to read]. I wish I had just had all

this power back then. But it’s never too late. • [I’ve felt I could learn to read] ever since my little one has been

in my life. If I would’ve known he was gonna change my life for the better . . . • I’m testing myself. I wanna know what I’ve really learned. I re-

ally wanna know how far I’ve gone because if I am reading a little bit more, I’ll probably learn more like science, or whatever—things I didn’t know back then, I’m learning now. • I have the baby now, and I read books with him. He’s got his

own little library. • Hopefully, I’ll get my license [GED] and get more respect. You

know, people see that license, you get more respect. • I wanna be first! I wanna do everything first now. I wanna

make up for all the years. I’m serious, for all the 39 years. • Well, what really interested me was I was wantin’ to write a

story about my brother’s death. About how he was killed and how much time did the guy that killed him spend in jail. The boy that killed my brother, when he got out, he was out a year and then he killed a boy. And I was wantin’ to investigate that ’cause I don’t know if he was shot, when the police shot him, but I never did find out if he was killed. • I just wanted to sit and read a book. I’d see people sittin’ back,

relaxin’, readin’ a book. And I’ve always wanted to do that.

10 Print Literacy Development • What made me decide to go to school? It was because after I

wasn’t working or nothing like that I needed something to put my time into. • It’s a great encouragement for your kids, whether they are little

to big, or big to little, you have a positive role model to them and that’s what counts. • We wrote an essay about why we wanted to get our GED, and

I said in mine that I want to earn mine; I don’t want people to give it to me.

Summary Characteristics of LPALS Sample Within our sample, 71% of the students were women and 29% were men. The literacy levels of these students ranged from preliterate to eleventh grade ⫹. By far, the majority of them, 71%, were judged by their teachers to be reading below eighth grade level. Teachers reported that most of the students attended class quite regularly, with 57% attending “very regularly.” About 38% of the students spoke a language other than English as their first language. Finally, 26% of our participants were studying to improve their literacy in one-onone settings, working with tutors, while the rest of the students participated in class settings of various types.

Literacy and Lives These people generously shared with us their struggles, perceived shortcomings, hopes, and fears. They told us about their valiant attempts to “get more respect” and to “learn more.” They told us about their literacy practices, the texts they read and write now, had read or written in the past but no longer do, and those texts that they began to read and write more and perhaps for the first time, after beginning their current literacy class. They provided us with a picture of lived literacy for a group of “low-literate” adults, and this, in itself, was a tremendous service. As we explore the characteristics of their literacy instruction which accounted for their growth as literate persons, we will draw conclusions about what kind of literacy instruction in general could perhaps have helped these students, and others like them, earlier on in their


development. First, however, we will briefly describe the design and methods of the LPALS study. The results of this study have been published both as a final report by the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy and as a research report in Reading Research Quarterly (Purcell-Gates, Degener, Jacobson, & Soler, 2000; Purcell-Gates, Degener, Jacobson, & Soler, 2002). For full details of the design, procedures, data collection, data analysis, and results, the reader is advised to read either of those accounts.

m

CHAPTER TWO

The LPALS Study

The LPALS study was designed to explore relationships between two dimensions of adult literacy instruction and change in the literacy practices of the adult students. We operationally defined change for the LPALS study as (a) reading or writing particular types of texts more often than before and/or (b) beginning to read or write new types of texts for the first time. We were interested in ways that adult students such as those you met in the last chapter could be helped by this last chance at instruction in reading and writing. How could they move reading and writing into their lives to a greater degree?1

Authenticity and Collaboration Given this interest in instructional impact on out-of-school literacy practices, we focused on the following two aspects of adult literacy instruction: • The degree to which the reading and writing activities and

texts are authentic. • The degree to which the relationship between the teacher and

the students reflects a power distribution that can be called dialogic or collaborative.

The LPALS Study 13

We labeled reading and writing activities and texts authentic if the written texts were either identical or very similar to those texts that occur in the lives of people outside of an instructional setting designed to teach reading and writing skills. Examples of authentic texts include novels, newspapers, government forms, and health reports. Authentic purposes for reading or writing these texts would include reading a novel for entertainment and discussing it with others who had also read it; reading a newspaper for information about a news story; reading and completing a government form to apply for aid; or reading the result of a mammogram to learn a woman’s health status. Note: these purposes for reading or writing the related texts reflect the reasons that literate people would read or write those texts outside of school as they go about their different and varied life activities. We labeled the relationships between teachers and their students as collaborative if the decisions about what to study, how to study, and how to assess were made as the result of dialogue and equal input between them rather than resulting from a preset curriculum or decided primarily by teacher or program directors. We decided to focus on these two instructional dimensions because, first, they both theoretically suggested an impact on literacy practices, and, second, adult literacy educators and researchers were recommending them as good practice. Theoretically, one could argue that if students learn to read and write, or further develop their reading and writing abilities, in school using texts that are the same, or very similar, as those texts that exist out in the world, AND if they read and write those texts for the same purposes that people read and write them in their out-of-school lives, then they are more likely to carry those school-learned practices out into their lives. Thus, it would make sense to involve learners in real-life literacy practices in the classroom to ease the transference problem.2 We made similar theoretical justifications for the second dimension, collaboration. If adult students and their teachers share on an equal basis the decisions regarding their program and their instruction, then they are more likely to learn to read and write those texts that they see as relevant to their lives. This in turn will help ensure that they take their newly learned literacy practices into their lives outside of school. How widespread is authentic and collaborative instruction in adult literacy classes?


Adult Literacy Classes As preparation for the LPALS study, we undertook a survey of adult literacy program directors across the United States (Purcell-Gates, Degener, & Jacobson, 2001). Using a short questionnaire, delivered over list-servs and by mail for randomly selected programs, we asked spokespersons of adult literacy programs to describe their programs. The questionnaire was structured to gain information about the two dimensions of interest: (a) the degree of collaboration, or power sharing, between the teacher and the students; and (b) the degree to which the activities and materials in the classes reflect real-life literacy uses.3 We gathered information from 271 adult literacy programs, from 42 states. We sampled programs whose major focus was literacy for adult students, including adult literacy classes, individual tutoring arrangements, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) literacy, workplace literacy, family literacy programs, library-based programs, and prison education programs. They were solicited primarily by letters mailed to 900 randomly selected adult literacy programs, evenly distributed across the National Institute for Literacy regions. For this survey, we designed a questionnaire to elicit information about programs that would inform a holistic method of coding for the dimensions of interest—(a) authenticity and (b) collaborative teacher/student relationships. To address the validity issues that accompany questionnaire data, we did the following: (a) we kept the questionnaire short—limited to one page—to encourage response; (b) we designed several questions, soliciting different types of information, that would inform each dimensional coding decision, allowing us to triangulate within the questionnaire on the coding for the dimension of interest; and (c) we gave the participants no explicit knowledge of the dimensions of interest and avoided revealing this through the wording of our questions (Goetze & LeCompte, 1984). We coded the responses along the two dimensions reflecting how authentic the literacy work was deemed to be and how collaborative the program was judged to be. We used a matrix to display our data with the authentic/school only dimension along one axis and the collaborative/teacher-directed dimension along the other axis. The following operational definitions describe what we would expect to see in a given class that was coded for each category. We

The LPALS Study 15

carried these operational definitions to our analysis of the data from the LPALS study.

Authentic/School-Only Dimension • Highly Authentic: Programs that use no skill books, have no

set curricula, and use realia, newspapers, journals, novels, work manuals, driver’s license materials, and so on. Programs are strongly focused on authentic materials and literacy activities that are relevant to the students’ lives and reflect students’ needs. Sample quotes from responses: “All authentic materials; newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, children’s books, newsletters sent home from school” (from a family literacy program). “No basic text. Individualized—basically use a Language Experience Approach” (from an ABE program). • Somewhat Authentic: Programs that may mention skills and may

use some published textbooks and workbooks, but student work is heavily concentrated on real-life texts and issues. Sample quotes: “We use lots of life-based materials—newspapers, brochures, flyers. Also pre-GED books . . . and vocabulary books” (from an ABE program). “Writing using learners’ lives. Wilson Language, Steck-Vaughn” (from an ABE program). • Somewhat School-Only: Programs that are more highly focused

on skills, with the majority of activities concentrating on phonics work, grammar work, workbooks, and the like. Materials tend to be published textbooks and workbooks, though some mention may be made of authentic materials or activities such as the Language Experience Approach, newspapers, and journals. Sample quotes: “Some Laubach workbooks; some Steck-Vaughn preGED workbooks. We prefer to use the real stuff when it’s available but usually in concert with an existing teaching tool” (from a one-on-one volunteer program). “Trained tutors follow instructions in guides . . . Laubach instructional materials; a large source of biblical instructional materials with Bibles and reference books rewritten at fourth grade level” (from an ABE program). • Highly School-Only: Programs that have a set curriculum with a

focus on skills, phonics, flash cards, and so on. Most, if not all, materials are from publishers, and there is almost no mention of


authentic materials or activities. “We use the video tapes produced by Scottish Rite Hospital (Orton-Gillingham) as well as corresponding teacher workbooks and student workbooks. Also use manipulatives such as plastic letters of the alphabet” (from an ABE program). Sample quotes: “Phonetic drill on cassette tape, drill with instructor, reading word lists, sentences and stories, spelling practice” (from an ABE program).

Collaborative/Teacher-Directed Dimension • Highly Collaborative: Programs where students work with

teachers to create the course, choose the materials, activities, as well as the assessment procedures, participating in their own assessments. Students are also involved in all aspects of the program, may serve on the board, and make decisions regarding meeting times, class rules, class structure, location, and so on. Students may also work to publish newsletters and to recruit new students. These programs may mention [Paolo] Freire as a model. Sample quotes from responses: “Specific readings/topics are determined by individual classes and are primarily generated from parents’ suggestions” (from a family literacy program). “Students are the primary decision makers” (from an ABE program). • Somewhat Collaborative: Programs where student input is crit-

ical. Students work with teachers to create curriculum, to plan study, and so on. There is a great deal of collaboration in choosing course content and activities. Students are in charge of their own learning. These programs may mention Freire as a model. Sample quotes from responses: “We have no specific textbooks. We draw from many sources and follow the lead of the participants’ needs in planning curriculum” (from an ABE program). “At the end of each session, students evaluate the instructor, the materials, and class activities” (from an ABE program). This designation differs from the first primarily around the areas of assessment and student involvement in the program structure and procedures such as serving on the board and planning location and times of classes. • Somewhat Teacher-Directed: Programs where students’ goals,

interests, and/or needs are taken into account when creating

The LPALS Study 17

course content. Students have some input into class content, usually in the form of interest inventories, students’ goals, or individual educational plans. Teachers encourage student input. Students typically choose from materials and activities that have already been selected by the teacher. Programs in this category are considered to be client-driven, though ultimate course decisions typically rest with the teachers. Teachers give needs assessments throughout the students’ time in the program. Teachers and students periodically reflect on goals and whether or not the program is meeting them. Sample quotes from responses: (Program described as student-centered) “Participatory . . . but students don’t regularly make suggestions” (from a family literacy program). “Classes are designed to meet students’ individual needs—identified by counselors’ and teachers’ meetings with students” (from an ABE program). • Highly Teacher-Directed: Programs where students have little

or no input into course content, activities, or materials. Students may be given a needs analysis when they start the program, but needs are not continually reevaluated. These programs may say that the demographics of the students impact course content. Sample quotes from responses: “A needs analysis is done in each class and teachers plan content and activities accordingly” (from an ABE program for women). “We follow curriculum recommended by the state Education Department” (from an ABE program). The results of this survey showed a clear clustering of classes using literacy materials and activities that are not authentic to the lives of their students and that involve noncollaborative, teacher-directed, teacher–student relationships. A total of 73% of the programs (n ⫽ 197) were described as consisting of activities and materials that were somewhat or highly appropriate only for in-school literacy learning, and these programs were somewhat to highly teacher-directed. Program descriptions judged as more authentic and teacher-directed comprised the next most common dimensional category with 17% (n ⫽ 45). This was followed by the dimensional space of authentic/ collaborative, wherein 8% (n ⫽ 23) of the responding programs were assigned. The smallest number of program descriptions fell within the school-only/collaborative dimensional space. Only 2% (n ⫽ 6)


of the program descriptions were judged to consist of somewhat to highly authentic activities and materials with student participation in choosing these activities and materials.

Looking at Classes and Interviewing Students The subsequent LPALS study was designed to look for relationships between the presence of these two dimensions and change in literacy practice by the students. To do so, we needed to collect data from two primary sources. To determine the degree of authenticity and collaboration in a specified class, we needed to get the information about the class that would allow us to make this judgment. Then, we needed to identify students in that class and solicit from them information about their literacy practices and whether or not they had changed since beginning the class.

Locating Classes and Students We enlisted teachers, classes, and students through a process often called snowball sampling. That is, we collected classes and students as we went along for the first nine months; we did not begin data collection at the same time for all of the sites. We initially contacted all those who had responded to the just-completed typology study, described above. Simultaneously, we put out calls over adult literacy list-servs, through the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) contacts, databases, and publications. In addition, we began personally contacting state and regional adult education programs, asking for volunteer programs and teachers. To be part of the study, a site needed (a) at least one teacher willing to participate; (b) at least three students from that teacher’s class, or the student in a tutor/tutee arrangement, willing to participate; and (c) an identified local data collector, willing to be trained by us and to collect the data over the course of the study. In recruiting students, we targeted adults who were working to improve their literacy skills. We considered only students who were in the basic education levels, ranging from acquisition of basic literacy to acquisition of literacy skills needed to pass the General Educational Development (GED exam). We established two sets of criteria for a cutoff level for ESOL students and the native English-

The LPALS Study 19

speaking students. ESOL students were accepted into the participant pool only if they did not possess high school diplomas or equivalents from their native countries. Furthermore, they were not accepted if based on self-report they practiced high levels of literacy in their native language. Although many of these students were in ESOL classes, for our purposes, they needed to be working on their literacy skills as well as on learning to read, speak, and understand English. For native English-speaking students, possession of a high school diploma or its equivalent did not disqualify them from the study, but they needed to be in their adult class to improve their literacy skills. The participating adult literacy students were paid $10 for each questionnaire interview.

Data Collection We collected the class data to judge the degree of authentic reading and writing and the degree of collaborative student/teacher relations using three different protocols to allow us to triangulate our data: (1) a five-page teacher questionnaire; (2) a class observation protocol; and (3) a student interview protocol. All of the protocols had been piloted, and their reliability was assessed and incorporated into the final analyses. To gather data for our dependent variable—information about change in the literacy practices of the adult learners—we developed an extensive questionnaire for use with each student. The questionnaire asked about specific literacy practices such as reading coupons, writing personal letters, and reading books. The interviews were conducted in the homes of the participants where the different texts that were read or written could be identified or recalled more easily. Each participant was interviewed at three-month intervals for a year or as long as they attended their class. For participants who spoke mainly Spanish, we used a Spanish version of the questionnaire, translated by a native Spanish-speaking member of the research team. Spanish-speaking data collectors obtained data from primarily Spanish-speaking participants. For other nonnative English speakers, they needed to speak and understand English well enough to answer the interview questions in English. Finally, we audiotaped one student from each site with a focus on


their experiences learning to read and write. The portraits of the participants in Chapter 1 came from the transcripts of these interviews.

Analyzing for Relationships We coded the classroom data and the literacy practices data and transferred them to databases for analysis. The analyses were done using Item Response Theory for scaling the questionnaire responses and modeling the relationships among the variables of interest, including the control variables of types of classes, the participants’ literacy levels at the start of their classes, the participants’ attendance records, number of hours the class met each week, number of days in the program for each participant, gender, and whether or not the adult student learned within a class or from a tutor.

Literacy Practice Change from the Students’ Perspectives Further analysis4 shed more light on the overarching issue being addressed here—the link, or relationships, between out-of-school literacies (actualized, or lived literacy) and academic, school-based literacy. Although our first analysis provided answers to our research questions regarding instruction and literacy practice, as we read through the literacy practice questionnaires we noticed that another perspective on literacy practice change was being reflected in the comments offered by the students themselves. The literacy practices questionnaire included space for recording comments participants made spontaneously in response to each question about their literacy practices (such as “Have you ever read a menu?”). In many cases, the recorded responses involved unelaborated chronological data (“Began in 1983”). However, a large number of completed questionnaires contained more elaborated comments. These comments were sometimes the direct quotes of participants (“When I got my first job” in response to the question about when the participant began a certain practice). More often, these comments were data collectors’ summaries of students’ comments (“J—— began practice six years ago when her husband wanted to go out to eat.”). We were impressed by the spontaneous comments provided by the students and noted by the data collectors. Virtually none of the students attributed their starting or stopping a literacy practice to the

The LPALS Study 21

presence or absence of the two instructional dimensions we were interested in: authenticity and collaborative teacher/student relationship. In fact, literacy instruction was only one of a myriad of life changes to which these students attributed their different shifts in literacy practice. We decided to conduct a separate, qualitative analysis of this comment data to document our impressions.

Looking for Answers through the Participants’ Eyes We divided and analyzed the literacy practices questionnaires of the 173 study participants (a total of 321 questionnaires), looking for elaborated information regarding changes in participants’ literacy practices. Comments were treated as data for this analysis only if they provided additional information not captured by the quantitative analysis of the questionnaires. For example, the comment “Reads menus more frequently now” would not have been included in the database because this information would have been captured by the yes/no question, “Do you think you’ve read any of these items more often since you began attending your literacy class?” However, if a specific reason was given for the change in frequency, such as getting a new job or going out to eat more often, the comment was included in the database. We included more types of changes in literacy practice in this analysis. Because we were no longer looking primarily at increases in frequency or type of literacy practices but in literacy practice change overall, we included comments that related to: (a) increase in frequency of a literacy practice; (b) decrease in frequency of a literacy practice; (c) initiation of a new practice; and (d) cessation of a literacy practice. Furthermore, for this analysis, we included all changes mentioned by the participant, regardless of when they occurred. In other words, we did not limit our analysis to those changes that occurred after the student began the class they were currently attending. For ESOL students, a language shift regarding an existing literacy practice was not coded as a change in practice (for example, when a student stopped reading menus in Spanish and began reading them in English, after moving to the United States). Of the 173 participants whose questionnaire responses were considered for this qualitative analysis, 117 had comments recorded that provided additional insight into their literacy practice changes. The


questionnaires of the 56 participants that were not considered for this analysis either had no comments filled in at all, had comments that did not expand on the information captured by the quantitative analysis, or had comments that did not account for changes in literacy practices. It was up to each individual data collector to decide which comments should be recorded and whether or not to record comments at all. Therefore, one cannot conclude that the 56 participants whose questionnaires were not used for this analysis did not share their thoughts about their changes in literacy practices. It may simply be that their comments were not recorded. The results of this analysis inform our theoretical discussion and thesis presented later in this book.

Literacy Practice Change from Authentic Practice and Instruction After documenting the instruction of 77 adult literacy classes and the frequencies and types of literacy practices of 159 adult students, we concluded that two instructional factors were significantly associated5 with positive change in literacy practice in the lives of these adult students: (1) learning to read and write with more fluency and skill; and (2) the degree to which the materials and purposes for reading and writing them in the classes matched those found outside of school in the lives of the learners.6

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CHAPTER THREE

How Does Print Literacy Develop?

How do we account for the successes and relative failures of the LPALS students from these results?1 We had two independent findings. First, those adults who read the least well reported reading and writing new types of texts and reading and writing familiar texts more frequently as they became more skilled in the context of instruction. This finding is easier to think about. It makes sense that students who read the least well would make the greatest gains in incorporating the practice of reading and writing into their lives after they learn to read and write better. How does this accord, however, with the second equally strong finding? Why did the students in classes where they read more authentic texts for more authentic purposes, as compared to classes that were more focused on skills, increase the frequency with which they read and wrote in their lives and begin reading and writing new and more complex texts? In making sense of the LPALS results, we found ourselves drawing on theories from two fairly distinct camps of scholars and researchers: the literacy as skill development camp, which sees literacy and literacy development as primarily cognitive, and the social practice camp, which sees literacy as primarily social and cultural. In the remainder of this book, we will explore how to reframe the theoretical claims of these two lenses on literacy into one lens to account for success and failure at school-based literacy instruction for adults and children from diverse backgrounds, nationalities, languages, and


cultures. We will henceforth use the term print literacy development to more carefully specify that we are focusing on learning to read and write.

Locating Ourselves Before we proceed, however, we will present our professional histories and concerns in order to help the reader contextualize, understand, or recognize, our concerns about literacy development and literacy instruction.

As Teachers All three of us have histories as teachers; we were teachers before we became researchers. Two of us are still literacy teachers to this day.2 This fact has a clear and indisputable influence on our perspectives on literacy and literacy development. We know learners, and we understand teachers. Our teaching experiences span early childhood through adult and English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Each of us has attempted to respond as teachers to students who want to learn to read and write and to parents who desperately want their children to acquire literacy. Many of these parents were denied access to basic schooling, or they were failed by schools that could not, or would not, provide them with the appropriate literacy instruction. The same is true for the adult literacy learners. All of these learners, and the parents of the young ones, want one basic result from their schooling: the ability to read and write at levels that will allow them to lead full and rewarding lives. When these learners think about learning to read and write, they envision, and mean, reading and writing print. Most literacy learners seldom consciously acknowledge the broader communicative activities of literacy—speaking, listening, and viewing. For most learners literacy means reading and writing print, and schooling is seen as the vehicle for achieving it. At the same time, many literacy learners would concur that people use reading and writing in different ways. Some read seed catalogues; others read machinery directions; still others read newspapers; and some read classic novels. Some write poetry, and others write quick notes to their spouses. They know that people ascribe different values

How Does Print Literacy Develop? 25

to different literacy practices. They also know that different social groups view different literacy practices as more or less important in their lives. However, when it all comes down to it, all of the learners whom we have taught want schooling to provide them with the basic ability to read and write print. When queried about the broader, social aspects of literacy, they respond with the conviction that instruction must provide individuals with the ability to read and write whichever written texts they value. Based on these experiences with learners and with teaching literacy, the focus of our book is on the development of the ability to read and write print. However, we will examine print literacy development as it takes place within specific sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts. From our experiences, we believe that questions about developing mastery of print literacy cannot be asked without accounting for differing accesses to print, to education, or to enough money to live.

As Researchers As teachers, each of us has developed research interests that attempt to better understand and describe factors, methods, and contexts that increase the learners’ opportunities to read and write print. We have collectively studied emergent literacy development in homes and communities, beginning literacy instruction, family literacy programs, adult literacy pedagogy, adult literacy learners, liberatory literacy instruction, conditions of oppression and denial of educational opportunity in the United States and elsewhere, and the literacy practices of a range of adult learners. Thus, the ensuing discussion draws on our collective experience with both teaching and research into issues of literacy development. Hundreds of books and thousands of academic articles, from different disciplinary perspectives, including psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, have been written on the topic of how humans learn to read and write. The description provided here will reflect the contributions of much of this body of work while, at the same time, providing our own syntheses as filtered through our own theoretical lens. The following prećis of literacy development forms the backdrop for the discussion that follows.


What Is Literacy? Before we can address what we mean by print literacy development, we must first deal with what we mean by literacy. Definitions of literacy currently range from a focus on individual learners acquiring the skills needed to decode, encode, and comprehend written symbols and texts to literacy as situated social practice, with the term literacy practice replacing the term literacy skill.3 This more recent focus on literacy as practice and as socially situated accords with the theoretical and research orientation in the social sciences that “looks beyond the individual to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which people lead their lives” (Cushman et al., 2001, p. 3). As can be seen by our definition of print literacy in the next paragraph, this orientation is very much at the forefront for us as well. Recently, the concept of literacy has grown to encompass such aspects as media literacy, computer literacy, and even emotional literacy. It includes speaking and listening, viewing, and art. It is to distinguish our focus from within these other definitions of literacy that we are using the term print literacy, which we define as follows: Print literacy is the reading and writing of some form of print for communicative purposes inherent in peoples’ lives. Thus, it involves decoding and encoding of a linguistically based symbol system and is driven by social processes that rely upon communication and meaning. Because it is social, its practice reflects sociocultural patterns and purposes as well as power relationships and political forces.

Given this definition, we provide the following definition of print literacy development: Print literacy development is the acquisition, improvement, elaboration, and extension of the abilities and strategies necessary to comprehend and produce written language for communicative purposes within sociocultural contexts. This includes understanding the social meanings of literate activity and mastering the pragmatics and semiotics of literacy activity.

As these two definitions reveal, we are operating out of a theoretical frame that includes both cultural and cognitive perspectives on literacy learning. We easily and naturally see cognition as occurring always within cultural contexts, which we define as settings for

How Does Print Literacy Develop? 27

human activity shaped by social structures, languages, conventions, history, and goals.

Literacy Development of Individuals within Sociocultural Contexts We will look at the growth of literacy ability and use within sociocultural contexts over time and place, and we will do so at the level of the individual learner. This is important because there is a growing movement among theorists of literacy to deny the relevance of individuals in the study of literacy, reflecting the “literacy is social not individual” stance. However, we point out that literacy development trends and rates reflect a process that occurs one learner at a time, and it is at the individual level of acquisition and achievement that a great deal of concern and effort at the policy level is currently being directed. By focusing on the individual level, however, we do not mean to consider print literacy development outside of sociocultural constraints and contexts. Rather, we hope to elucidate the roles of these contexts in individual learning.

Literacy Instruction and Practice as Factors in Print Literacy Development The problem that we are posing for this book involves the relationship between the two elements that surfaced in the LPALS findings: instruction for skill development and the social practice of that skill. The thesis we will develop is that print literacy development occurs both inside and outside of schools and across the life span. This is not an additive, or linear, process, as in first one learns to read in some form of instructional context; then one practices and perfects what has been learned by using these skills in life. Rather, it is a mutually constitutive process, with development occurring at all stages within and outside of instruction. Through this argument, we hope to bridge the apparent but, to our minds, illusory, theoretical gap that currently exists between literacy scholars who on the one hand maintain that literacy should be studied as primarily social and multiple4 and those who, on the other hand, insist that it be primarily viewed as individual, cognitive, and


dependent upon learned skills.5 To clarify the divide between these two influential and dominant theories, in the following two chapters we lay out the presuppositions, assumptions, and claims of each. Chapter 4 will present the Literacy as Social Practice Perspective, and Chapter 5 will do the same for the Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development Perspective. We will then proceed to build our own argument for focusing a broader lens on print literacy development. Building on the seminal work of Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole, and other cognitive social psychologists,6 we sketch the parameters of this wider lens that reveals the interrelations between the two theoretical perspectives. In the process, we hope to advance our understanding of print literacy instruction, of print literacy development on an individual as well as on social and economic levels worldwide, and of the interrelationships among literacy opportunity, literacy practice, and literacy abilities.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Literacy as Social Practice I’m able to talk to people about different things, not about just the same thing, the same problem. I’m able to communicate and joke and talk about different stuff, you know. . . . I picked up La Raza, and I was reading . . . and it was about this mother, that she was stealing, and the daughter didn’t know . . . so I was talking to my neighbor about it and she goes, “Oh, I read that!” And we started talking about it, and it felt good because it was about something different, besides problems. I’ve learned to do my own grocery list; I can read my own letters; I have my personal life now. Before I had to share my life with everybody, which I didn’t like. Now I have my personal life. It feels good! MARIA, LPALS PARTICIPANT AND STUDENT IN A PRE-GED CLASS

As Maria’s comments illustrate, print literacy is more than merely a set of cognitive and information processing skills. Reading and writing are always associated with and mediate different social activities; they are socially situated. Maria reads the newspaper La Raza as part of the communicative network she shares with her neighbor. She identifies with the content of the stories and assimilates it within her own personal and relational frames of knowledge. She reads personal letters sent to her from relatives and friends, reveling in the sense of privacy that this literacy skill provides her. New Literacy scholars have converged on a definition of literacy as social practice (Gee, Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanicˇ, 2000). From this perspective, reading and writing are but elements of larger practices that are socially patterned. Some history of language theory will help here. Much of the theory of literacy as social emanates from a Bakhtinian view of language as essentially dialogic and socially constructed (Bakhtin, 1986). V. N. Volosinov1 writes that “Signs emerge, after


all, only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another” (Volosinov, 1996, 11). For this reason, we can say that the word (or in general any sign) is inter-individual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside of the “soul” of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable rights to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes up with it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). (Bakhtin, 1986, 121– 122)

Any act of reading or writing, the use of words, cannot escape this sharing and struggle over words. For this reason, the meaning of what is written or read, and the meaning of the act of reading or writing, is necessarily contextual. It is social. Bakhtin also argued that the contextual character of language use makes it radically creative: Two or more sentences can be absolutely identical (when they are superimposed on one another, like two geometrical figures, they coincide); moreover, we must allow that any sentence, even a complex one, in the unlimited speech flow can be repeated an unlimited number of times in completely identical form. But as an utterance (or part of an utterance) no one sentence, even if it has only one word, can ever be repeated; it is always a new utterance (even if it is a quotation). (Bakhtin, 1986, 108)

Writing or reading “thank you,” for example, is never the exact same event. Attempts to isolate words as repeatable texts—as people do when they create assessments, for example—cannot account for the newly created and unrepeatable meanings that arise when the words are read by new readers, or indeed, by a single reader at more than one moment in time. Because of this focus on the social life of words, and the negotiation that takes place between two or more people, some social practice theories of literacy have drawn on Vygotsky’s theory of language and thought as essentially social activity (Kozulin, 1996; Leont’ev, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985). Others have taken this interindividual approach to literacy and been explicit in their use of ideology as an analytical frame. Volosinov points to the ideological nature of language and of any sign. This

Literacy as Social Practice 31

leads to the conclusion that one cannot consider even a letter, or grapheme, in use as ideologically neutral.2 While Volosinov was a theoretical linguist, researchers working in other disciplines have come to similar conclusions. Anthropologist Brian Street’s work in the villages of Iran led to his coining the term multiple literacies, which has been appropriated and developed by other New Literacy scholars (Street, 1984). The construct of multiple literacies captures the notion that many different literacies exist within different social contexts or domains. Street’s work describes the ways literacies are multiple, resulting from differing languages and writing systems as well as differing contexts and purposes for reading and writing. Literacies also vary with regards to participant structures, how the public/private dichotomy is constructed, and the use of certain rhetorical or discourse structures. Within the academic world, interest in the notion of multiple literacies arose gradually in the last quarter of the twentieth century from several different perspectives and concerns: (a) anthropology of literacy; (b) sociology of literacy; (c) critical theory; (d) emergent literacy, and (e) adult literacy, among others. Reflecting the critical theoretical perspective, Street asserts that the model of literacy from which he works is ideological in that it recognizes, given the multiplicity of literacies, that literacy practices are always associated with issues of power; they are never neutral technologies. By this he means that those who hold social and political power in a society determine which types of literacies are considered valid, of consequence, and worth teaching and measuring, and which ones are not. In addition, those in sociopolitical control determine who has access to the literacies in favor and who does not, through educational and economic policy decisions.

Key Theoretical Assumptions of Literacy as Social Although many studies of literacy as social practice have been published in recent years, the work of David Barton and Mary Hamilton and their Literacy Research Group at Lancaster University is perhaps the best known (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, 2000). They have laid out several key theoretical assumptions of the literacy as social practice stance (Barton & Hamilton, 2000, 8):

32 Print Literacy Development • Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these

can be inferred from events which are mediated by written texts. • There are different literacies associated with different domains

of life. • Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and

power relationships, and some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others. • Literacy is historically situated. • Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired

through processes of informal learning and sense making. Within this view, literacy practices are larger than acts of printbased reading and writing. Literacy practices are the socioculturally related ways of using written language, and they involve values, attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and social relationships. In this sense, they are not observable per se but must be inferred by the literacy events and texts utilized as part of the literacy practice. Literacy events are observable. They are generally defined as any instance of interaction with print, either writing or reading, or its interpretation. For this reason, analysis typically moves from literacy event to literacy practice, from what is happening to the meaning that the event has for participants, or from asking “what is happening” to “why is this happening?” For example, a common literacy event is the paying of bills. As part of this event, individuals can be observed reading bills to determine what is owed, writing checks to the company requesting the payment, writing addresses on the envelope, and putting on the proper postage. Behind these actions are a host of culturally shaped attitudes (bill paying is not a pleasurable activity for many), beliefs (it’s somehow criminal to not pay your bills), values (a man is as good as his word, and this includes paying debts), feelings (people worry about not having enough money to cover the bills), power relations (the people at the electric company will cut off your power if you don’t pay the bill), and social relationships (your family will suffer if the electricity is cut off). The act of paying bills may also include discussing with others the best way of dealing with the bill (such as installment plans) or whether the bill is correct. Thus, one


can also ask questions about the role of participant structure in literacy practice, as some texts are read in isolation, while others may be made public. Of course, this varies from context to context and among individuals. Again, it is the social nature of the literacy event that gives it resonance as a literacy practice. For example, a comparison of paying bills online by clicking a mouse and paying a utility bill with a cashier’s check would more than likely lead to questions about the social class of the individuals paying the bills. Within literacy events, one can identify and analyze different texts that are read or written. Literacy events can usually be inferred from texts. The process of moving from literacy event to literacy practice is a bit more ambiguous. For example, bills are typically paid by one member of a family or couple, and many of our LPALS participants reported this event as a relatively new one when they became independent from either their parents or spouse (who either left through divorce or who died). Just looking at a person paying a bill would not necessarily provide insight into the individual’s literacy history or practice, and there can be multiple interpretations of what sort of literacy practice informs a single literacy event. For the LPALS study, we documented the texts read and written by the participants, using these texts to imply literacy events and literacy practices. We used the term literacy practice, in our own sense, to describe the texts being read and written by the participants. By literacy practice, we were thinking of the reading and writing of text types. We did not intend this term to mean, or to compete with, Barton and Hamilton’s definition, which is broader and includes social practice. It was simply another denotation of the term practice.

Literacy as Social Practice Research While theorizing within the literacy as social practice paradigm predominates among many academics of language and literacy, some research has been done that documents and develops aspects of the theory. As previously mentioned, Barton and Hamilton’s group at Lancaster University has been particularly active in this regard. In their ethnography of the uses of reading and writing in one community in Lancaster in the 1990s, Barton and Hamilton documented the “local literacies,” or vernacular literacies, throughout the community (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). The final picture their data


draw is that of people of all walks of life using reading and writing to get things done in their lives: to manage households (writing lists, notes, paying bills), to shop (reading food ingredients, reading laundry requirements, writing grocery lists), to communicate with others (writing notes and letters to loved ones, writing formal letters to school personnel, sending and receiving greeting cards); to learn (reading books, writing essays, reading and following directions), to relax (reading novels and poetry; doing crossword puzzles); and to reflect (writing in diaries). More recently, members of their Literacy Research Group have been working to develop and expand their work and theory of literacy as social practice through additional research and theorizing.3 For example, one notion under consideration is that of time, recognizing that time is relative to personal perspective and not always a static background variable. In an examination of how understandings of time and literacy are co-constructed, Tusting cites Kapitske’s study of how “the literacy practices of Seventh Day Adventists change radically on the Sabbath; time is used as a marker between sacred and profane domains and between sacred and profane literacy practices” (Kapitske, 1995; Tusting, 2000). In this case, an understanding of Seventh Day Adventist concepts of time and literacy would be incomplete taken in isolation. As Tusting suggests: “Constantly bearing in mind the temporal nature of literacy practices can give us a more flexible conceptualization of what a practice ‘is’ ” (Tusting, 2000, 50). Time needs to be taken into account as a factor in studies of literacy, and this focus can contribute important insights to the study of literacy as social practice. Other researchers have used the literacy as social practice frame for exploring aspects of literacy in context. We will mention only a few works as examples. Anne Haas Dyson has asserted the social nature of literacy learning for over 20 years. She studies young children learning to write in school. In her latest book, The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write, she describes the ways in which a group of close friends pull from the multivoiced landscape of their worlds, including that of pop culture, to learn to appropriate written language into their symbolic repertoire (Dyson, 2003). She is particularly interested in how young learners bring symbolic resources to school from their social lives outside of school: “It is the process of transporting and transforming material across symbolic and social


borders—and the interplay of childhoods and school agendas they entail—that are at the heart of the developmental vision I aim to illuminate” (Dyson, 2003, 10). Deborah Brandt’s recent book, Literacy in American Lives, exemplifies Barton and Hamilton’s social practice principle that literacy is historically situated (Brandt, 2001). Brandt describes the literacy learning of 80 people born between 1895 and 1985 and examines the sources of the changing conditions of literacy learning. In particular, this study describes literacy learning within the context of large economic systems such as increasing industrialization and the subsequent falling away of farming as a typical way of life. Her analysis is of what she terms “sponsors of literacy”: “those agents who support or discourage literacy learning and development as ulterior motives in their own struggles for economic or political gain. . . . Analysis of sponsorship exposes the ways that individual acts of literacy learning partake of social and economic conditions around them and pinpoints the changing conditions of literacy learning across time” (Brandt, 2001, 26–27). Another researcher, Cynthia Lewis, studies literature instruction in middle school. Her award-winning book, Literacy Practices as Social Acts: Power, Status, and Cultural Norms in the Classroom (2001),4 explores the ways that classroom literacy practices—read alouds, independent reading, peer-led discussions, and teacher-led discussions— are shaped by social and cultural considerations and norms. Lewis describes her theoretical frame for this study as “social constructionist” and contrasts it with “social constructivism”: To bring this distinction to light, Hruby (2001) analyzed the difference between social constructivism and social constructionism. Social constructivism, he argued, is grounded in the epistemology of psychology, which “pays more attention to the social scaffolds and frameworks that promote the fashioning of such internal structures in a manner reasonably cohesive with an individual’s social surround.” Social constructionism, on the other hand, is grounded in the epistemology of sociology, which attends to “the way knowledge is constructed by, for, and between members of a discursively mediated community. (Lewis, 2001, 48)

Thus aligning herself less with Vygotsky than with J. P. Gee,5 Lewis reflects literacy researchers’ growing shift in focus away from the individual and toward the social. “Reading and writing are not pri-


marily mental acts,” she asserts. “They are primarily socially situated acts” (Lewis, 2001, pp. xvi–xvii). This shift of focus from individual acts of cognition and learning to social norms, power, and status reflects much of the recent work within the evolving literacy as social practice theory. As Brandt explains it in the introduction to her book on changing conditions for literacy learning: “this perspective tends to eschew references to skills or abilities at all, focusing instead on the concept of literate practices, emphasizing the grounded, routinized, multiple, and socially sanctioned ways in which reading and writing occur” (Brandt, 2001, p. 3).

Social Practice Theory as Context for LPALS Study We situated our study of change in the literacy practices of adult literacy students within the theory of literacy as social practice. Within this theory, everyday practices of reading and writing become interesting and worthy of study. In addition, the research questions evolved from previous work by Purcell-Gates that was also situated within a social practice theory of literacy, although one not quite as developed, having been conducted prior to much of the theorizing just described.

LPALS Rationale #1: Emergent Literacy Development The motivation for the LPALS study came from the cumulated body of emergent literacy research, particularly the more recently completed studies by Purcell-Gates (1988, 1995, 1996; Purcell-Gates & Dahl, 1991). One of these studies, for which low-income children were followed through kindergarten and first grade, had documented statistically significant relationships between (a) the degree to which young children possessed crucial emergent literacy concepts before they started kindergarten and (b) the degree of success they experienced in learning to read and write by the end of first grade. These emergent literacy concepts included (a) knowledge that print “says,” or is linguistically semiotic and that it serves different functions in people’s lives; (b) demonstrable control of vocabulary and syntax associated with written narrative as contrasted to oral narrative; and (c) knowledge of a range of concepts of print, as measured by Marie Clay’s Concepts of Print Assessment, and a demonstrated under-


standing that in English, print codes language at the phoneme/letter level, referred to as the alphabetic principle (Clay, 1979). Among these concepts, the knowledge that print “says” and serves different purposes in people’s lives, which we termed intentionality, was the most predictive of end-of-first-grade success. Following the thread empirically as to the source of these concepts, Purcell-Gates subsequently conducted an intensive participant observation study in the homes of 20 families of mixed ethnicity who were all considered low income. Each family had at least one child between the ages of 4 and 6. Researchers, matched to the families by ethnicity, observed in each home for an aggregated week, noting all instances of reading and writing that occurred during the hours the focal children were awake. Thus, they were noting all literacy events (see previous discussion). After collecting data for an aggregated week per family, the researchers gave the focal children the same battery of emergent literacy assessments as were used in the previous study of K–1 children. The subsequent analysis, involving simple correlations and qualitative sorting and categorizing, revealed significant and complex relationships among the dependent variables. Young children who experienced more instances of reading and writing in sheer frequency scored significantly higher on the task measuring the intentionality of print. Concepts about print and knowledge of the alphabetic principle were both related to a variety of types of reading and writing like storybook reading, reading print on game boxes, television and movie ads, and to adult reading and writing of books, newspapers, and essays for organizations like church. Sorting the literacy events into social domains, Purcell-Gates concluded that many of the emergent literacy concepts were related to reading and writing that was child-focused or of potentially greater interest to the children. For example, print used for entertainment and for storybook reading was most highly related to emergent literacy knowledge. Knowledge of the vocabulary and syntax of written narrative was exclusively related to being read to. Finally, a textual analysis of the texts involved in the literacy events (from coupons and food container texts to stories and essays) revealed that the more linguistically complex and “written” the texts were, the higher were the children’s scores on concepts of print and the alphabetic principle (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1986).


An ethnography of one child and his mother provided confirming evidence of these conclusions—that the number and types of literacy events and literacy practices in the homes of young children constitute the environment within which literacy development begins (Purcell-Gates, 1995). The informants for this ethnography, 7-yearold Donny and his mother, Jenny, were members of a family in which no one could read or write with the exceptions of their names. Thus, Donny lived in an environment sans print, from a phenomenologic perspective. There were no literacy practices, literacy events, or texts in use from which this child could observe and learn. After two years of working with Donny and Jenny, the researcher concluded that, for Donny, print did not exist in any sort of functional semiotic sense. Without this foundational concept of the intentionality of print, he was not capable of retaining information taught in school regarding its letter/sound relationships, nor was he able to learn to read or write. Literacy development did not begin for Donny until the author, as his teacher, arranged experiences with literacy practices and events in ways that were meaningful for him.

LPALS Rationale #2: Efficacy of Adult Literacy Instruction Donny had no literacy practices in his closest community—his family—within which to learn about reading and writing. Jenny, his mother, had dropped out of school in the seventh grade without knowing how to read or write anything but her name. His father had similarly dropped out of school after repeating seventh grade three times. He also had failed to learn to read or write anything but his name. Whereas Donny’s father had completely given up on schools, Jenny had repeatedly tried to learn to read by attending a series of adult literacy classes for a number of years. However, the instruction she encountered in these classes was very skills-based and decontextualized from actual practice, and Jenny never was able to transfer it to literacy practice in her own life. She still could not read or write anything but her name outside of adult literacy class. The researcher began working with Jenny on reading her own words—written as journal entries—which the researcher transcribed with conventional spelling and punctuation. Over time, Jenny began to understand that print was linguistically semiotic, and to read, com-


prehend, and write it, she must bring her own language knowledge and meaning system to bear. As this understanding grew, Jenny began to read texts in her environment, from posted signs to personal notes and letters, and finally to more official letters from Donny’s school. In other words, literacy development for Jenny began only when she brought print into her own life and created her own literacy practices—reading and writing within her own socially situated domains.

Search for Impact of Authenticity on Literacy Practice Change When the opportunity arrived to propose a study of adult literacy learning and instruction, Purcell-Gates brought together these two strands of research: emergent literacy development and the efficacy of adult literacy instruction. Focusing on the apparent importance of literacy practices and events in the homes of young children, PurcellGates asked, “Would adult literacy students whose instruction involved more authentic texts and purposes for reading and writing them bring literacy more into their lives outside of school? Would such students read and write more often—thus increasing the frequency of literacy events in their homes; would they read and write different types of texts, including more complex ones?” Both of these factors associated with literacy events in the homes of the children in the 20-home study were positively related to emergent literacy knowledge.6 As described in Chapter 2, we collected data from 83 U.S. adult literacy classes, and we conducted extensive and repeated interviews with 173 student participants in those classes in their homes. We asked about texts that reflect a broad number of literacy events and practices as well as linguistic complexity. These included (a) reading essays, compositions, and text for information; (b) reading books and stories; (c) reading labels, container print, signs; (d) reading school communication; (e) writing messages, notes; (f) reading calendars, tickets; (g) writing speeches, reflections, stories, poems; (h) reading messages, notes; (i) reading periodicals (horoscope, sports); (j) reading directions (recipes, shopping lists); (k) writing instructions; (l) reading ads, coupons, fliers; (m) writing on calendars, appointment book; (n) reading bills, bank statements, receipts; (o) reading schedules, guides; (p) reading addresses, phone books; (q) reading


postal letters; (r) writing checks, money orders, gift certificates; (s) writing lists; (t) reading song lyrics; (u) reading menus; (v) reading documents (lease, mortgage, portfolios); (w) writing postal letters; (x) writing names, labeling; (y) writing forms, applications; and (z) reading comics, cartoons. With this interview, we were able to survey the literacy practices and literacy practice change, inferred from reported textual practice, of the adult literacy students. We were exploring literacy in use— literacy as practiced by people in their own social contexts. We were conceiving socioculturally constrained literacy practice as outcomes of (adult) literacy instruction. At times, we referred to this literacy practice outcome as actualized literacy instruction (Purcell-Gates et al., 2000).

m

CHAPTER FIVE

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development I learned how to say my ABC’s, to write my ABC’s. Don’t have to wonder how to do it. I know how to do it. And I can do it from A to Z. That’s a big help to me. By going to school I was able to learn all of that, able to take it all in, and use it to help myself, and to help me get along in the world. . . . That’s a great encouragement because you don’t have to ask people for everything; you can do for yourself. That’s the most important thing is doing for yourself, not depending upon someone else.

A cognitive perspective on print literacy development is situated within the paradigm represented by the overall field of cognitive psychology.1 This field, according to noted cognitive psychologist John Anderson, arose in response to a form of psychologizing about the workings of the human mind that relied on introspection, a method in favor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Anderson, 1980). This methodology used trained observers to report the contents of their consciousness under controlled conditions and tasks. Over time, several significant objections to this methodology arose, particularly in the United States with its growing interest in pragmatism and functionalism.2 Psychology based on introspection did not seem relevant to the study of real problems or to practical application—the focus of psychologists in the United States at the time. At first, the alternative to introspection took the form of behavioral psychology,3 which focused only on observable behavior and shunned any attempt to create a theory on mental operations. However, a psychology with a focus on the workings of mind reemerged after


about 40 years, influenced, according to Anderson, by three main fields of endeavor: (a) the development of the information processing approach; (b) developments in computer science, particularly artificial intelligence; and (c) the linguistic paradigm shift driven by the work of Noam Chomsky. Of immediate relevance to our discussion is the defining characteristic of this reemerged field of cognitive psychology: the empiricist methods of studying human cognitive functioning. This new field held firmly to the belief that in order to be a science, cognitive theory must be based on observable data. Until recently, cognitive psychologists believed that studying cognition at the neural level was too complex and detailed. Seeking a more abstract level, they turned to information processing theory to study observations of humans performing intellectual tasks and from these operations inferred the mental operations that were impossible to see. Within the last few decades, however, advances in technology have led to an increasing number of studies linking neurological processes to cognitive ones. Of interest to the field of literacy have been studies using FMRIs to trace the neurological processes involved in word recognition, phonemic processing, and so forth.4 As the field progressed, cognitive psychologists researched such human mental capabilities as perception and attention, representations of knowledge, memory and learning, problem solving and reasoning, and language acquisition, production, and comprehension. Constructs from this work that run deep in the knowledge base of reading researchers include (a) letter and word recognition; (b) automaticity; (c) bottom-up/top-down processing; (d) schemas; and (e) stages of skill learning. The last-named construct, stages of skill learning, forms the backbone of much of the work on print literacy acquisition from the cognitive perspective. Cognitive skills are assumed to be learned in stages: • Cognitive stage: This is an instructional or study phase in

which the learner is either taught or studies it herself with the goal of trying to understand the skill. The outcome is an internal understanding of what the learner must do. • Associative stage: This stage follows the cognitive one and in-

cludes two main occurrences. First, errors in the initial under-

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development 43

standing are gradually discovered and eliminated. Second, connections among the different elements required for successful performance are strengthened. • Autonomous stage: In this stage, the learned skill, or process,

becomes increasingly more automated and rapid (Anderson, 1980, 226). Within the above-named cognitive stage, one usually finds additional stages. Reading researchers, theorists, and curriculum developers who identify with the cognitive perspective have invested a great deal in the stages of early reading, breaking this period down into smaller and smaller bits of learning. Although some of the research and assumptions behind this stage approach to learning emanates from the belief that learning proceeds from part to whole, from small to large, and from concrete to abstract, not all of it does. Mirroring the ways in which the cognitive psychology field progressed and branched, many cognitive researchers also worked from a top-down/bottom-up interactionist or parallel processing perspective (Rumelhart, 1994; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1988; Trabasso, 1981). We will now move from this discussion of cognitive psychology in general to our specific focus on print literacy development, which will be treated, in the cognitive tradition, as skill development. We will begin with the early phase of print literacy development— learning the code of written language. We will then proceed to issues of comprehension and composition.

Learning to Decode and Encode Print Reading researchers who work within a cognitive perspective believe that print literacy acquisition follows specific developmental milestones. Cognitive researchers tend to be interested in what they would consider to be normative behavior, as in the learning-to-read process, and they single out nonnormative cases in order to better understand and to explicate the norm. Thus, although social context is not always ignored, it is generally understood that reading and learning how to read involve the same processes for everyone. For alphabetic languages, print is simply a code that represents phoneme/grapheme correspondence. Therefore, the process of learn-


ing to read and write begins with learning this code. This process would apply to a child in rural Appalachia as much as to a child in a wealthy suburb of San Francisco or to a grown man living in a housing project in Chicago. For this reason, teaching students how to decode and encode print, should, from a cognitivist perspective, be the same regardless of the sociocultural contexts of the students (children or adults). In recent years, this viewpoint has gained political endorsement in the United States, particularly following the release of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report in 2000.5

Early Stages of Reading Development According to the cognitive perspective, learning to read print occurs developmentally, in stages. Although this idea had existed at least as far back as the 1920s, Jeanne Chall’s work on the stages of reading gave momentum to it (Chall, 1983; Gray, 1925). Her first three stages (0–2) address the early reading stages concerned with decoding and encoding print. Chall’s stages are discrete and invariant: each must be completed before the learner progresses to the next. Chall describes six discrete stages of reading that individuals must experience in order to become expert readers: • Stage 0: Prereading (birth to age 6) • Stage 1: Initial Reading or Decoding (ages 6–7) • Stage 2: Confirmation, Fluency, Ungluing from Print (ages 7–8) • Stage 3: Reading for Learning the New (ages 8–14) • Stage 4: Multiple Viewpoints (ages 14–18) • Stage 5: Construction and Reconstruction (age 18 and above)

Linnea Ehri is another cognitive researcher who endorses the notion of developmental stages of reading development (Ehri, 1999). Unlike Chall, however, she believes that the developmental stages are more fluid and that students can go on to the next stage without mastering the previous one. Ehri’s stages, as compared to Chall’s, are not age-specific. For this reason, she prefers the term phases of reading development to stages. Ehri posits four phases for the learning-the-code period of development, which roughly correspond to Chall’s first three stages:

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development 45 • Prealphabetic Phase • Partial Alphabetic Phase • Full Alphabetic Phase • Consolidated Alphabetic Phase

Other cognitive reading researchers have described the stages of beginning reading in slightly different ways, but all closely match those of both Chall and Ehri (Moats, 1998). Both Chall and Ehri are concerned with instruction of beginning readers, and most of their work and theory relates directly to teaching children in classrooms.6 Another influential group of cognitive researchers includes those who research specifically phonemic awareness and acquisition trajectories of letter and word knowledge. This body of work nicely illustrates the cognitive emphasis on in-the-head operations and the possibility of inferring those operations from manipulating variables such as letters, words, and tasks, and measuring processing speed (usually operationalized as reaction time) and accuracy. Their work, much of it conducted in research labs where conditions could be controlled, accounts for much of the experimental research on which the NRP based its findings (Bowey & Hansen, 1994; Brady, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1978, 1983; Goswami, 1988; Jorm & Share, 1983; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Stanovich & West, 1981; Stanovich, West, & Feeman, 1981).

Writing Development Writing development receives much less attention from cognitive researchers partly because, with the exception of spelling, writing as a topic of research emerged from different disciplines from reading. Writing as composition had belonged to the fields of rhetoric and literature before being taken up by those who were interested in issues of development and instruction. The first federally sponsored research center for the study of writing and learning to write reflected a blend of psychological (as in cognitive) and humanities influences, and Linda Flower’s early model was heavily influenced by cognitive traditions (Flower & Hayes, 1994).7 Cognitive perspectives, however, do influence many of the beliefs about early writing, including issues of encoding/spelling. For the beginning reader, writing is often seen as integral to learning to de-


code. Although Chall’s work does not mention writing at all, others who became interested in emergent spelling (see Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of this topic) arrived at different stage theories of acquisition of encoding skills. For example, Bear and his colleagues posited stages of writing that correspond to Ehri’s and Chall’s stages of reading (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 1996). In the contexts of these beginning stages, writing is operationalized as spelling, or encoding print. Bear’s early stages of writing include: • Emergent (ages 1–7): This stage consists of pretend writing or

drawing. Early in this stage, children just draw and scribble. As they progress, they may make letter-like figures, and possibly actual letters, but there is little or no sound–symbol correspondence. • Beginning (ages 5–9): Early in this stage, children tend to labor

over writing each syllable. At first, they may only write one or two words at a time. Ultimately, they are able to produce up to a half page of writing. The content of their writing tends to be summaries of events or retellings of stories. • Transitional (ages 6–12): At this stage, children are becoming

more fluent in their writing, they spend more time planning what they write, and their writing is more organized and includes more details. • Intermediate and specialized writing (ages 10–100): At this

stage, individuals are considered fluent writers. Their writing contains more expression, and their voice is more developed. Writers use different styles and genres. Similarly, Bear has also outlined different stages of spelling, which go hand in hand with the stages of writing: • Preliterate (corresponds with emergent writing): When asked to

spell words, children may draw a picture or scribble. As they progress through this stage, they may write a series of unrelated letters (as in “LBUA” for “dog”). • Early letter name (corresponds with the early stages of begin-

ning writing): When writing words, a child in this stage writes the predominant sounds in a word (as in “KZ” for “cousin”)


and then progresses to writing the beginning and ending consonant sounds (“BL” for “ball”). • Middle and late letter name (corresponds with the later stages

of beginning writing): Students use beginning and ending consonants as well as a vowel in most syllables (writing “SUMR” for “summer”), progressing to learning short vowel patterns, most consonant blends and digraphs, and some long vowel words. • Within-word pattern (corresponds with transitional stage of

writing): Students spell short vowel words correctly and learn most one-syllable long vowel words. They spell r-controlled words such as “word” and “bird” more accurately. They may incorporate common Latin suffixes into their spelling. • Syllable juncture and derivational constancy (corresponds with

intermediate writing): Students learn how syllables fit together, beginning to understand such concepts as consonant doubling or dropping the “e” when adding an ending (“clapped” or “biking”). By the end of this stage, they know most common prefixes and suffixes and begin to understand how knowledge of root words can help them spell more difficult words (knowing the word “know” can help when spelling “knowledge”). Based on the idea that reading (as well as writing and spelling) development occurs in stages or phases, reading instruction, from a cognitive perspective, should follow specific guidelines, and skills or strategies should be introduced in specific sequences. The following section will give some idea about what learning to read (and write) looks like from a cognitivist perspective before a child starts school. Because this perspective is either pervasive or highly influential in actual classrooms, we will also provide scenarios of classroom instruction within each phase as we present them. E M E R G E N T R E A D I N G S TA G E

According to cognitivists, learning to read print (as in decoding, word recognition) is a process that begins before a child starts school and is completed by third grade. It is characterized by immersion in written and spoken language, followed by learning phonemic aware-


ness and the alphabetic principle, and it concludes with automaticity and fluency (Ehri, 1999; Moats, 1998; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Comprehension is not ignored during this time, but it is believed that meaningful comprehension cannot fully occur unless a reader first masters decoding (Ehri, 1999). Chall’s Stage 0 or Prereading Stage encompasses the time from birth to age 6. Ehri’s corresponding phase is called the Prealphabetic Phase. (There is also some overlap with Ehri’s Partial Alphabetic Phase.) According to Snow, Burns, and Griffin, most children develop basic control of language during this time (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). They learn to use new grammatical constructions in their speech. Their vocabularies grow by leaps and bounds, particularly when they are exposed, through conversation with a parent or teacher, to new and challenging words and concepts. During this stage, cognitive researchers believe that children need to build their background knowledge and language about how things work in order to gain a deeper understanding of the world around them (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Initially, they build this knowledge through interactions with adults. From the day they are born, they are able to distinguish all the different sounds in the language spoken around them. By age 1, children are able to distinguish words they hear, and they begin to understand basic vocabulary. Their oral language evolves from being able to provide one-word labels for objects to being able to put two, three, and more words together to form a sentence and being able to recap the events of their day (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). As their language skills grow, so grows their ability to think about the world in a decontextualized way, to the point that they are able to think about the motivations of people and story characters outside of their individual life contexts. At this point, they begin to ask questions about the characters and events in stories (as in “Why is the big bad wolf so mean?”), as well as the general workings of the world (“Why is the sky blue?”). Because it is assumed that children will come to school with a basic understanding of the world and the way it works, children who are not exposed to a variety of vocabulary and language experiences during this time will be at a serious disadvantage in school, according to cognitive perspectives on print literacy development (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).


In addition to the growth of vocabulary and language skills during this phase, children also begin to develop knowledge about print. Through listening to storybooks over and over, according to cognitive theory and research, they begin to understand that words are not pictures, but actually symbolic representations of ideas. They learn that print is read on the page from top to bottom and from left to right. They begin to be able to separate sentences into words, words into syllables, and syllables into sounds (Clay, 1975). The ability to break a word into individual sounds or to combine sounds to make words is called phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness involves the ability to hear (or perceive) the individual phonemes in words. Some children as young as 2 or 3 can recognize words that rhyme (dog, log, fog) or to play with language, taking a word like snowman and creating new words such as lowman, snowfan, rowtan, and so on (Clay, 1975). Children in the preschool years may also begin to understand that certain words share beginning and ending sounds with certain other words. This is called the phonetic-cue phase of reading development (Ehri, 1999). During this time, children may recognize that “baby” and “boy” and “beagle” all begin with the same sound. Because studies have shown that general language ability and phonological awareness are highly correlated,8 cognitive researchers recommend that as many language and literacy experiences as possible be provided during this emergent reading stage. Much of the research within this paradigm concludes that children may enjoy reading on their own, employing what has come to be known as “pretend reading.” They may begin to attempt reading by mimicking the words of a story that they have heard a parent or teacher read repeatedly. Children who engage in pretend reading may also rely heavily on picture cues as they attempt to make sense of a book. It is assumed that predictable books such as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, with its repetitious language, will help a child in this stage (Martin, 1992). Studies have also shown that children will use logographic cues to try to read words (Moats, 1998). For example, a child who regularly eats Cheerios will use the color of the box as well as the familiarity of the label to “read” the word “Cheerios” when handed the box. It is the familiarity of the word on the box with all its visual cues that enables the child to read the word. In this stage, most children cannot read familiar words when taken out of their expected context (Beck & Juel, 1992).


A child’s first experiences in school (preschool or early kindergarten) may resemble the following vignette: This week in Mrs. Guthrie’s kindergarten class, the children are studying the s sound. To start off, Mrs. Guthrie asks all of the students in class whose names begin with S to come up to the front of the class. Sam, Sabrina, Stevie, and Serena all eagerly come forward. Mrs. Guthrie asks the rest of the class to say each of the students’ names as she points to them. The class enjoys this exercise and loudly yells each name. Mrs. Guthrie then repeats each student’s name, exaggerating the beginning sound: “Ssssam, Sssabrina, Ssstevie, Ssserena. What sound do you hear at the beginning of each name?” Most of the students reply with a robust “SSSSS” in unison. They have done this exercise before with other consonant sounds, and they are beginning to get the hang of it. Mrs. Guthrie shows her students the poster of a snake who is forming the letter “s.” While they look at the poster, she sings a song about the snake: “Can’t you hear the snake? Ssss, ssss, ssss. Do you hear the sound he makes? Ssss, ssss, ssss . . .” The song is simple, and soon the children are singing along with Mrs. Guthrie. Next, Mrs. Guthrie asks the students if they can think of any words that start with the s sound. They raise their hands, and Mrs. Guthrie calls on the students, one by one. Most of them are able to give her “s” words, like sink, song, silly, and sand. One child appears to be having trouble differentiating the s and the f sound, and volunteers the word frog. Mrs. Guthrie hopes to help the student distinguish the difference between sounds by repeating the s sound and the f sound in an exaggerated manner. She makes a mental note to ask his mother about getting his hearing checked. She knows that failure to distinguish between different phonemes could severely hamper his learning to read. Another child volunteers the word desk, and Mrs. Guthrie slowly goes through all the phonemes in the word desk so that the student can hear that the s sound comes in the middle of the word. Mrs. Guthrie tells the students that it is story time and calls them all over to the rug, where she shows them the big book Silly Sally.9 She has chosen this book to read because it repeats the words “silly” and “Sally” on every page. She also likes the books because it is a pattern book written in rhyme, making it a book that the students will learn quickly. She will read the book again when she starts teaching onset and rime. She tells the students that they will hear the s sound many times as she reads, and she asks them to raise their hands every time they hear it at the beginning of a word. Because silly and Sally are repeated so many times throughout the book, along with other s words,

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development 51 the students are soon beside themselves with giggles as they keep raising their hands over and over. While Mrs. Guthrie reads the big book, she points to each word so that the students begin to associate printed words and letters with the sounds each word and letter makes. She also knows that engaging in reading-aloud activities such as this will help her students understand the directionality of print—top to bottom and left to right. On subsequent days this week, Mrs. Guthrie will continue the focus on the letter “s”. She will have students practice tracing and writing the letter, she will sing more songs with “s” words, and she will have students continue to think about words they know that begin with the s sound.

Beginning Reading Chall’s Stage 1 (Initial Reading or Decoding Stage) encompasses children aged 6–7, in grades 1 and 2. Ehri’s corresponding phases are the Partial Alphabetic Phase and the Full Alphabetic Phase. Initially, children are learning the shapes and names or sounds of letters and are becoming more aware of letter–sound relationships. They are becoming more adept at segmenting words into different sounds (as in understanding that “dog” and “daddy” begin with the same sound or that “boat” and “coat” have the same ending sound). A cognitive approach to learning to read asserts that readers at the beginning of Chall’s Stage 1 or in Ehri’s Partial Alphabetic Phase learn how to read sight words based on a partial alphabetic connection between some of the letters in written words and the sounds those letters represent. Children in this phase rely heavily on the beginning and ending sounds of words, while virtually ignoring the other letters and sounds (Graves, Juel, & Graves, 2001). They are able to blend sounds into words (as in their ability to say “sun” when asked what word contains the sounds SSS, UH, and NNN) (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). When reading, children use prediction and picture cues as well as phonetic cues in order to read sight words (Beck & Juel, 1992). For example, to read the word “truck,” a reader in this stage would look at the picture(s) on the page, would consider what he had read so far, and would also look at the “t” and the “k” in truck in order to be able to read it. Without the picture cues and context of, say, “things on the road,” a reader in this stage might read truck as “talk” or “tank.” Knowledge of vowels and vowel sounds as well as consonant blends is minimal at this stage (Graves,


Juel, & Graves, 2001). This is also reflected in the spelling of these readers. Typically, words are spelled using only the first and last letter sounds. Vowels are not used, according to Bear et al., or are used incorrectly, and consonant clusters are rarely used. The following scenario portrays how instruction is geared to this stage of print literacy development: After circle time, during which Mr. Sherman’s students go over the day of the week as well as that day’s schedule, they go back to their seats for some word play. Although many of the students know the alphabet and are able to recognize most letters, some are still struggling to learn them. He calls those students who are having the most trouble with the alphabet over to a table to work with a classroom aide. He tells the rest of the class to find words around the room that start with the letter “b” and to write them down on the cardboard strips that he gives them. This is a relatively easy exercise for the students because Mr. Sherman has note cards around the room labeling the different parts of the room (as in “books,” “bins,” “chalkboard,” “alphabet”). There are also words labeling the different colors, different animals, and different shapes, as well as posters with nursery rhymes and short sayings. Some of these words have become sight words for the students since they have seen them and talked about them so much during class. The students eagerly engage in this task. Back at the table, the aide has written each of the students’ names on a cardboard strip in big block letters. She asks the students to read their names, which they are able to do. She then asks each of them to use scissors to cut out each individual letter of their names. One at a time, the students call out the letters of their names and put them back in order to spell their names. The aide provides some guidance as needed. When she feels that the students are comfortable doing this activity with their own names, she asks the group to switch letter piles, so that each is working with the letters of one of their classmate’s names. In the meantime, Mr. Sherman calls the students back to their seats to see what words they have found that begin with the letter “b.” He then calls students up one at a time to tape their words with “b” at the beginning onto the chalkboard. The students can read some of the words, but not all of them, so Mr. Sherman helps them read the new words. Mr. Sherman spends some time going over the b sound and reminds students that when they see a word with a “b” at the beginning, they will know that the word starts with the “buh” sound. Throughout the next month, he will do the same kind of activity with different consonant sounds. It is only once students have learned the

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development 53 individual consonants and can recognize them at the beginnings and ends of words that he will begin to teach the vowel sounds. Next, Mr. Sherman reads a short poem with many “b” words that he has enlarged into a chart. He reads it to the students twice while pointing to each word, and then he asks the students to read it with him. Finally, he gives each student a copy of the poem to read with a partner. They will also take the poem home and practice reading it for homework. To end this word study time, Mr. Sherman hands out a worksheet with pictures of different “b” words, such as “ball,” “bat,” and “bug.” For each word, the “b” has been left blank, and the students have to fill it in. Once the students have completed this activity, Mr. Sherman asks volunteers to read each of the words. Although they have only been studying beginning consonant sounds, the students are able to read the words because of the picture cues. Throughout the following months, Mr. Sherman will gradually increase the difficulty of word play, looking at rimes (all the letters in a word except the initial consonant), short vowels, ending consonants, consonant blends, and digraphs. He will then teach his students how to blend all those sounds to form words. Finally, he will teach long vowel patterns, multisyllabic words, and prefixes and suffixes. He has been teaching long enough to know not to rush this process and not to change the steps of phonemic analysis. He is convinced that if students miss any of these steps along the way, they will have lifelong difficulty with reading. For this reason, he believes that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction need to be taught explicitly and systematically, as well as through the context of the storybooks he reads aloud to his students.10

As readers move through Chall’s Stage 1 or move on to Ehri’s Full Alphabetic Phase, they begin to make more complete associations between the letters in a written word and the phonemes those letters represent. They have learned the simple consonant sounds and the long and short vowel sounds. They have also learned most of the digraphs (Ehri, 1999). At this point, if the learners are on the timeline for print literacy development, they are aware of the predictable relationship between graphemes and phonemes. They are able to decode words that they have never seen before—that is, they can transform words they don’t recognize in writing into recognizable pronunciations (Moats, 1998). Words that readers in this stage see frequently become sight words so that precious time and effort are not wasted decoding words that they have encountered many times


before. Readers at this point can read pseudo-words, they can distinguish words with similar spellings, and they can also spell words using conventional letter choices (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). They may still have trouble reading and writing multisyllabic words. Chall describes readers at this stage as being glued to print, particularly when encountering new words. Mrs. Johnson’s second grade students have made a lot of progress in their understanding of the alphabetic principle. Most of them have learned the consonant and vowel sounds, including long vowel patterns and digraphs. Mrs. Johnson has noticed that their spelling is beginning to look more conventional. Most students are using beginning and ending consonants, are able to encode consonant blends and digraphs, and they are using vowels correctly (though they sometimes have trouble remembering which long vowel pattern to use, often writing, for example, “plain” instead of “plane”). A lot of class time is still spent on word analysis skills. Because her students still have trouble sounding out longer, unfamiliar words, Mrs. Johnson spends time each day working on multisyllabic words. Today, she has planned a lesson on prefixes. With her students sitting at their desks, Mrs. Johnson writes the following words on the chalkboard: “rewrite,” “replay,” and “redo.” She asks the students to read the words in unison, and then she asks them to tell her what the words have in common. Most notice immediately that they all begin with the letters “re.” She underlines the “re” in each word, and then tells the students that “re” is a common prefix that means again. She then asks her students to define the words on the board, given the definition of the prefix. They easily do this. She then writes a word she thinks many of them may not recognize: “refresh.” She tells them to use what they’ve learned about the prefix “re” to try to pronounce and define the new word. She covers up the “re” and asks them to tell her what remains. She tells them that they are likely to encounter many words with the prefix “re,” and that one way to successfully read and understand those words is to cover up the “re” to figure out what remains, decode that part, and then add the prefix back onto the word. She writes more “re” words on the board for the students to read and define together as a class. She then gives them a worksheet with 10 “re” words. Their assignment, to be completed independently in class, involves writing the prefix and base word separately, and then providing a definition of the new word.

Developing Automaticity This stage corresponds with Chall’s Stage 2 (which she describes as Confirmation, Fluency, Ungluing from Print), and Ehri’s Consoli-


dated Alphabetic Phase. According to cognitive researchers, readers at this stage have committed many sight words to memory and are able to begin seeing letter patterns that occur across words (Samuels, Schermer, & Reinking, 1992). Rather than relying on tediously sounding out each phoneme in each word, readers begin chunking groups of letters together and so are able to generalize as they read and spell (Graves, Juel, & Graves, 2001). For example, the letters “AND” may begin to merge as one unit in a reader’s mind after learning as sight words “and,” “sand,” and “hand.” When encountering the word “bland” for the first time, the reader would not have to sound out each of the five phonemes in the word but rather would recognize the consonant blend “BL,” would chunk the letters “AND” together, and would be able to read the word much more quickly and automatically than previously. During this stage, readers also begin to have much greater success in decoding multisyllabic words by chunking letters into syllables (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Because readers at this stage are able to make generalizations about words and word patterns, the decoding process becomes much more automatic. With these new skills in hand, readers at this stage must practice reading so that they become more fluent as readers (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). As they move into Chall’s Stage 3, they will need to be quite fluent in order to begin gaining knowledge from the books and other literacy materials they read (Samuels et al., 1992). Miss Crenshaw’s third graders, for the most part, have developed good decoding skills. Three or four of her students still have difficulty with decoding, and they work with the school’s reading specialist for extra practice for half an hour each day. The remainder of the class appears to be reading and spelling at or near grade level. Miss Crenshaw knows that it is important for her students to read fluently, both silently and orally, so that they can concentrate on understanding what they read. To help them with this, she still spends time each day on word analysis, particularly with longer words. At the beginning of reading class each day, she writes down three multisyllabic words on the board and asks her students to tell her how they figure out each word’s pronunciation. She is proud of all the strategies that they have learned, including breaking down a compound word into two words, noticing prefixes and suffixes, recognizing consonant digraphs and blends, and chunking letters together. Because the students have spent the last two years working on word analysis, they have developed a large bank of sight words, so they have less trouble pronouncing the majority of words that they encounter in

56 Print Literacy Development their reading. Still, many of the students’ oral reading is jerky and lacking in expression. Because she knows that fluency aids in comprehension, Miss Crenshaw spends a lot of time working on reading fluency. Each day, she copies a passage from a textbook or trade book and puts it on the overhead projector. She reads it aloud while the students follow along silently. She wants her students to hear how text sounds when it is read effortlessly and with expression. She then asks the entire class to read the selection along with her. They do this several times. Some days, she also pairs the students up (often pairing a weaker reader with a stronger reader) and has them practice the same passage with their partners. By the end of this activity, students are usually able to read the passage easily and fluently.

Reading to Learn: Issues of Comprehension Once students learn to read, the emphasis for instruction and skill development, from a cognitivist perspective, shifts from word recognition and decoding skills to reading for meaning. This shift typically occurs in third or fourth grade, and continues through middle school, into high school and beyond. Chall’s Stage 3 labels this as reading for learning the new. Another familiar phrase for this shift is learning to read, then reading to learn. This point in the print literacy developmental continuum marks the turn toward issues of comprehension—cognitive research and perspectives on comprehension are less influenced by specific stages such as that on decoding/encoding. Still, however, it reflects the general cognitive assumption that skills are learned in stages from early, heavily supported, acquisition to later relatively effortless mastery (see discussion at the beginning of the chapter). Chall’s Stage 3 includes students from ages 8 to 14 and in grades 4 to 8. In previous stages, new knowledge came to students through the spoken word or the environment. Now, students must use reading to acquire new information. Cognitivists believe that schema theory is instructive in informing our understanding of reading comprehension during this stage (Anderson & Pearson, 1984). This theory posits that everything we know or learn is stored in memory in schemata (defined as networks of related concepts), and reading comprehension occurs when we are able either to assimilate text information into existing schemata or to change our schema in order to incorporate new information.


Reading is, therefore, an active process in which readers construct meaning by connecting what they already know with what they are learning from the text (Adams & Collins, 1977; Pearson, Roehler, Dole, & Duffy, 1992). Good readers are able to assess their schemata while they read, deciding whether what they read makes sense based on what they already know, and if not, how they must change their schema in order to make sense of their reading. Less experienced or poorer readers have a harder time noticing when something they read does not fit in with what they already know, and this leads to difficulties in reading comprehension (Adams & Collins, 1977; Pearson, Roehler, Dole, & Duffy, 1992). From an instructional standpoint, schema theory points to the importance of teachers helping students to access prior knowledge about a given topic before reading a selection on that topic, as well as helping students to learn selfmonitoring strategies as they read. Because “reading to learn” is new for most students as they enter this stage, they are not adept at certain comprehension strategies, such as finding the main idea, summarizing, drawing inferences, and asking questions about text (Graves, Juel, & Graves, 2001). Cognitively oriented instruction should provide specific, explicit strategies for helping students do these things. Teacher modeling is one way to help students understand the metacognitive processes involved in specific reading strategies. By talking aloud about their thoughts while they read a text orally, teachers are able to show how they incorporate reading strategies into their reading processes. Teachers should also be explicit about when certain strategies should be used and can use guided reading instruction as a way to help students become more adept at using the strategies (Pearson et al., 1992). For example, a teacher might read a paragraph aloud and demonstrate how he or she determines the main idea. The teacher would then explain to students that the selection they will be reading contains several new ideas and that the reading strategy they should focus on is finding the main idea. The teacher might also tell students to record the main ideas while they read (Graves et al., 2001). Understanding text structure is also important in enhancing reading comprehension, and cognitivists believe it should be taught explicitly (Taylor, 1992). Research has been done on story structure, or grammar, as well as exposition, and this research has led to studies on reader strategies and on instructional methods (Meyers, 1975;


Stein, 1982). Graphic organizers that help students to organize what they are reading, such as text maps or semantic webs, were found to provide frameworks for focusing on the most important ideas of the text, helping students to avoid getting mired down in unimportant details (Graves et al., 2001). Providing explicit instruction in different expository text structures—such as cause/effect, problem/solution, claim/counterclaim—and providing an outline with the key terms from that structure listed—such as problem, support, solution—for students to fill in as they read can help students’ recall of what they have read, according to research in the cognitive tradition (Taylor, 1992). Cognitive-oriented research concludes that vocabulary study is an important part of this period. The larger a student’s vocabulary, the more likely that student is to understand what he or she reads (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Cognitivists believe that individual words that are integral to students’ understanding of a text should be taught explicitly. In addition, they believe that teachers should teach word learning strategies, such as using knowledge of base words, affixes, and root words in order to determine the meaning of complex words; using reference books such as the dictionary and thesaurus; studying word origins and derivations; learning synonyms, antonyms, and idioms; using context to determine meaning; and studying words with multiple meanings (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Mr. Cooper’s fifth graders talk constantly about the new amusement park that just opened not far from their community. He is thrilled that the basal reader has a nonfiction selection on roller coasters because he knows that this selection will hold their interest. Before he distributes the readers, he tries to get the students to guess what topic they will be reading about. He gives them clues, one at a time, until someone comes up with the answer. “This story is about something that can be scary . . . sometimes is very fast . . . sometimes gets you wet . . . sometimes goes upside down.” The students call out guesses until someone finally gets the right answer. Next Mr. Cooper asks some questions designed to activate the students’ prior knowledge about roller coasters. He knows that some of his students have never been on a roller coaster, and he feels that the reading will be more meaningful to them if they hear what the other students have to say. “How many of you have ever ridden on a roller coaster? Were you at all scared? What do you think makes roller coasters scary?”

Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development 59 Mr. Cooper then writes several vocabulary words on the chalkboard. He has chosen “gravity,” “acceleration,” “diversion,” and “tragedy.” He chooses the words because he knows they may be difficult for the students, and because he believes they are important words for understanding the selection. He asks the students to look the words up in the dictionary and then write down the definition in their own words. After they have done this, they share their responses with Mr. Cooper. He helps them to analyze the words, pointing out the “ion” endings of two of the words and asking them if they know any other words that share the same root as “tragedy.” Now Mr. Cooper hands out the readers and tells the students to begin reading the selection on their own. Because his students often have difficulty with comprehension when they read nonfiction texts, Mr. Cooper guides their silent reading. He asks them to write down a description of the first roller coaster, and then keep track chronologically of the ways roller coasters have changed over the years. He briefly models how he might approach this task, noting the different dates provided in the text as well as the headings that give clues as to what different sections of the text will be about. When the students have finished reading the selection, Mr. Cooper asks students to share what they wrote. He then assigns the questions at the end of the selection as homework. The bell rings, and the students move on to math class.

As students proceed through Chall’s Stage 3 of reading, they continue to master the same types of reading strategies detailed above but with a greater degree of challenge. Their word analysis and vocabulary lessons now include idioms, analogies, metaphors, and similes. They also engage in sentence-level analysis as they learn grammar and the parts of speech. They focus much more on informational materials and analyze the different structures that such materials can have: cause and effect, chronological, compare and contrast, enumeration, and topical order. It is Women’s History Month, so Mrs. Lawson’s eighth graders are studying important women in US History. They have just read a chapter in a biography about Eleanor Roosevelt that describes the New Deal and other changes that took place during FDR’s presidency and Eleanor’s role in those changes. Mrs. Lawson decides that this is an optimal chapter for studying cause and effect. She briefly explains cause and effect to her students, giving examples from previous topics of study, such as cause: the garment factory had terrible working conditions and was unsafe; effect: the factory caught on fire and 157 women were killed. She asks the students to think of other cause and effect

60 Print Literacy Development examples, which she writes on the overhead. She then divides the class into groups of four and tells them to go through the chapter they read last night and find at least five examples of cause and effect. The students get into groups and begin working. Mrs. Lawson goes from group to group, providing help when necessary. When most groups are close to being finished, Mrs. Lawson stops them and pulls the groups back together. She asks each group to give one example of cause and effect from the reading. Some of the responses indicate that the group members didn’t really get the assignment. Mrs. Lawson can sense that she needs to do more teaching on the subject and plans to continue to teach cause and effect in future lessons. She hands out worksheets with sentences that she has taken from the Eleanor Roosevelt biography. She reviews subject and predicate with the class, then asks the students to circle the subject and underline the predicate in each of the sentences. She reminds them that being able to identify the subject and the action that takes place in each sentence will help build their comprehension of complex sentences. Once the students are finished with the assignment, Mrs. Lawson collects the worksheets. Finally, Mrs. Lawson asks the students to take out the poems they have written about a special woman in their lives. They have been asked to use similes in their poems, and Mrs. Lawson asks for volunteers to read their poems aloud. She tells the other students to listen for and write down the examples of similes that they hear. Mrs. Lawson engages the students in a discussion of these similes, asking students to explain how the similes enhance the description of the women in the poems.

Advanced Reading Skills Chall’s final two stages of reading development (Stage 4—Multiple Viewpoints, and Stage 5—Construction and Reconstruction are seen to correspond with the increased maturity and experience that high school and college students bring with them. In these stages, students are able to understand and critically analyze points of view different from their own. It is generally agreed that not all students achieve this level of understanding when they read. It is not a given that students will move from Stage 3 to Stage 4 to Stage 5 (Chall, 1983). Vocabulary study involves differentiating between literal and figurative meanings of words as well as exploring the etymology of words. Reading comprehension involves being able to synthesize in-


formation garnered from multiple sources in order to show thorough understanding of a given topic. Reading and understanding literature from a cognitive perspective has usually meant being familiar with such literary devices as foreshadowing and flashback, allegory, symbolism, figurative language, and so on.11 Mrs. Perkins’s class of eleventh graders has just finished their study of Shakespearean tragedies. She is interested in seeing exactly how the students view the two tragic heroes they read about, Hamlet and King Lear. She asks them to work in groups of two or three to create Venn diagrams comparing and contrasting the two characters. The students get right to work, as they have used Venn diagrams frequently this year and feel very comfortable doing so. After about 10 minutes, she asks the pairs to share their responses. She jots their responses down on a Venn diagram that she has created on the overhead projector. She is impressed that her students have found so many commonalities between the two characters. Mrs. Perkins then gives the students a writing assignment. Using the Venn diagrams, in addition to their knowledge of the two tragedies, the students are asked to write a paper comparing and contrasting the two characters. She writes down her expectations for the paper: must have at least five paragraphs, must state thesis in introductory paragraph, must have at least three paragraphs to support thesis, must use direct quotes as support for main ideas, must have concluding paragraph. She reminds the students to use transition words and to write in complete sentences. Before allowing the students to get started on their writing, Mrs. Perkins remembers that they had had trouble using direct quotes in their previous essays. She briefly goes over the rules for using direct quotes and demonstrates these rules by writing sentences with direct quotes on the overhead projector. Mrs. Perkins gives the students the last 15 minutes of class to get started on their papers. The rest they will complete at home.

Motivation and Engagement Cognitive psychologists have also addressed and researched issues of reader engagement and motivation. In fact, during the 1990s,12 the federally funded National Reading Research Center (NRRC) based its proposal for the center on the centrality of literacy engagement. Literacy engagement, according to John Guthrie and Allan Wigfield, two of the NRRC directors, “refers to the joint functioning of mo-


tivation with knowledge, strategies, and social interactions in literacy” (Guthrie & Wigfield, 1997, 5). Seeking to describe the interaction of motivation and cognition in the reading process, the NRRC research team arrived at a model of mediated engagement specific to reading development (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). Motivation, according to this research, enhances the effort involved in application of skills and strategies to the comprehension of text, thus positively affecting achievement. Engagement mediates instruction, and student achievement and knowledge (a central driving force behind reading comprehension) are enhanced with increased engagement. This research is an example of the recent type of cognitive research that attempts to include social forces as a component of reading. However, this is not the same theoretical construct of social practice of literacy, described in Chapter 2. In summary, we have attempted to give a fair and focused description of the cognitive perspective, or lens, as it applies to print literacy development. We emphasize focused because we did not have space to cover all aspects of cognitive learning theory and so we focused primarily on the application of skill-learning as it applies to theories of learning to read and write in school. We also purposively presented what one could call a strong reading of the cognitive perspective (although not as strong as it could have been and as is reflected in some instructional versions) to make clearer the divisions and differences between a social practice and cognitive view of literacy. To drive this point home, we suggest the reader go back to Brandt’s words in Chapter 2, explaining the social practice lens: “this perspective tends to eschew references to skills or abilities at all, focusing instead on the concept of literate practices, emphasizing the grounded, routinized, multiple, and socially sanctioned ways in which reading and writing occur” (Brandt, 2001, 3). Nothing could be more different from the focus for cognitive psychologists who study print literacy development.

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CHAPTER SIX

The Seeming Incommensurability of the Social and the Cognitive

We have briefly explored literacy as seen through two very different lenses. The cognitive lens focuses primarily on learning to read and write as skill development and as it occurs in some form of schooling. The social practice lens, on the other hand, focuses on literacy as constructed by and woven throughout social and cultural practices, shaped by historical, status, and power relationships. It is always “local,” imbued with local meanings and practices.

“Literacy Is Not Individual Skill Development” On the surface, the cognitive and social practice theories are not competing ones. Yet they have not been treated as complementary theories either. In fact, the social practice perspective arose in response to the work of scholars who were claiming for literacy a causal agency in civilizing “primitive” societies and affecting the nature of cognition itself (Goody & Watt, 1968; Ong, 1982, 1986; Olson, 1977, 1994). Reacting to what he perceived to be elitist and ethnocentric positions, Brian Street countered in 1984 that literacy was not an “autonomous” technology with the power to render cultures more advanced cognitively and culturally (Street, 1984). Rather, he claimed, all aspects of literacy are contextualized within specific literacy practices, and these are socioculturally determined. He termed this view


of literacy ideological to contrast it with the autonomous view that considered literacy a technological skill that could be considered context-free just as written language itself was viewed as decontextualized. Others also weighed in to counter what became known as the autonomous view of literacy. Harvey Graff in The Literacy Myth provided documentation to show that print literacy had no real effect on the socioeconomic lives of people in the nineteenth century in Canada (Graff, 1979). His work is used to counter the claim of those who view literacy as an autonomous skill that can be acquired acontextually—outside of specific literacy practices, in school, for example—and that produces the same results regardless of the prevailing social conditions. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s landmark study of the Vai in Liberia demonstrated the following about print literacy skills: (a) these skills are learned and employed for specific purposes; and (b) they do not transfer to what could be regulated as general cognition (Scribner & Cole, 1981). Street, however, set the stage for the path the social practice perspective would travel when he critiqued Scribner and Cole’s work for focusing on cognition at all: Although this approach provides a useful corrective to the grander claims of Goody1 and others, it poses an unresolved contradiction between the possibility of isolating ever more precisely the “technical,” “autonomous” qualities of literacy and the understanding that any literate practice is a social practice and thus cannot be described as “neutral” or in isolation. Vai literate practices may be usefully isolated from formal schooling, but they are embedded in other socializing practices and in the beliefs and customs which accompany them and give them meaning. The Vai material poses and highlights the basic sociological questions about literacy to which the “ideological” model of literacy addresses itself. (Street, 1984, 10)

Over the years, academics and researchers have moved determinedly away from studying literacy development as cognitive skill development and away from locating literacy within individuals to locating it within social and cultural groups. This can be seen in the descriptions of the theory that frames such recent research. Mary Hamilton, describing the literacy as social practice lens, writes: “A theory of literacy as social practice as put forward by Street (1984), Gee (1992), and Barton and Hamilton (1998) emphasises the social

Seeming Incommensurability 65

relationships and institutions within which literacy is embedded. This is in contrast to traditional approaches to literacy which construe it as a set of cognitive skills possessed (or lacked) by individuals” (Hamilton, 2000, 16). Recall Lewis’s explanation of this movement, noted in Chapter 2, that, from the social practice perspective, reading and writing are not primarily mental acts. Brandt, also noted in Chapter 2, was more specific: “This perspective tends to eschew references to skills or abilities at all, focusing instead on the concept of literate practices, emphasizing the grounded, routinized, multiple, and socially sanctioned ways in which reading and writing occur” (Brandt, 2001, 3). In keeping with this concern about how certain literacy practices are socially sanctioned, some researchers have examined what they perceive to be too narrow a focus on the technical aspects of teaching literacy. Donaldo Macedo and Lilia Bartolome´ criticize what they describe as “the methods fetish” and suggest that the focus should be on the sociocultural realities that contextualize the underachievement of minority students. In this analysis, questions of methods are subordinate to the need for teachers to have political clarity regarding the sociopolitical context of literacy instruction (Macedo & Bartolome´, 1999). They decry viewing the underachievement of minorities as a “technical” problem that calls for technical solutions such as finding the “ ‘right’ teaching methods, strategies, or pre-packaged curricula that will work with students who do not respond to socalled regular or normal instruction” (Macedo & Bartolome´, 1999, 120). Although Macedo and Bartolome´ cite and examine some productive methods and teaching strategies, this is not their key concern: “We are convinced that creating pedagogical spaces that enable students to move from object to subject position produces more far-reaching, positive effects than the implementation of a particular teaching methodology, regardless of how technically advanced and promising it may be” (Macedo & Bartolome´, 1999, 124). Although this account of the complex relationship between the cognitive and the social is concerned mostly with understanding and changing the nature of political reality, it does not a priori dismiss concerns over methods. It argues against treating methods as ends in themselves. However, other formulations of this argument take a stronger line toward a concern for instructional methods. At times, this move away from studying literacy as involving cognition to


studying the ways in which it is patterned by social forces is perceived to have led to an antipathy toward research and theory that attempts to look at the cognitive aspects of literacy skill development. James Gee, in one of the foundational social practice texts, The Social Mind (1992), develops the thesis that cognition occurs not isolated inside people’s heads but out, in the material and social world. Cognitive psychologists, he argues, should study the social worlds of children in school rather than focusing on what is purported to go on inside their heads. To study reading and writing as if they exist separately from larger, socially related and constructed discourses is, at best, foolish and, at worst, hegemonic. By extension, research that focuses on literacy and skill development as it occurs in the context of instruction is often labeled hegemonic.2 The argument goes like this: literacy is taught in schools as if it is a set of skills that can be applied across contexts. All students are taught the same skills in basically the same way, in the same order, and for the same purposes. Thus, literacy is taught in schools as if it were acontextual. Literacy is taught as if it—and by extension the skills of literacy—exists separately, outside of any social context, and can be simply inserted into, or applied to, different social contexts of use once it is acquired. Moreover, according to this perspective, looking at “school” literacy through a social practice lens, one can see that the literacy taught, measured, and valued in schools is academic literacy, valued by the dominant mainstream sociocultural group. The fact that this type of literacy is the one taught and valued demonstrates how issues of power and domination shape literacy instructional practice and policy. Furthermore, by valuing academic literacy, the institutions of schools and governments that give power to the schools devalue, background, and ignore other literacies—local literacies practiced by people who do not succeed with academic literacy. In this way, then, school literacy—academic literacy—and its teachings are hegemonic. And, by extension, research that looks at “best practices” without detailing the prevailing sociopolitical conditions participates in attempts to depoliticize something that is inherently political. It is, as the saying goes, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.


A Case Example of the Debate In a short series of journal articles, James Gee and Catherine Snow engaged in a debate about the National Academy of Sciences report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, of which Snow was an editor and primary spokesperson (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Gee began the discussion by seeking to “reframe the report from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies” (Gee, 1999, 355). His analysis attempted to do this while using the same research covered in the report. He believes this reframing is important because If we do not begin to transform debates about reading into debates about language, literacy and learning (which, of course, greatly broadens the relevant research base), then I predict we will soon face another and new “crisis”: elementary, middle school, and high school children who have successfully passed basic reading tests by the third grade and yet cannot use language (oral or written) to learn, to master content, to work in the new economy, or to think critically about social and political affairs. (Gee, 1999, 358)

Gee’s framework for this critique is the theory that literacies as sociocultural practices “always have inherent and value-laden, but often different, implication about what count as ‘acceptable’ identities, actions, and ways of knowing. They (literacies) are, in this sense, deeply ‘political’ ” (Gee, 1999, 356). Gee, like Macedo and Bartolome´, points to examples of productive instructional strategies but stresses that “if one accepts the New Literacy Studies approach, one cannot coherently debate ways of improving reading and leave out the social, cultural, institutional, and political issues and interventions as if they were ‘separate’ from literacy” (Gee, 1999, 360). Gee claims that the report in question places these cultural and political aspects into the background and for this reason may be said to have a narrow view of reading. Not surprisingly, Snow’s response disagreed with Gee’s account of the work of the panel (Snow, 2000). While addressing some specific concerns about Gee’s analysis, Snow gets to the heart of the matter. She begins by noting that the Committee did not reject the notion of literacy as a culturally and politically informed social practice. Indeed, she states that “Those rather unexceptional claims are embraced explicitly in the report” (Snow, 2000, 116). She also notes


that “We could, of course, have included in the report the sort of recommendation Gee seems to be endorsing—“reduce poverty”— though this would hardly have had the impact he desires” (Snow, 2000, 119). She writes this by way of addressing and accepting the social framework and its concern with political and economic inequality, in order to make her central point: There is, of course, a theoretical clash between the New Literacies and the perspectives presented in Preventing Reading Difficulties, but it does not lie in the rejection by the Committee members of social, cultural, or moral views of reading. It lies in the inability of the New Literacies perspective as formulated by Gee, Street, Barton, and others to account for, even to talk sensibly about, development—a failure associated with their unwillingness to accept a view of literacy as involving subskills. The Committee viewed reading as an inherently developmental process—a process in which the cognitive changes within individuals affect the nature of their participation in the social events that constitute literacy. (Snow, 2000, 117)

Gee counters that it is not true that the New Literacy Studies do not concern themselves with development (Gee, 2000). He points out that The New Literacy Studies is interested not primarily, as is Professor Snow, in “how cognitive changes within individuals affect their nature of participation,” but in how changes in the nature of participation affect cognition, socially situated identities, and the assessments made about individuals (a basically Vygotskian perspective taken in sociocultural and sociopolitical direction). . . . The whole point of the New Literacy Studies is that there really is no such thing as language and literacy (or reading) in some generic universal (“undifferentiated”) sense, only multiple culturally, socially, historically, and institutionally situated social practices, practices that almost always involved more than oral and/or written language and that need to be studied “on the ground,” not just in a laboratory or in “controlled” studies. In turn, research on reading needs to be situated within the study of such social practices, themselves set in their wider cultural, historical, institutional, and political contexts. (Gee, 2000, 126)

Although he does not say so in as many words, Gee may be suggesting that accounts of literacy that focus on the cognitive states of individuals do not “talk sensibly” about the social nature of literacy. In this example of the debate, each side recognizes and shares


common reference points (the social element of literacy practice, the existence of something that can be called phonemic awareness), but their arguments are framed in completely different ways. As such, they come across as talking about two completely different things.

“You Have to Be Able to Read and Write First” Those who see literacy primarily through the cognitive/skills lens can be equally critical of the social practice perspective. The social practice of literacy seems to be outside the purview of issues of development and schooling for these theorists. It seems rather obvious that people will use their literacy skills in different ways in their lives. What matters is that they possess the skills needed to read and write in the first place. Furthermore, literacy skills for the great majority of people are acquired in settings of formal instruction.3 This renders issues of method of instruction as critical and worthy of debate, research, and policy. Cognitivists simply cannot understand the disdain with which many social practice researchers hold issues of instructional method. For cognitivists, reading and writing involve acts of information processing—for word decoding and recognition—and higher-level acts of cognition—for text comprehension. The failure of social practitioners to share the cognitivist concerns with cognitive processes such as word recognition and text comprehension is perplexing. Moreover, an underlying sense exists among many cognitivists that social practice theory is responsible for much of the failure in today’s schools due to this denial of the relevance of the study of literacyrelated cognition and of issues of instructional method.

A Recent Historical Perspective on the Social/Cognitive Divide A brief foray into relatively recent history is appropriate here to forestall the impression that these two rather extreme and apparently incommensurable positions arose as such from ether. Those readers familiar with schools and literacy instruction are aware that we are not too far removed from the era of what came to be called the Whole Language movement. John Willinsky, writing in 1990 about what at the time was considered an innovative pedagogical trend,


provided us with a nice contextualization of what he termed the New Literacy educational practices in historical traditions of progressive education,4 popular literacy,5 and romanticism6 (Willinsky, 1990). From these historical roots he pulls the following threads that characterize the New Literacy:7 • A focus on personal meaning for the reader and writer • An insistence on maintaining the whole of the reading and

writing process • A refusal to break the process into its constituent parts • A focus on everyday talk and storytelling of individual learners • A respect for the individual as creator of meaning • A belief that meaning is created in community rather than in

isolation • A move away from positivism as a way to ‘truth’ toward expe-

rience Beginning in the late 1960s–early 1970s, classrooms in the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand began to reflect the influence of this pedagogical trend. It soon became widespread in the schools, although the extent of its implementation is unclear from actual data. Writing workshops began to supplant composition lessons, including grammar drills, punctuation worksheets, and the 5-paragraph theme. In these workshops, students were encouraged to write for themselves, from their own experiences, for their own purposes. Reading workshops replaced basal reading lessons with their focus on decoding and comprehension skills. Readers were now choosing their own books, reading for their own purposes, seeking and constructing their own meanings. Young children were learning to read from texts written for children to enjoy as compared to texts written to provide practice with early literacy skills. The respect for community as context for meaning construction was reflected in the writers’ groups that provided individuals with feedback on their written pieces, in the classroom communities that served as audiences for the authors, and in the implied audiences for their newly published written products. Book groups and literature circles provided community for reader response during and following readings. Big Book shares and partner reads provided for community and joint construction of meaning in the beginning reading classes.


The individual as the primary creator of meaning came through in the insistence on meaning over accuracy, process over product, and a lengthening of time allotted to learning to read and write. This early reading/writing period was now referred to as the emergent literacy period. Skills associated with learning to read and write were referred to as emerging rather than as mastered, partially mastered, or not mastered, terms associated with a skills approach to cognition and reading/writing. Beginning readers and writers were encouraged to discover the skills, or conventions, associated with public uses of written language on their own as they searched to find and express their own meanings. Thus, sound–symbol associations were to be learned through writing attempts and invented spellings. Word identification strategies were to be learned through the intentionality of making meaning of print, matching words to print to make sense of it in one’s own meaning universe and through one’s own linguistic structures. Along the developmental continuum, skills were never totally dismissed by teachers within this instructional paradigm. Rather, teachers were encouraged to teach them as embedded within meaningful reading and writing activities as needed. The isolated teaching of skills was always discouraged as counterproductive to true development of individuals as language users. It was expected that most learners would intuit many of the skills needed to read and write for meaningful purposes, precluding the need for a sequenced skill curriculum meant for all learners. Willinsky pointed out in 1990 that proponents of this new way of doing business in the literacy classroom needed to conduct rigorous, comparative research on its processes and products. He noted that this research was needed to counter the concerns of those educators for whom this type of literacy instruction did not feel right. As he described the movement at that time, the New Literacy theorists, reflecting their roots in Romanticism as it reacted against the Enlightenment period with its faith in mechanism, were much more comfortable with research that reflected lived experience. This led to an eschewing of positivist-based experimentalism and a hewing to anecdotal accounts from teachers or ethnographic researchers. Unfortunately, this scenario did not change significantly in the ensuing years. By the early 2000s, there was a dearth of research into the theories of the New Literacy (or Whole Language) and the ways they were instantiated in real classrooms. When people asked for


“proof” that this approach “worked,” the response was that this question, using those terms and the theories that underlay them, was inappropriate. According to this position, it was neither possible, relevant, nor desirable within this (New Literacy) epistemological frame to conduct the type of research others were advocating. This antiresearch stance was largely responsible, we believe, for the eventual weakening of public confidence in New Literacy instructional approaches. Thus, the New Literacy proponents were rendered vulnerable to the politically motivated power shift (or grab, depending on one’s perspective) by a block of cobbled together interest groups. These groups included political conservatives, empiricist researchers, cognitivists, and a public experiencing a free-floating anxiety, fueled by media accounts and political sound-bites, that their children were not learning to read and write well because the skills were not being taught in school. Without “proof,” or some systematically gathered body of evidence that this was not the case, we were led to the current state of “literacy crisis.”8 One result of this reactionary power shift has been the current focus in the United States on reinstating the systematic teaching of skills, and on making exclusive use of experimental or quasiexperimental research to identify the skills and the instructional methods to teach those skills, as described in Chapter 5. In the process, the cognitive and social perspectives on cognition and literacy learning have moved further apart. Each in response to the other has assumed opposing poles on a dialectic of learning continuum. In many ways, it appears that we have gone back through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. The social perspective has no use for skills at all and disdains empirical research on learning. The cognitive proponents are determined to rely solely on their experimental studies, conducted necessarily within narrow and controlled conditions, and to insist on the teaching of those skills they “know” will “work” for all learners.

Reconnecting the Social and the Cognitive Our goal is to begin to reconnect the two poles of the social and the cognitive. We attempt this theoretical move to better account for literacy development, on the individual as well as the community levels, than either theoretical lens currently does alone. This move


has significant implications, we believe, for future research and instruction into literacy development. Before we begin to develop our theory, which we depict as a widened lens, we address the relevant inadequacies of both the social and cognitive lens as they are now enacted and relate to literacy development. Each lens—the social practice and the cognitive—has theoretical and practical limitations that we hope to address in presenting our widened lens on literacy development. We discuss these theories as teachers and researchers who are primarily focused on literacy development of individuals who look to instruction for access to print literacy.

Limitations of the Cognitive Lens Inability to see the forest for the trees is a good metaphor for the difficulties inherent in a primarily cognitive lens on literacy development. Within this paradigm we include researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who believe that the search for the one right method will solve the failures of schools-based literacy education. These well-intentioned individuals and groups proceed with epistemological blinders on, seeing only learners in classrooms partaking in delivered instruction. Given that this picture fills the entire view frame, literacy development is defined as such; skills, instruction, method, and materials thus become the relevant issues. Failure—as measured by lack of adequate progress as determined by the state—is attributed either to poor instruction or to cognitive or linguistic deficits of learners that render them “not ready” or incapable of learning the skills taught in school. The gaining ascendancy of faith in the right method and corresponding materials has coincided with a dramatic shift in assessment policies. Within the previous decade, high-stakes assessments—initiated and implemented by political bodies—have made significant inroads into the schools. All students9 are now expected to pass assessments at predetermined levels in order to graduate from high school. One of the devastating outcomes of this stance is the incredible impact on the lives of learners and schools. Teachers and schools are being held accountable for delivering instruction that will ensure that even those learners previously described as not ready or as disabled will learn to read and write at predefined acceptable rates of progress.10 Punishments in the forms of refusal of credentials, negative designations of failing, and eventual takeovers of schools by local governing bodies are in-


creasingly common for those individuals and schools that fail to meet these high-stakes requirements. Increasingly, teachers are reporting a narrowing of the curriculum as limited classroom time is spent on preparing for assessments. Writing instruction is being reduced to writing to formulas designed to score well on assessment rubrics. Little, if any, time is spent on critical and analytical reading strategies because they are not usually assessed in the high-stakes assessments. The blinders inherent in the cognitive perspective prevent one from seeing learners in contexts outside of instructional ones. We do not mean that researchers and practitioners who identify as cognitivists do not recognize that literacy underachievement in school is highly related to economic and social status. However, cognitivists often assume this relationship to be causal. In this way, communities of underachieving learners are often identified as the source of cognitive and linguistic deficits, for which the schools must compensate. We argue, on the other hand, that the relationships between socioeconomic status and literacy achievement are more complex and, thus, interesting to the study of development. A strictly cognitive lens on literacy development fails to account for literacy practice outside of schools. It fails to account for it because it does not see it as relevant to literacy development. Rather, it sees it as an outcome of schooling. Thus, socially determined literacy practices outside of school, when they differ from academic literacy practices, are often used as evidence of literacy underachievement for nonmainstream learners and of achievement for mainstream ones.11 The narrow focus of the cognitive lens shuts out our view of the rest of the picture and prevents us from perceiving the links that outside-of-school literacy practices have to inside-of-school literacy development. One of these links can be conceptualized as actualization of literacy instruction. However, here we do not mean to depict types of literacy practices as evidence of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of different literacy instructional methods or of different levels of deficits by learners in schools.12 We do mean to emphasize that instructional method should primarily be envisioned as directed toward the ultimate real-life uses of print by learners rather than focused on in-school performances on literacy achievement measures. In this way, we see the playing out of literacy practice in the lives of people as the most proximal and valid measure of the outcome of


literacy instruction (Purcell-Gates, Degener, Jacobson, & Soler, 2002). This assumes that the ultimate rationale for literacy instruction in schools is to enable people to read and write in their lives in ways that allow them to accomplish personal and social goals and purposes. Another link we wish to focus on between outside-of-school literacy practices and inside-of-school literacy learning is found at the other end of the developmental continuum. This is the emergent literacy period (birth to age 5–6) during which young children develop early concepts and abilities foundational to learning to read and write. A great deal of research has documented the ways in which this knowledge construction is facilitated and enabled by experiences with literate others engaged in different literacy practices. We discussed this matter previously in Chapter 4 as part of our rationale for the LPALS study. The cognitive skills lens does indeed include recognition of emergent literacy abilities in the light of skill development. For many cognitivists, literacy practices are related to emergent literacy knowledge primarily in a strength/deficit relationship: children who come to school “not ready” to learn have linguistic and cognitive deficits owing to poor parenting and poor linguistic models in their homes. The literacy practices in these homes are judged good or bad depending on the degree to which they match those of the homes of high-achieving children. We believe however, that the link between social practices of literacy → emergent literacy knowledge → literacy development in school signifies a larger view of literacy development beyond that of a starting point for skills. This larger view emanates from a social practice perspective as well as a cognitive one.

Limitations of Social Practice Lens Conversely, a metaphorical failure to see the trees for the forest is a primary weakness of the social practice lens. With the prevailing focus on the social nature of literacy and on discourse differences, any discussion of development within discourses is often excluded and neglected. In particular, many social practice researchers eschew consideration of print literacy development. Perhaps because it was a response to the universalizing attempts of researchers grouped together as “Great Divide” theorists, a key


insight on the part of what came to be called the social practice view of literacy is that literacy cannot be understood in any decontextualized or ahistorical manner. Early works such as Street’s study of literacy in Iran, or Heath’s study of three different communities in the Piedmont pointed to the specific ways members of different communities interacted with print (Heath, 1983). These studies allowed researchers, teachers, and others to think more clearly about what kind of literacy was being valued in a society and taught in schools. It opened up the question of what literacy was after all. From that starting point, it would appear that the framework became increasingly narrower. Researchers looked to identify other variations on literacy, such as vernacular, smuggled, or gendered. Case studies of communities flourished, on Pacific islands or Amish homesteads, in the United States (Besnier, 1995; Fishman, 1988). Much of this work attempted to analyze the lack of success individuals from some communities in the United States have in school. Instead of prioritizing school-based literacy, or treating it as the model of literacy, the New Literacy Studies, as Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz describe, “have embraced out-of-school contexts, almost to the exclusion of looking in schools,” which is, after all, where most individuals acquire their print literacy (Hull & Schultz, 2002, 27). Indeed, as Street (2001) explains, “The ethnographic approach . . . is, then, more concerned with attempting to understand what actually happens than with trying to prove the success of a particular intervention or ‘sell’ a particular methodology for teaching or management.” Street contrasts this to the dominant account of literacy programs that “remains concerned with ‘effectiveness,’ often measured through statistics on skills outcomes.” Thus, researchers in the New Literacy Studies “attempt to understand ‘what’s going on’ before pronouncing on how to improve it” (Street, 2001, 1–2). As part of trying to understand what is “going on,” researchers have looked for causes of crises, such as differing discourse practices. In particular, much has been made of the experiences of students whose home discourse patterns are not a good match with the expectations of schools. Norman Fairclough sees this “prioritization of difference and change” as characteristic of the multiliteracies project (a current variation of the social practice model). Change, in this case, is “the dynamic negotiation of cultural and linguistic differ-


ence” (Fairclough, 2000, 174). Thus, the model is often that of a speaker of one language, dialect, or discourse encountering a different one in school, and the resulting tale of forced negotiation. In a recent formulation of multiliteracies, this explanation is provided: In the new theory of representation, in the context of the multimodal, multimedia modes of textual production in the era of electronic technologies, the task of text-makers is that of complex orchestration. Further, individuals are now seen as the remakers, transformers, of sets of representational resources—rather than the users of stable systems, in a situation where multiplicity of representational modes are brought into textual compositions. All these circumstances call for a new goal in textual (and perhaps other) practice: not of critique but of Design. Design takes for granted full competence in the use of resources which includes a full understanding of the communicational (hence political, ideological) potentials of these resources. (Kress, 2000, 160)

This move to take full competence for granted means that theories and research along this area cannot deal with individuals who are not fully competent in any given “mode of textual production.” Or, by definition, it must treat any production as competent. Both are flaws in the theory as it is put into practice. In the first case, by limiting itself to synchronic studies of difference, diachronic, or developmental, differences are not accounted for. This is too limiting an analytical framework. In the second case, treating all textual productions as competent washes out whatever difficulties individuals may have and ascribes them to “differences.” Although Street correctly points to the limited (and limiting) nature of statistical analysis of literacy achievement, effectiveness of literacy programs, we believe, is still a key concern. Our focus is on individual students who rely on instruction to appropriate the literacy abilities needed to participate within their communities of practice as well as to empower themselves through political and social action. In response to critiques of her work by Gee (noted above), Catherine Snow countered with the following observation of the social practice perspective: Gee and others who focus on the social and political nature of literacy (or literacies, in the current mode of shifting the noun’s character from mass to count) pretend to be oblivious to the fact that participation in a literacy practice—reading and making sense of instructions for in-

78 Print Literacy Development stalling an air conditioner, for example—is quite a different phenomenon for the preliterate child observing from his mother’s knee, the halting first grade reader who is focused on the task of recognizing letters and relating them to sounds, and the older reader who may be relatively fluent in reading regularly spelled words but has not yet acquired the capacity to process texts with many morphologically complex or unknown vocabulary items. (Snow, 2000, 117)

Snow asserts, and we concur, that the difficulty with the social practice perspective lies in its unwillingness to consider a view of literacy as involving subskills (we would add . . . as they relate to print literacy). However, we do not attribute this failure to the focus on the political or social aspects of literacy. We believe, as we explain in the following chapter, that the political and social aspects of literacy can be considered in conjunction with a view of literacy that also includes the cognitive components of print literacy development. PRINT MISSING FROM SOCIAL PRACTICE LENS

Related to the above consideration is the fact that in one strand of the social practice theory of literacy, print is removed from our understanding of what constitutes literacy. Gee, in his zeal to define literacy as larger than print, writes, “I define literacy as mastery of a secondary Discourse. . . . If one wanted to be rather pedantic and literalistic, then we could define literacy as mastery of a secondary Discourse involving print (which is almost all of them in a modern society)” (Gee, 1992, 143). Gee declines to do so: I see no gain from the addition of the phrase “involving print,” other than to assuage the feelings of people committed (as I am not) to reading and writing as decontextualized and isolable skills. In addition, it is clear that many so-called non-literate cultures have secondary Discourses which, while they do not involve print, involve a great many of the same skills, behaviors, and ways of thinking that we associate with literacy—for example, the many and diverse practices that have gone under the label “oral literature.” (Gee, 1992, 144)

Gee’s claim seems to involve a rather astounding leap and is made possible by regarding interactions with print only at the level of discourse. This renders any and all successful semiotic or communicative activity “literacy.” It also creates an analytical framework in which any attempt to examine skills such as coding and decoding print is seen as decontextualized. Looking at the specific requirements of


print literacy does not mean that the “oral literature” is by definition devalued. Nor does it mean embracing “Great Divide” theories about the inherent positive developmental impact of print. Although the creation and understanding of oral and print literature do require many of the same skills, some are simply not the same, namely the use of print. We do define literacy as involving print (although not all literacies do), but we do not view reading and writing as decontextualized and isolable skills. Without asserting a strong text version of literacy and recognizing that other communicative and semiotic practices share many things in common with print literacy, the fact is that print literacy has a unique set of requirements, not the least of which are the coding and encoding of phonemes. It is at this very conjunction of the special demands of print literacy and literacy that the need arises for a theoretical lens that takes into account both social practice and cognitive perspectives. A M B I G U O U S I M P L I C AT I O N S F O R I N S T R U C T I O N

A growing critique of the social practice perspective coalesces around the notion that it fails to lead to practical implications for instruction. Although this may be in part a result of the disciplinary heritage of the New Literacy Studies, it is a serious flaw for practitioners as well as for future literacy researchers. By reexamining the historical record (in Graff’s case) or by using anthropological methods to study literacy in practice (in Street’s case), social practice theorists and researchers have been quite successful in shifting the view of literacy from the autonomous to the ideological. This has allowed literacy itself to become a means for social analysis. For example, from within the social practice perspective on literacy, “we can treat literacy practices as windows into a group’s social and political structure—that is, not only can one look to local contexts to understand local literacy, but one can also look to local literacy practices to understand the key forces that organize local life” (Brandt & Clinton, 2002, 343). However, because the agenda of the New Literacy Studies has been, in part, to correct the historical record, to debunk ideas of literacy’s inherent cognitive benefits, and to value reading and writing practices other than those sanctioned by the school (all efforts we would endorse and learn from), it has had little time to speak about


the values of specific methods of school-based instruction, beyond pointing out the ways in which power structures are (re)constituted in certain types of instruction. Indeed, as noted earlier, the focus has been almost exclusively on outside-of-school literacy. As a result, many teachers and theorists are armed with cogent historical and political analyses of literacy but do not possess the research methodology they need to study what is most effective in practice. It has also resulted in the opposite: teachers reject the call for political clarity because they see the choice as one between methods or political clarity rather than both. To put it another way, an analysis of the economic impact of mass schooling and literacy instruction on the working class of Canada in the nineteenth century is important in developing political clarity about literacy and social policy. Yet this does not begin to help teachers who need to come to conclusions about the potential benefits of sustained silent reading as an instructional strategy for all students. Although teachers, armed with an understanding of students’ local literacies, may be able to adapt classroom instruction (Au, 2002; Au & Mason, 1981), an awareness of potential cultural incongruencies is not enough to help teachers provide those students with the skills they need to reach whatever literacy goals they have. Furthermore, too narrow a focus on discourse or practice incongruencies may erase the sociopolitical construction of those incongruencies (Bartolome´, 1998), and it may also erase the developmental needs of an individual student.

m

CHAPTER SEVEN

Print Literacy Development through a Widened Lens

Many, perhaps most, researchers and theorists operating within the cognitive or social practice frame believe that the two are distinct and independent paradigms. Each, according to practitioners of the other, has serious limitations and does its own brand of harm to literacy learning and achievement. This belief in the disconnect between the social and the cognitive was apparent when Purcell-Gates was asked to deliver a paper at a jointly sponsored session at the American Educational Research Association and Society of Scientific Study of Reading Annual Meetings.1 The request was to address the question, “How can the social and cognitive connect?” The request came from several prominent cognitive psychologists who study reading and reading acquisition. The implication of a current disconnect of the two lenses was clear. We reject this implication that the social and the cognitive are independent and incommensurable. The very term disconnect implies a linear relationship, much like two train cars, coupled, or uncoupled, together. We suggest that a more accurate way of envisioning the relationship between the sociocultural and the cognitive is as relating transactionally in a nested relationship, with the cognitive occurring within the sociocultural context. From birth, we perceive objects, learn about them, think about them, act upon them, or forget about them while we are in the world. And the world is organized socially and culturally. In this sense, therefore, it is impos-


sible to conceive of the sociocultural and the cognitive as disconnected. We therefore suggest that, to have any valid relationship to reality, research into a cognitive process like reading must reflect this contextualization of the cognitive by the sociocultural.2 We believe that we are among other researchers, theorists, and literacy practitioners who do not see the world of literacy—literacy practice and literacy development—as bifurcated along the social and cognitive dimensions. Indeed, we believe that an assumption of interrelationship between the two perspectives is required to account for accumulating data on literacy development from different research programs. As noted earlier, the majority of cognitive researchers do not discount the existence and relevance of sociocultural contexts of learning. Nor do sociocultural researchers deny the role of cognition in learning to read and write.3 The disagreement, we believe, is more a function of how one sees the world and thus forefronts and backgrounds phenomena. However, these decisions of foregrounding and backgrounding have significant impacts on theory-building, on research, and—perhaps most significantly—on learning opportunities for children and adults around the world. As an example, when one of the authors of this book was teaching ESOL at a community college a few years ago, he was stunned to hear teachers at a staff meeting assessing students in purely cognitive terms. Almost to a person, the teachers were praising the newly arriving Russian students (“They’re so smart—they learn so fast”) and simultaneously criticizing Spanish-speaking students (“They’re so slow—I think they have learning disabilities”). When the author in question pointed out to these teachers that the Russian students had completed higher education in the former Soviet Union, and many of the Spanish-speaking students had come from the countryside of Latin America, and thus the two groups had radically different histories when it came to literacy and education, he was met with blank stares. In subsequent conversations with students at the school, they indicated that they had been made to feel “stupid” and “slow,” and when the social and sociopolitical aspects of their own development were explicitly addressed, they took on renewed drive to learn. Counter-examples exist, of course, where students (particularly adults) feel like the class they are taking is all about the social (or political) and does not help them to learn the skills they have iden-

Through a Widened Lens 83

tified as important. Again, this does not have to be the case; the cognitive (subskills) and the social (discourses, opportunities, and so on) are not by definition mutually exclusive. Sylvia Scribner and Jean Lave are two psychologists whose theories of learning within social contexts represent the tradition within which we place ourselves. Scribner (1997), in an essay on the future of literacy research, argued for studying literacy as the relationship of higher and lower levels of processes, with the higher levels representing the social practice aspects of literacy and the lower levels the skills-driven ones. The challenge, according to Scribner, is to come to a full understanding of the phenomenon of literacy; we must seek to understand how the levels become integrated into the full complex system. She called on activity theory as a promising theory within which to conceptualize literacy (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Wertsch, 1979; Wertsch & Lee, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978; Leont’ev, 1978). According to Scribner, Activity Theory offers the applicable units of analysis, activities, goal-directed actions, and operations. Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) described the process of learning within social practice contexts as Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP). Lave and Wenger see LPP as the central defining characteristic of learning viewed as situated activity: “By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, 29). Lave and her colleagues also draw on activity theory and the situated nature of activity. This perspective emphasizes the need to study the whole person in activity in the world rather than as a person who “receives” knowledge of the world.4 Agent, activity, and the world are seen as mutually constituting the other. Learners are seen as newcomers to social practice who become increasingly skilled, thus becoming masters. Our intent in this book—to theorize on the relationships of (a) cognitive, in-the-head, processes/skills and (b) social practices of literacy as this applies to literacy development itself—and, within this frame, to research and instructional implications—is within the spirit expressed by Scribner and Lave and Wenger. Our metaphor is that of a lens that is pulled back far enough to incorporate the nested relationship of the cognitive within the social. To do so, we must


modify each of the strong positions of the cognitive and the social. We, therefore, do consider reading and writing to involve cognitive— in the head—processes. We also see these in-the-head processes as developing and shaping themselves within and according to socially determined literacy practices, using David Barton and Mary Hamilton’s definition of literacy practices to include values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). As a way to begin thinking of the cognitive and the social as transacting in print literacy use and development, consider the following instances of word recognition—a component of reading that is claimed by cognitivists and disdained as a unit of analysis by social practice theory: • Reading from a list of unrelated words • Reading from a list of related words • Reading words in the context of a single sentence • Reading words in the context of a paragraph • Reading words in the context of a novel • Doing any one of these word recognition tasks in a lab in front

of a computer screen as a subject in an experiment • Reading words from a mirror within a FMRI machine with

your head in a locked position • Reading words from a story in a classroom during round robin

reading • Reading words from a book in a classroom during free reading • Reading words at home from a recipe book during a cooking

event • Reading words from a novel in bed before drifting off to sleep

First of all, we maintain that each of these processes occurs within its own, recognizable, and named sociocultural contexts with its unique goals, players, motivations, and linguistic entailments. The strong cognitivist position is that the process of word recognition operates in the same way, regardless of shifting social, including linguistic, context.5 Work in information processing, however, documents that, as regards perception and recognition, context plays a strong role. Works by Keith Stanovich, Richard West, and others


demonstrate convincingly that younger, less able readers rely on linguistic context to a greater degree than do readers for whom the word recognition process has become automatic (Schvaneveldt, Ackerman, & Semlear, 1977; Schwantes, Boesl, & Ritz, 1980; Stanovich & West, 1978, 1981). However, models of perception and recognition of real-world objects, including words, include the effects of context not as trivial but almost in a deterministic sense. For perception of real-world objects, Stephen Palmer (1975) and others concluded that objects are recognized both faster and more accurately if they are encountered in congruent contexts. For example, when shown a picture of a living room, or a kitchen, with identifying features and furnishings, subjects recognize a toaster faster and more accurately (that is, with fewer misses or errors) in the picture of the kitchen as compared to the picture of the living room. Please note that our conceptions, or schemas, of which objects more typically belong in a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and so on come from our experiences living in our own specific, socioculturally organized worlds. For example, when shown a picture of a cooking fire in different contexts, we suspect that most of our readers would recognize it more quickly and with fewer errors in the context of a campground than in the context of a kitchen. But the women informants for a study of adult literacy learning in rural El Salvador would probably recognize it faster in the context of a kitchen than a campground (Purcell-Gates & Waterman, 2000). These women cooked three times a day over cooking fires placed on raised platforms, located inside their kitchens—one-room structures built of mud, sticks, and tin roofs. Few, if any, of these women had ever seen an electric toaster! Regarding the recognition of letters and words, we recall David Rumelhart’s interactive model of word recognition, a model that is still valid and implicit in much of the work that cognitive psychologists are currently doing on word recognition (Rumelhart, 1994; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1988). According to this model, as confirmed by a series of carefully designed and executed experiments, congruent context aids the perception of letters as they are processed in the perceptual system. Congruent context at the semantic level, the syntactic level, the lexical level, the letter cluster level, the letter level, and the feature level significantly enables perception and recognition of letters and words. Whatever constitutes congruent con-


text at the semantic, syntactic, lexical, letter cluster, letter, and feature levels is determined by one’s experiences with language and texts— oral and written—which are constructed and comprehended according to specific, sociocultural rules and conventions (Halliday, 1978; Slobin & Johnson, 1986). Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria (1983)—as reported by Anne Haas Dyson (1991)—concluded that children linked the written language encoding system to their grasp of the specific function of print as an aid in recalling the meanings of different written messages. Dyson points out that Luria illustrated in detail how a functional and interactive context—a socioculturally organized context—might lead to the grasp of the function of print as an aid in recalling messages and as the beginning of the child’s search for ways of precisely differentiating meanings through letter graphics. In other words, experiencing the act of using print within an authentic, interactive, sociocultural context enabled the cognitive task involved in learning letter/ sound encodings that in turn permitted that print function—in this case, writing down messages. Cognitivists can also grasp this social cognitive interrelationship by considering the implications of schema theory.6 The strong implications, if not the underlying presupposition, of schema theory is that it accounted for the context effects on all levels of cognition, from basic perceptual processes such as letter recognition to more cognitive ones such as comprehension and interpretation of text (Adams & Collins, 1977). Several researchers in fact specifically documented the obvious conclusion from schema theory that comprehension of text was affected by cultural perspectives (Pritchard, 1990). This is quite similar to work being done in cross-cultural studies of a given linguistic community’s color words and perceptions of color.7 Although very little actual research has been done on word recognition as it occurs in the situated world, Ellen McIntyre’s study provides tantalizing evidence that beginning readers, while actually reading text, do employ different strategies for identifying words as they shift among classroom social contexts (McIntyre, 1992). McIntyre documented first graders’ reading behaviors within the three classroom contexts of (a) independent reading; (b) whole-class reading; and (c) reading group. She found that these behaviors changed depending on the implicit rules and demands of each setting as well as on the patterns of interaction implicit in each.


Literacy Development: Cognitive Development within Sociocultural Practices Given our arguments for pulling back the lens, or widening the aperture, on print literacy development, we now present the resulting view. Of course, the metaphor of opening the lens wider reflects a starting place within a cognitive perspective. For social practice perspectives, then, the process we are proposing is one of sharpening the focus to bring into view the cognitive skill development that must be part of any social practice of literacy. Within this camera analogy, we could say that we are widening the lens and deepening the depth of field to increase the in-focus zone or range. The theoretical view we present on the development of print literacy is driven by a need to include development in the picture of literacy practice. As will become apparent, we do not view development as primarily unilinear or hierarchical but as a result of ongoing context-specific responses to need, use, and opportunity for literacy practice. Print literacy development is better understood as a complex of related lines of development, not all of which run parallel. Change in one aspect of literacy practice does not by definition lead to change in another aspect of it (although it does, of course, change the context in which the individual’s collection of literacy practices are situated). For example, Somali immigrants in the United States bring with them a culture that tends to favor oral communication over written, and the spoken word often carries more authority than the written. Many Somalis become literate for the first time after coming to America, and they begin to interact with many different kinds of texts. But being able to read in English does not always change their perspectives on the authority of the oral that they had in Somalia. For this reason, Somali immigrants often seek out oral confirmation of what has been written, even in cases where most literate Westerners would not think twice. In addition, since practice is not static, neither is development. As the needs, uses, and opportunity for literacy practices change, so do skills. For example, print literacy in a second language will atrophy without use, particularly if the language uses a script that differs from that of the individual’s dominant language. One of the authors of this book, Erik Jacobson does research in Japan, and his facility with Japanese print literacy waxes and wanes depending on the amount of time he is spending in Japan.


Thus, we begin with the commonsense standpoint of cognitive activity being shaped by and shaping the social world, and the social world shaping and being shaped by the cognitive. We are interested in the implications of this stance for print literacy development, and we choose to begin the examination of this dialectic, or mutually constructed relationship of the social and the cognitive, with the social. We will then move to a discussion of the specific skills that print literacy appears to require, always keeping in mind their instantiation in context. We have also chosen to describe the process of literacy development beginning at the start as it would for a child. This is not to say that the process does not hold for adults or for others who may begin the development process at any age. Nor does it mean that literacy development is always, or even essentially, incremental, as will become apparent when we discuss literacy development across the multiple literacies that exist for different people at different points in their lives. Children are born into communities of social and cultural practice. If the specific worlds into which they are born include written language and written language use, these children, from birth, are immersed in the literacy practices of their homes and communities. These practices encompass the values that members of their communities place on different literacy practices, their beliefs about literacy use, participation, and learning, and the ways in which the practices reflect power relationships embedded in the social lives of community members.8 Thus, these literacy practices are part of the rhythms and textures of their lived lives. Children born into sociocultural worlds that do not include print literacy practice do not begin to develop print literacy until, and if, they experience at least one instance of the use of written language. To understand the world of literacy for particular, individual children, and thus to begin to get a hold of something we can call a developmental process, we present three different portraits that capture the world of three actual children. Texts and functions for reading and writing are embedded in their worlds. We present these literacy worlds as different not in the essence of literacy as social/ cultural practice but as this essence is instantiated within different sociocultural contexts and practices.


Different Worlds of Literacy: Three Cases Khosi Khosi is an 11-year-old boy living in a village in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa.9 Khosi comes from what would be considered a middle- to upper-middle-class family in that country; his father owns a successful car mechanic shop, and his mother is a police officer in the capital city. It is common for many children in Lesotho to live with their extended family, particularly when both parents work. Because his parents must live apart in order for them both to have jobs, Khosi chooses to live with his paternal grandmother, Mrs. Serobe. Mrs. Serobe is a highly educated person compared to most others in her village; she was the first married woman to be granted admission to the teacher training college in Lesotho. Both of Khosi’s parents have also completed some postsecondary education, and the family is extremely proud that Khosi’s mother recently graduated from the police academy. Most of the texts and the opportunities to read and write that Khosi encounters are at school. The primary school, which teaches the equivalents of first through seventh grades, is equipped with textbooks, which have been published in Great Britain or South Africa. Most of the textbooks are written in English because English is the exclusive medium of instruction after Standard 4 (fourth grade). Students at Khosi’s school have their own notebooks, and a large portion of their time at school is spent in copying down notes from the blackboard or completing exercises in these notebooks. Outside of school, Khosi has some different opportunities to come into contact with texts and literacy for different purposes. Because his grandmother holds a high position in the village—she is the headmistress of the local primary school, directs the village choir, and serves as a member of the governing boards of the local high school, the technical skills training center, the church, and the clinic—Khosi sometimes observes her receiving hand-delivered notes from colleagues regarding business for one of the schools or for one of the boards on which she serves. Khosi’s grandmother occasionally receives mail, which someone from the village may fetch from the school’s mailbox in the district capital. Khosi also comes into contact with various texts in the little shop near his house. The shop has old advertisements for items such as Coca-Cola or Castle beer. In the


shop, he can see the packaging labels of various products such as Sunlight Soap, OMO laundry detergent, or Simba potato chips. Although the prices for various items are written directly on the package in black marker or are orally conveyed upon request, there might also be a posted handwritten announcement for a special offering. Similarly, Khosi would be able to observe the shopkeeper writing as he totaled the bill or kept track of his sales in a ledger. Most printed text in the shop is in English (except for handwritten postings), since all of the products for sale come from South Africa or England. The government-run clinic is one place in the village where there are both a high number of texts and a large percentage of texts written in the local language, Sesotho. In the clinic’s waiting room, Khosi can see a number of public health posters that educate the villagers about the importance of childhood vaccines, about the prevention of HIV, and about how to care for AIDS patients. These posters are typically written in Sesotho and are accompanied by helpful illustrations. Khosi and other Basotho children learn a number of things about literacy as they grow up in villages like this one. These children learn that reading and writing are primarily things that happen at school or for the lucky few who are able to earn good jobs, typically with the government; reading and writing are not at all necessary for the important tasks of daily living. The children also learn that being able to read and write in more than one language is important, since English is the best means for advancement in Lesotho or in neighboring South Africa. Literacy in English therefore is an important marker of social and economic status.

Yoshihiko and Tomohiko Yoshihiko, growing bored with the book he is reading, announces, “I am going to my study to check my e-mail.” After checking his e-mail, he says, “I am going to write some thank you cards!” The “study” is an antique desk given to him by his grandmother and aunt, and it is nestled among other furniture in the living room. His laptop is made by Fisher Price. Yoshihiko is 3 years old. He is also a member in good standing of his family where e-mail is checked on a regular basis and where hand-made “thank you” cards are preferred to store-bought cards. He exhibits other signs of having been socialized into a variety of literacy practices. One of his father’s favorite photos is that of Yoshihiko (age 2) flipping through a copy of


Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.10 Yoshihiko himself is fond of pointing to the “B” on his baseball hat and saying “Red Sox yeah!!! Yankees boo!!!” While the two texts, Engels and a Red Sox hat, are quite distinct, both are part of local literacy practices for Yoshihiko. Tomohiko walks into the bedroom, one of his favorite books in hand, and climbs onto the bed. He watches as his father reads a book to his brother. As soon as the book is finished and put down, Tomohiko pushes his brother off of his father’s lap, hands his father the book he was carrying, and installs himself in place. When his father is finished reading the book, Tomohiko asks for it again. Protocol seems to imply that as long as it is the same book, the lap does not have to be vacated. Tomohiko is 20-months-old and has mastered his family’s bedtime routine. Given that one of his favorite books is a road atlas of eastern Massachusetts, he also is well on his way to participating in the time-honored New England pastime of endlessly discussing “how to get there.” Yoshihiko and Tomohiko’s mother is a Japanese American who was born in New York City. Their maternal grandparents were both born and raised in Japan. Indeed, except for their maternal grandmother, aunt and uncle, all of Yoshihiko and Tomohiko’s maternal relatives live in Japan. When the adult members of this side of the family get together (with no monolingual English speakers present), the majority of the conversation is in Japanese. Yoshihiko and Tomohiko’s grandmother has lived in the United States for almost four decades, but Japanese remains her dominant language. Their mother, aunt, and uncle are fluent speakers of Japanese but have varying literacy abilities in the language. Their father is a Finnish American who was born in Massachusetts and who speaks some Japanese. He is far less fluent than his brother-in-law, yet has stronger Japanese literacy skills. The other members of the paternal side of the family have no Japanese-language skills, and their dominant language is English. As they grow up, the hope is that Yoshihiko and Tomohiko will become biliterate. Because of the nature of the Japanese writing system, their names can be written in the following three ways: English Alphabet

Yoshihiko

Tomohiko

Japanese/Hiragana Japanese/Kanji

0 12 3 67

4 523 87


Hiragana is one of two Japanese syllabaries. In hiragana, each symbol stands for a syllable, and in Yoshihiko’s case 0 is read as “yo,” 1 as “she,” 2 as “he,” and 3 as “ko.” In Tomohiko’s case, 4 is “toe,” 5 as “mo,” 2 as “he,” and 3 as “ko.” Kanji are the Chinese-derived characters that carry both morphemic and phonological value. Yoshihiko’s kanji are 6(meaning good, smart, or nice) and 7 (meaning boy). In Tomohiko’s case, the kanji are 8 (meaning friendly) and the same kanji 7 (meaning boy). All of these kanji can be pronounced differently if they are in different combinations, but in this case they are read Yoshi-hiko and Tomo-hiko. Thus, when Yoshihiko and Tomohiko get birthday cards their names can be written in three different ways. From their paternal relatives, they are in English. When they get cards from their maternal relatives they may be in either kanji or hiragana. As they grow up and begin to read and write cards themselves, they will have to possess the ability to decode (and encode) print in two different languages and understand the use of print as a social semiotic. That is, they will have to be able to read and write their names in two languages, and they will have to be aware of the meaning that a choice of a given language may represent. The use of an unexpected print code (for example, writing a name in Japanese in a card sent to a monolingual English speaker) would be a break with protocol and have some interpersonal ramifications. While encoding/decoding and understanding the social practice demands of literacy are distinct skills, they are not separable or autonomous—the cognitive and social demands of writing a name occur simultaneously. Yoshihiko, being somewhat older than Tomohiko, already needs to master both the cognitive and social demands of literacy. When he wants an adult to read a book to him, he has to think about what kind of text to get. All the adults in his life can read English, but not all can read Japanese. When he goes into his playroom to choose, he is confronted with shelves overstuffed with books in Japanese and English (and some other languages as well). He can already identify which books are in English and which books are in Japanese, but he cannot as easily match the book with the adult reader’s skills. One reason for this is that books in Japanese vary with regards to their use of hiragana and kanji. Some books for children have no kanji and all hiragana, while others use kanji in limited ways. There are certain books that his father can read and understand, and others that his father can read out loud (by decoding the syllabary) and yet


not understand. His Japanese-speaking uncle cannot read to him at all in Japanese but can understand what his father is reading out loud. In this way, the combined cognitive and social are at play with the adults as well.

Jimmy Jimmy’s dad sells toys for a living, a fact that makes him a very popular person among Jimmy’s friends! Because Jimmy’s dad sells toys, a supply of new toys is always kept in the closet in the guest room, and it is not unusual for his mother to bring one out from time to time as a gift for a visiting child. Every night, and some mornings, Jimmy’s dad sits at a card table set up in the living room doing paper work—filling in forms, filing orders, making checkoffs on preprinted lists of stores and locations. The sight of his dad at that card table, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, and mumbling to himself as he does his work will always stay with Jimmy whenever he remembers his childhood years. Jimmy’s mother is mostly a stay-at-home mom who is known for her sewing skills and her love of cooking. There are often patterns for sewing and cookbooks covered with flour left out in the house. She also grows vegetables and fruit out in their small backyard in Southern California. Their house sits among many like it in one of numerous housing tracts that have taken over the fruit groves and farms of the area. With his mom busy with sewing, cooking, and gardening, and his dad away on his selling trips, there is little time during the day when anyone is actually sitting down. Jimmy himself likes best to tinker with motors and “make things” out in the garage. The family does get together, however, to watch the evening news on television each night before they go to bed. Mom and Dad much prefer getting the news this way than through a newspaper, which they would not have the time or patience to read anyway. The same is true for magazines. No one ever sits long enough to read one during the day, so it would be a waste of paper to buy or to order one. There are a few Readers’ Digest condensed books on a small shelf set above the light switch in the living room. But “We’re just not readers, you know,” explains Jimmy’s mom. Someone gave them the books a long time ago, and they seem to function much like the collection of decorative plates displayed on the walls. Jimmy attends a Catholic parochial school and does above-average


work in his studies. His school books and papers are carted back and forth to school in his book bag, and he does his homework every night at the large varnished picnic table in the kitchen. When he finishes, he packs up his books and papers into his bag in preparation for school the next day. The television is usually turned on after dinner, and family members alternately watch it and engage in their other activities. The family is very close and whenever possible goes off on family camping trips. At selected campgrounds, they meet other families they know from other trips. At night, after a day of fishing or hiking, they sit around the campfire and talk and share stories into the night. These vignettes contain rough sketches of only three possible scenarios of possible literacy worlds. We believe that there are endless permutations to the ways that print appears in practice and textual forms in the social lives of individual children and adults. Furthermore, any particular literacy world should never be seen as fixed, or static, but as a snapshot of a system of interrelationships of written language practices, events, and texts that is dynamic, shifting, and capable of change.11

The Functional and Social Nature of Print Literacy At this point let us clarify a distinction between what we are viewing as the sociocultural contexts of literacy practice within which print literacy skill develops and Barton and Hamilton’s depiction of local, or vernacular, literacy, Street’s multiple literacies, and others (Moje, 2000; Hull & Schultz, 2002; Guzzetti & Gamboa, 2002). For us, an individual child’s literacy world will consist of all possible literacy practices, literacy events, and written texts that occur within and for the lives of the members of that child’s community and family. This means all of the literacy practices that function in the lives of the community and family members. In this sense, we are appropriating the term functional literacy to mean any use of print for a real-life communicative purpose. We use the term real life—granting its awkwardness—to refer to reading and writing events that people carry out for true communicative purposes. We contrast this with reading and writing conducted as part of the function of learning to read and write. Our view of functional literacy differs from some other depictions


primarily in that it is more all-encompassing. Barton and Hamilton use the term vernacular literacies for the types of literacies they documented within the Lancaster neighborhood that served as the site for their study. They define vernacular literacy practices as those that are “rooted in everyday experiences and serve everyday purposes. They draw upon and contribute to vernacular knowledge. Often they are less valued by society and are not particularly supported by external social institutions.” Barton and Hamilton distinguish these informally learned literacies from what they term dominant literacy practices, which they define as “those associated with formal organisations, such as those of education, law, religion and the workplace” and as those “given high value, legally and culturally” (1998, 251–252). We include these vernacular literacies in our theoretical portrait of potential literacy worlds but do not limit ourselves to them. We are positing a lens for literacy development in general and so must include dominant literacies as well, if in fact the individual is participating in a social community for whom dominant literacies function.12 This stance is assumed more easily because we are depicting the literacy worlds of individuals from their perspectives, not from a disembodied analytic one. From individuals’ perspectives, all experiences with reading and writing in their lives are local, functional, and part of social practice. Experienced literacy practices, with their literacy events and texts, will always be shaped by the personal interpretations, values, beliefs, and purposes of those practicing them. It is in these localized, embodied forms that individuals experience them. One framework for understanding this approach to the construct of functional, or real life, is the work of M. A. K. Halliday, specifically his notion of language as a social semiotic. Halliday’s theory of language as social semiotic provides the source for thinking about the functions that language serves. Focusing on language development in children, Halliday provided a typology of functions for which children learn their native language. This typology was an attempt to capture the range of linguistic functions in a social world. They include: • Instrumental • Regulatory • Interactional

96 Print Literacy Development • Personal • Heuristic • Imaginative • Informative

Halliday extends his functional theory of language development to written language. “What is learning to read and to write?” he asks. “Fundamentally it is an extension of the functional potential of language . . . reading and writing are an extension of the functions of language” (Halliday, 1978, 57). As such, we present Halliday’s language functions and definitions with our own written language examples of each: 1. Instrumental: Language used to satisfy a material need, enabling one to obtain goods and services that one wants or needs. Examples: Ordering something via a form; requesting service in a memo. 2. Regulatory: Language used to control behavior. This is related to the instrumental function but is distinct. The difference between this and the instrumental is that in the instrumental the focus is on the goods or services required and it does not matter who provides them, whereas the regulatory function is directed toward a particular individual and it is the behavior of that individual that is to be influenced. Examples: Written rules and regulations (such as, a driver’s manual); the “don’t walk” sign or a stop sign. 3. Interactional: Language used to make or maintain interpersonal contact. Examples: Personal letters and greeting cards; Notes like “I love you.” 4. Personal: Language used to express awareness of oneself, in contradistinction to one’s environment. Includes expressions of personal feelings, participation and withdrawal, interest, pleasure, and disgust. Examples: Memo of personal reaction to a new policy; writing in a journal of personal reactions and feelings. 5. Heuristic: Language used to learn and to explore the environment. Examples: Reading for information; writing down questions to ask of text or of a speaker.


6. Imaginative: Language used to create, including stories and make-believe/pretend. Examples: Reading/writing poetry, fiction. 7. Informative: Language used to communicate information to someone who does not already possess that information. Examples: writing information texts; Writing research reports; writing personal letters to inform someone of what has happened to a relative. These are the social semiotic functions for which literate people use written language in their socioculturally defined lives. As we portrayed in the cases of Khosi, Yoshihiko and Tomohiko, and Jimmy, these literacy worlds will consist of dominant, vernacular, and all permutations of different literacy practices as they mediate different social worlds. Depending on the context and situation, individuals may (code) switch between literacies to accomplish the function in question. They may decide that vernacular literacy is more appropriate for an interactional function (writing a letter to a friend) and that a dominant literacy is needed for an instrumental function (getting a bank loan). Part of the developmental process is identifying which literacy may be appropriate for which function, and what the specific subskill requirements are for each situated act. We highlight the functionality of print (texts) because we wish to think about what people read or write and why they read or write them in specific sociocultural contexts. This is key to our linking the cognitive with the social, especially as it implicates instructional practice. We acknowledge that function and text do not simplistically constitute each other and that meaning and values are contested, variable, and open to interpretations. While these linguistic theoretical issues, nicely framed by the work of Bakhtin,13 contextualize our thinking, they are not immediately relevant to our argument and so will not be developed within the main text. We do wish to note, however, that this world of contested and changing meanings is the world in which development takes place. Within their socioculturally constructed and organized worlds, children participate as language users—they proceed to make sense, make meaning of their worlds and of themselves within those worlds. To accomplish this activity, they learn the semiotic system of their worlds. As Gunther Kress, in presenting the theories of the New London Group,14 explains, the


semiotic worlds of individuals in the current era of intense social change are complex and ever changing and require constant and complex orchestration. In summary, we are portraying literacy development as occurring within the context of socioculturally constructed literacy practices. Figure 7.1 portrays this relationship.

Literacy Development within Textual Worlds We enthusiastically agree with the New London Group that the full literacy required to construct and negotiate texts in today’s world involves more than the ability to read and write print. However, in line with our earlier stated goal of focusing this discussion on print literacy, we ask that readers now move to consideration of the written language aspects of this semiotic array. The textual functions and forms of written language in the social semiotic worlds of children constitute the linguistic environment

Socioculturally Constructed Literacy Practices

Values

Literacy Development

Beliefs

Power Relationships

Figure 7.1 Literacy development occurs within the context of socioculturally constructed literacy practices.


within which literacy development will commence and proceed. Individuals learn these functions and forms as they participate within their own socioculturally organized textual worlds. Their textual experiences include the values and beliefs that accompany textual practices and, within this, the different participant structures that are assigned to different textual practices. Thus, the learning of textual functions and forms, thus, includes learning the values, beliefs, and participant structures that accompany those practices. As is undoubtedly apparent, we are now moving to the cognitive dimension of our model with this discussion of learning. We have stated that individuals learn social functions of written language and the textual forms that are used to serve those functions. Learning textual forms involves cognitive processes such as perception, memory, as well as cognitive linguistic, or psycholinguistic, processes involving the production and reception of language forms. With our focus on the learning of written language functions and forms, we will first step back for a moment to provide some background information regarding the ways that written language, in general, differs linguistically from oral.

Psycho-Socio-linguistic Considerations of Oral/Written Language Differences Any discussion of written textual functions and forms must assume certain linguistic features that mark written language—the language of print that literate people read or write—as contrasted with oral language—the language of speech.15 We stress this linguistic issue because descriptions and assertions of the interrelatedness of oral and written language, and of the ways they constitute each other in actual practice, have often resulted in the assumption that they are linguistically synonymous. The most simplistic version of this misconception, often perpetuated by beginning reading methods texts, is that written language is just oral language written down. This, of course, is not the case, and any theory of literacy development must account for learning the forms and features of written language that are called upon to accomplish the different functions of print. Let us offer the following sample of written language to exemplify this statement and to ground the subsequent discussion: There once was a brave knight and a beautiful lady. They went on a trip, a dangerous trip! They saw a little castle in the distance. They

100 Print Literacy Development went to it. A mean, mean, mean hunter was following them, through the bushes at the entrance of the little castle. As he creeped out of the bushes, he thought what to do. As the drawbridge was opened, they could easily get in. . . .

This remarkable piece of language was produced by a 5-year-old girl who had just begun to attend kindergarten. She was not reading these sentences from a book; nor was she telling a story. She was pretending to read orally from a wordless picture book. As such, she revealed her knowledge of written storybook language, specifically, written fairy tale language—the genre triggered by the pictures in this particular book. In a study of 39 randomly selected kindergartners and second graders, all of whom had been extensively read to before they started school, Purcell-Gates concluded that children learn written language forms through this cultural practice of reading to young children.16 In the 1980s, linguist Wallace Chafe did a great deal of work on the linguistic differences between oral and written language (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1986). Eschewing an approach to this topic that considered oral and written language as decontextualized forms, Chafe and others (Rubin, 1978; Rubin, 1987) sought to understand the similarities and differences within a cognitive as well as a social frame. Basically, this meant that different language forms were studied as they reflected social factors such as location, social and power relations among communicative partners, function or purpose of the text, and discourse style. Cognitive considerations for language use included time to compose and cognitive limitations of working memory. Swirling around this work is the claim that written and oral language—or print and speech—can never be actually differentiated from each other in use. Reading and writing always draw upon and are used in conjunction with talk and vice versa. Although some take this as a reason to dismiss the linguistic work of Chafe and others, we do not. We acknowledge that written and oral language are interdependent and do not exist in separate domains in the lives of people. However, we do believe that the different textual forms and features of a given written language (since not all languages share the same features) can be identified and studied. We also believe that they are part of the knowledge required of learners as they develop


as readers and writers within specified cultural practices. We will briefly summarize the conclusions of this work. Written language, as all other modes of language, serves specific purposes and carries particular pragmatic constraints. We may use written language to communicate with someone who is not physically present at the moment—and the language produced reflects this purpose. We may use writing to make a thought permanent because, unlike oral speech, print continues to exist after we produce it. We may write language down to serve legal and administrative functions because, in this literate society, print carries much more authority than speech. The linguistic markers that tend to distinguish oral from written language include word choice and variety, syntax, and reference conventions (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1986). Language that is written (and spoken) consists of many different genres to serve the different linguistic functions. Therefore, these markers of word choice and variety, syntax, and reference conventions should not be taken to mean that they appear identically across all written genres. Written genres themselves, as socially determined written language variants, are marked by such linguistic features as word choice, syntax, topic, and written discourse community style (Christie, 1987; Cope & Kalantzis, 1987; Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987; Reid, 1987). Across the genres of (oral) conversation, (oral) lectures, (written) personal letters, and (written) essays, however, Chafe found differentiating markers that reflected the intersections of (a) distance from communicative partner, and (b) mode—whether it was spoken or written. Further work by the first author documented many of his findings for formal oral and written storybook narratives for young children (Purcell-Gates, 1988). To assist in this discussion, we present another language sample, this time oral, from the same 5-year-old girl whose sample of pretend reading language appears above. This oral narrative resulted from a request to tell about her last birthday party. The reader is encouraged to examine these two samples for linguistic evidence of oral and written differences: I got a rainbow heart. And so did my friend, my best friend at the party. My friend Kee, who’s actually the same birthday. And then I know another person with a June 1st birthday, but he’s a boy. And his name is Brandon. And he’s just down the street. And then after my

102 Print Literacy Development party, we had like a little family party, and we went to the San Francisco Zoo. V O C A B U L A RY

The vocabulary chosen for written language includes words that most users of the language would agree belong in books or other print contexts rather than in speech. These vocabulary items are identified as lexical choices between words with the same meaning, with more common words (such as use, show, and pay attention to) being rejected by the writer for more literary ones (such as employ, state, and heed). Other linguists refer to these word types as “rare words” or “sophisticated words” (Weizman, 1996). These labels reflect the fact that these literary words are used less frequently overall than their more commonly used counterparts, and linguistic analyses document that, when they are used, they tend to appear in print rather than speech. Written texts also tend to reflect a greater variety of vocabulary, perhaps because of the greater time needed for choosing wording afforded by writing as compared to speaking. Variety of word use can be measured by type/token ratios, with the number of different words in a sample divided by the total number of words in the sample. Wallace Chafe and Jane Danielewicz compared a formal speaking situation (formal lectures) with a formal writing situation (written essays). They found that the lectures had a type/token ratio of words of .19 as compared to essays with a ratio of .24. Even the more informal written texts of letters had a type/token ratio of words of .22, slightly higher than the formal spoken text of lectures. S Y N TA X

The syntax found in many written texts, as compared to spoken texts, is more embedded and often transformed. Embeddedness is accomplished with such constructions as dependent clauses, appositives, nominalizations, adjectival and adverbial clauses, and attributive adjectives. Particularly in narrative, many more written sentences than oral ones are left-branching in that the sentence does not begin with the subject to the verb but rather may begin with an adverbial clause, or other type of modifier clause, that the reader must hold in memory before encountering the subject (for instance, “Down


through the forest in silent rushes, the river ran along its deadly course”) (Purcell-Gates, 1988). Transformations more typical of written text than oral language also appear within sentences at the clausal and lexical levels. For example, the preceding written example can be made even more “written” (as in more prototypically written as judged by “native readers”) by inverting the subject and verb to “Down through the forest in silent rushes, ran the river along its deadly course.” These types of transformations are typically found in reported dialogue even in text written for very young children (such as “ ‘Begone!’ said the queen”). Because of the greater amount of composing time for writing, different processing demands for aural and written input, and stylistic differences, oral syntax is much more fragmented, with clauses and phrases more “strung together” than embedded. Not counting the typical disfluencies (false starts, repetitions, abandoned intonation units), speakers even in the most formal settings will not produce the type of syntactic constructions they would if they were writing. Those who have experienced public speakers who read their papers rather than speak their presentation know immediately that they are listening to a written text and not an oral one. While intonation is one of the markers, the written syntactic constructions also significantly contribute to this recognition and make the presentation much more difficult to follow and comprehend by ear! REFERENCE USE

The use of recontextualized17 language—decontextualized from the immediate and shared physical context of the speaker/listener and recontextualized into written language—is much more frequent in written than oral language. By virtue of the physical and temporal space between writer and reader, written language is inherently characterized by recontextualized language (the exception being, perhaps, notes written between two friends in the same classroom commenting on an ongoing, present event). In oral language, topic and situation dictate the degree to which recontextualized language is needed and is appropriate (Snow, 1983, 1991). Casual conversation relies to a great degree on paralinguistic means and dialogic (speaker and listener) mediation of meaning. Gestures, facial expressions, and intonation are all paralinguistic factors that are appropriate to oral lan-


guage. They are, however, rendered impossible for written language. Even when pictures are used to clarify written text, the meaning must remain within the linguistic written text. The appropriate use of reference is central to making language that is recontextualized from a physical context to a written one comprehensible to the reader. That which can be accomplished semantically through gestures, facial expressions, and intonation in oral communicative events must be accomplished in writing with explicit language and appropriate endophoric referencing. Exophoric references are references to meaning outside of the text and are not allowed in writing, which requires endophoric referencing, or within-text references (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Rubin, 1978). One type of exophoric reference that is often misused by beginning writers are pointers, or deictics, such as “this” or “that,” indicating that this nature of written language does not develop along with oral language competence but, rather, is specific to the nature of written text. P R A G M AT I C C O N S T R A I N T S

Linguistic markers of oral/written language difference occur most frequently when the social context for the language use is maximally different, such as oral conversations and written essays. When they are more alike—such as a formal speech and a written essay—the differences between literary and colloquial word choice will be smaller. However, using an example from above, unless a formal speech is actually a reading of a written essay, one is more likely to find fewer “rare words” in the speech than the essay, less embedded syntax in the speech than the essay, and more exophoric references reflecting the shared physical context of the speech than in the essay.

What the Learner Must Learn about Written Language The task of the literacy learner is to appropriate the ways with words and meanings that are inherent to written communication and whose features are described above. As Lave and Wenger might phrase it, print literacy learners, by participating in culturally based communities of literacy practices, must move from newcomers to masters. Learning to communicate through print by comprehending and re-


contextualizing written language into the genres and forms that constitute individuals’ communities of literacy practice is the task facing literacy learners. This task is cognitive as well as linguistic in nature. However, it begins with social practices of literacy.

Genre Theory and Genre Learning Genre theorists have built on Halliday’s work to identify different language genres as they are marked by (a) purpose and (b) text (Halliday, 1975, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1985). Genre knowledge, they theorize, is itself the result of socially situated language practices, reflecting community norms and expectations. These norms are not static but change to reflect changing sociocognitive needs and contexts (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987). We draw on theory and research to conclude that print literacy learners will learn about the written genres that they experience in their literacy communities. This learning occurs at the levels of purpose and textual form. It also includes the linguistic natures of written language (see discussion above) as it is shaped to the different pragmatics of the genres. We will briefly summarize the research on which this claim is based. Evidence of Developing Written Genre Knowledge In the last several decades, research has documented the emergence of written genre knowledge among young children. Jerome Harste, Virginia Woodward, and Carolyn Burke conducted a landmark descriptive study of this type in 1984 (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984). Working with children in a university-based preschool, the researchers documented that children as young as 3 will demonstrate genre knowledge when asked to write for specific purposes. For example, when asked to write a grocery list, they would respond with vertical lists of nouns, often rendered as scribbles but read by the children as items to be found in a grocery store. When asked to write a letter to Grandma, they would produce connected scribble or inventively spelled sentences that would inquire about Grandma’s health and report on recent events in the children’s lives. Other research focused on the development of written linguistic feature knowledge.18 Although much of this research conceptualized this development as learning about written language in general, in fact the tasks were always genre-specific, demonstrating the impos-


sibility of separating linguistic features from linguistic forms. Elizabeth Sulzby (1985) was one of the first researchers to examine written genre learning. Her task involved young children producing renderings (pretending to read) of written narrative text that had been repeatedly read to them. Through discourse analytic techniques, she mapped a developmental move made by 3- to 6-year-old children in the language they used to “read” favorite storybooks. She found that they moved from the use of language more appropriate to oral genres of book sharing (as in language that assumed a shared physical context) to language more appropriate to written storybook genres (language that does not assume a shared physical context and thus is more explicit and decontextualized). That this development occurs within other written genres was demonstrated by Christine Pappas’s research (Pappas, 1991). Pappas focused on information books rather than storybooks. She also recorded the pretend readings young children did after hearing the text repeatedly read to them. Analyzing the language used by the children during these readings, she began tracing the development of written linguistic feature knowledge specific to written informational discourse. Thus, both Sulzby and Pappas could begin to trace the development of genre-specific written language knowledge over time and experience with written text. However, with tasks such as these, the alternative explanation that children were simply getting better at repeating oft-heard sentences could not be completely discounted. In response, the first author began a series of studies utilizing a task designed to avoid this interpretation. To explore the hypothesis that young children, through hearing written language read to them, learn a linguistic register that is specific to the social context in which it is used—in this case, storybooks and storybook reading—Purcell-Gates designed a task that would require young children to compose this register without ever having heard a particular text. The theory and rationale for this research plan was grounded in psycholinguistic and language acquisition research protocols for which language production is taken as evidence of underlying rule-governed linguistic knowledge (Slobin & Welsh, 1971). She asked young preliterate kindergartners to apply their (hypothesized) knowledge of syntactic, lexical, and referential features of written storybooks to a new textual situation, thus testing the actual existence of this knowledge. The two language samples from the 5-year-old child quoted above come from this study.


Forty randomly selected well-read-to kindergarten and second grade children19 told the researcher about a recent birthday party, or other significant event (if the child’s family did not celebrate birthdays or if the child could not remember the party), and pretended to read a story told by pictures in a wordless storybook, responding to the directive to make it sound like a book story. The first task was intended to elicit an oral narrative—decontextualized in the sense that its topic was about something not presently happening within the shared context of researcher and child (Snow, 1983, 1991). The second task was designed to elicit a written narrative (albeit delivered orally)—also decontextualized but assumed, or pretended, to be written. Two samples from each child were elicited to examine a counter-claim that well-read-to young children normally spoke in this elaborated fashion, using high-level vocabulary, when recounting narratives. The researcher was looking for linguistic evidence that these young children spoke narratives differently than they “read” them. The data from this study, with its within-subject analysis, strongly confirmed that these children differentiated oral and written narrative language within their overall language knowledge and could produce each different register, given the appropriate social context (as in a request to tell about a past event and a request to pretend read a story from a book to a doll/child).20 The children’s written narrative registers were distinguished from their oral narrative registers in the following ways: (a) they were syntactically more integrated; (b) they were lexically more literary and varied; (c) they were lexically and syntactically more involving through the use of high-image verbs, image-producing adverbials, and attributive adjectives; and (d) they were more decontextualized through appropriate endophoric reference use. In other words, these 5-year-olds, when placed in a typically oral language social context of telling someone about a past event, did not talk in the same way as they did when they were placed in a typical written language social context of reading aloud from a book. It makes sense to believe that this knowledge of written language comes from being read to, and parents have been told to read to their children for years. Unfortunately, little research has been done to show a causal relationship between reading to young children and their written language knowledge. It would be unethical to design a good experiment with random assignment—condition A: Being read to regularly from birth to age 5; condition B: Never being read to—to


test this theory that children learn the linguistic register of written stories by being read to. However, support for this thesis does come from data collected over the years with the same pretend read task. This task has been used in three other studies involving exclusively low-socio-economic status children (Dahl & Freppon, 1995; PurcellGates, 1996; Purcell-Gates & Dahl, 1991). The results of all of these studies show clearly that the written register knowledge of the children, most of whom had not been read to extensively prior to kindergarten, is almost nonexistent as compared with that of the wellread-to children at the start of kindergarten. Further support for this theoretical linking of written storybook register knowledge and being read to came from a participantobservation study of 24 low-SES children in their homes. For this study, all uses of print were documented, and the 4- to 6-year-old children in the homes were given the pretend reading task, among others designed to measure emergent literacy knowledge (PurcellGates, 1996). Within this group of children, a significant positive correlation was found between being read to and scores on this task.

Genre Learning and Communities of Practice As mentioned earlier, we do not mean to present print literacy development as unilinear, beginning in childhood and progressing in some type of accumulative fashion. Print genre learning, in particular, exemplifies the thesis21 that people continue to learn different genres as they encounter new or different communicative needs throughout their lives as participating members of shifting communities of practice. Different written textual forms reflect the varied sociocultural contexts and communities within which individuals other than children, or early literacy learners, find themselves. For example, already highly literate adults who enter new professions will find themselves needing to learn the genre conventions of those professions. The dentist who becomes a computer programmer will need to learn the textual forms of programming manuals and technical reports. The public school teacher who becomes an academic will need to learn the genre conventions of the research proposal, the research review, and the research report. The academic who goes into a businessrelated field will need to learn about financial reports, spreadsheets, and effective memos.


All of this learning, or literacy development, will entail participating in the specific communities of practice and learning through Lave and Wenger’s Legitimate Peripheral Participation. It will also entail learning which genres are appropriate for which communities. For example, the former academic will need to quickly learn to drop the academese from her writing if she is to succeed in the business world! Our LPALS participants dramatically detailed for us how intricately new textual genres are tied to new life worlds. The LPALS study was designed to look for relationships between instructional dimensions and change in out-of-school literacy practices. An analysis of spontaneous comments by the participants whenever they were asked about specific literacy practices and texts revealed they were attributing change in literacy practice to factors other than dimensions of their adult literacy instruction. These data are particularly interesting, we believe, because they reveal ongoing genre learning occurring even for adults who are not fully print literate. The LPALS participants began new genre practices, dropped old ones, and shifted back and forth among genres as their lives shifted and changed according to opportunities, responsibilities, and role changes. We have categorized the shifting genre practices according to these life changes.

Employment In a highly literate culture, almost all jobs require some type of reading and/or writing, and the participants’ comments reflected this influence on the genres they read and wrote. Often specific jobs brought with them specific literacy tasks, and many of the participants began reading certain types of texts at the point they began new jobs. Conversely, participants reported that they stopped reading and writing specific types of texts when they quit the jobs that required them. For example, reading instructions was commonly required with the types of jobs the literacy students in this study occupied. Another common practice tied to employment was that of reading and writing notes and memos to other employees or to themselves while on the job. Other types of texts often mentioned as being related to the students’ jobs included schedules/guides, incident reports, phone books, and print on envelopes. Several participants reported beginning the practice of creating and using personal appoint-


ment and phone books once they started working. Time management seemed to be the motivating factor for this as well as the fact that employment usually meant they were outside of the home and thus needed to carry the phone numbers of important people in their lives with them. The reading of particularly complex texts was often related to job requirements. One 51-year-old man, who had only finished sixth grade, worked part-time managing the apartments in which he and his family lived. This position required that he not only read applications from people wanting an apartment but also that he read, and understand, apartment leases—a text we considered a “document.” He only began this type of reading when he took on the job of apartment manager. Seeking a new job also brought with it new print genre practices such as reading and filling in job applications, reading notices of job openings, reading phone books to call prospective employers, and so on. Once employment was obtained, these practices–particularly those involving applications–often ceased, and, if the participant did not find herself in the job market again, would never begin again. At times, print genre practices were reported as peripherally related to employment. There was the case, for example, where a 34-yearold Guatemalan woman reported first reading comics and cartoons during her tenure as a live-in maid. The home contained magazines with comics and cartoons that she would read on occasion. She said that she stopped this type of reading when she left that job. Another Guatemalan immigrant reported that she stopped reading so much print on home entertainment products (for example, videos) when she started working, citing the lack of time (for, presumably, engaging in watching videos and TV at home). Other participants reported new reading and writing practices related to the money they earned involving texts such as paychecks, bank statements, deposit forms, and receipts.

Schooling Another life change that contextualized print genre change for our participants was that of attending school. In our analysis, 27% of the participants cited schooling as an explanation for a specific change in genre practice. For the most part, this change involved either increased frequency for the textual practice or the initiation of


a new one. Rarely did students report stopping a textual practice once they began attending a class. However, they did report stopping certain practices at the conclusion of a class. The two main factors involved in this school-practice change relationship were (a) increase in literacy ability and (b) text types encountered in school activities that were apparently not part of their lives before attending the class. Other factors included time management texts such as personal calendars that became necessary once the students added school to their regular activities as well as the introduction to U.S. culturally specific literacy texts and practices encountered by previously low- or nonliterate immigrants. Many of the respondents in this category gave evidence that their increasing ability to read and write, as a result of attending an adult literacy class, accounted for their adoption of new everyday print genre activities. They cited their newly acquired abilities to read ads, coupons, flyers, directions, menus, phone books, schedules, guides, money orders, gift certificates, labels, song lyrics, signs, and tickets. Clearly, all of these students began adult education with very low literacy levels, and many of them were recent immigrants from countries and life situations where they had no opportunity to attend school. It was within this last group of respondents that we saw evidence of new literacy practices tied, not only to learning to read and write, but also to encountering texts for the first time–texts that did not exist in their prior lives and cultural contexts. For example, many recent immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala had grown up in rural, poor, and marginalized communities where such texts as written recipes or classified ads simply did not exist. As these students became literate in English, they turned to these texts as the needs and opportunities to use them arose. Participants cited other school experiences in addition to adult literacy classes as related to changes in print genre practices. High school classes brought exposure to more complex “school-like” texts such as novels, poetry, journals, and essays. The comments by participants indicated that they began reading and writing these types of texts—for the first time, again, or more frequently—because they were assigned in class. There was the very strong suggestion that if the students had not been assigned these texts, they would not have engaged with them. However, although some students indicated that they had stopped certain of these textual practices once a particular


class ended, several others said that they had continued such practices. For example, some said that while they started writing in a journal as the result of a class assignment, they had continued on their own after the class had ended or after the reading or writing practice was no longer assigned. Some students also reported beginning an everyday-type of print genre practice in class that then became a part of their lives. For example, one student who had dropped out of school after seventh grade first encountered store flyers and advertisements in her adult literacy class. At the time of her interview, she reported reading these texts for her own purposes on a weekly basis. Another student, who also had left school after completing seventh grade, reported reading directions for the first time after she read directions for operating a computer in her class. She added that she continues to read all kinds of directions now on a frequent basis. Another participant related how she had encountered recipes for the first time in a cooking class. She continues to read and use them to this day.

Living Situations Moving out on one’s own into an apartment or a house was a major impetus for new print genre practices for our participants. Moving into a new living space involved reading ads for housing prior to moving and reading documents such as leases or mortgages at the time of moving. One student began reading documents at the age of 16 when he first had to sign a lease of his own. He said that he continues this practice, reading leases at least twice a year. Moving out on one’s own also meant reading and writing for oneself such texts as bills, bank statements, paychecks, and receipts. These print genre practices often began when students moved away from family or group-support living situations, as when they had to do them for themselves. Other print genre practices that participants tied to changed living situations included reading schedules and guides, reading and writing names and addresses, reading container text such as medicine bottles and lotions, and reading labels and titles of household items, including toys, books, articles, magazines, and newspapers. Family Roles and Responsibilities By far, the bulk of the reported print genre changes for the LPALS participants involved children in some way. Many genre practices


were initiated at the birth of children, and a few were dropped. Students reported beginning to read print on food containers purchased for their children, bills and receipts, ads, coupons, and flyers, leases for apartments, health-related posters, labels and names of toys, print on envelopes, books and encyclopedias, stories and poetry, forms and applications, and instructions following the birth of their first children. Similarly, the birth of a child brought with it new writing genres. Students began writing personal letters to family members after they had children. They started writing lists of responsibilities for their children, filling out forms related to public assistance for their children, and keeping calendars and appointment books for the first time for time management purposes, as well as to keep track of their children’s appointments with health care workers, friends, and childcare providers. Other textual practices stopped at the birth of children. If parents left jobs, then the reading and writing they were doing at work ceased while new, child, and home-focused practices began or increased. One woman reported that she stopped reading stories and poetry, written genre practices that she had engaged in for 12 years, when her daughter was born. One can only speculate that this mother of a 2-year-old could no longer find the time or energy for this type of reading. The onset of schooling for their children also brought with it the reading of school communications, schedules, and menus for the parents in this pool of participants. The need to communicate with teachers also resulted in the onset of note writing to school personnel. These types of genre practices were always reported as stopped if the children were no longer in school. Also, one woman reported that she stopped reading school communications and information when she lost custody of her children. Other changes in family situations, aside from those related to children, were also reported as contextualizing changes in print genre practices. Often, students would report beginning the practice of writing messages on greeting cards, captions on photos, or personal letters when members of their family moved away. Another woman reported more frequently reading signs after her daughter moved and she was doing more of her own driving. An older student who had completed eighth grade and who was enrolled in a family literacy program reported reading documents for the first time when her


adoption of her grandchildren was in progress. She has continued to read the documents giving her parental rights to “reassure herself that the adoption . . . is final and to feel good about having gotten them.” Increased responsibility for family members such as caring for elderly parents or for a chronically ill spouse resulted in several new genre practices. These practices included reading medicine/prescription bottles, tickets, print on envelopes, ads and coupons, and reading and writing postal letters.

Relationships Like the birth of a first child, getting married seemed to be a watershed event for our participants when they reported genre practice change, particularly the beginning of a practice. There was a sense of attained independence and responsibility, doing for oneself and another, that seemed to explain their connecting certain new genre practices to the act of getting married. For example, students reported beginning the following practices at the time they married: reading bills, paychecks, receipts, and bank statements, reading print on medicine bottles, lotions, and other personal items, reading directions that go with appliances, reading family histories, reading at home for a job, reading labels on household items, reading menus, reading messages and notes, reading phone books and yellow pages, reading print on envelopes, reading periodicals, reading books and encyclopedias, reading schedules and guides, reading the lyrics in hymnals, reading print on food containers, reading print on home entertainment objects, writing names and addresses, writing checks and money orders, filling out forms and applications, writing lists, and reading apartment leases. Divorce or the death of a spouse or live-in partner also was mentioned as the context for change with some of these practices. Reading documents as a genre practice was often mentioned as beginning and ending with the divorce process. Increased independence and responsibility following the loss of a partner also appeared in reports of the first-time writing of checks, reading directions, and reading schedules and guides. Some written genre practices ceased when relationships changed. One man reported that he stopped writing checks and money orders when he got married as his wife took on those responsibilities. His wife had recently left him, however, and he reported that the bills


were no longer being paid. This same man said that he also stopped writing postal letters when he got married, with no further explanation. Perhaps his wife had taken over this type of writing as well. A woman, who had completed seventh grade, had been in the habit of painting and writing captions to accompany her pictures. However, she stopped painting when her husband died, and thus the caption-writing also ceased. Another woman stopped reading lottery tickets when she stopped purchasing them after her husband’s death. One woman’s experiences with reading menus perhaps, captures, the effect of changing relationship status on written genre practice. She reported that she began reading menus when her first husband died. Since he did not like to go out to eat, the need/opportunity to read menus had never arisen before. After he died, she began to go to restaurants, a practice she enjoyed. However, the frequency with which she reads menus is decreasing following her new relationship with a man who also prefers to eat at home (while she, presumably, cooks!).

Geographical Changes Moving to a new geographical location brings with it print genre change related to local contexts that are linked to textual practices. This was especially true for immigrants to the United States, but several native-born participants also experienced print genre change in the context of a change in geographical location. Virtually all of the new literacy practices reported by immigrants reflected new textual sources and purposes that were not present for them in their countries of origin. These included ads and coupons, bills, bank statements, paychecks, print on medicine bottles, personal items, food containers, calendars and appointment books, captions, tickets, menus, signs, schedules and guides, print on home entertainment items, forms and applications, documents, phonebooks/yellow pages, and notes to schools or teachers. In addition, the need to maintain relationships with those left behind seemed to dictate first uses of personal letters, their envelopes, messages, and greeting cards by immigrant participants. A few textual practices were stopped upon moving to the United States. One 19-year-old Guatemalan woman stopped reading religious text because she stopped attending mass when she immigrated. Another woman stopped buying and reading lottery tickets when she


left El Salvador. She also stopped reading magazines when she came to the United States where she no longer purchased them. Changes in location within the United States also contextualized literacy practice change for native-born students. One woman with reported learning disabilities told us that she quit reading the guide to television shows when she moved from Texas to Vermont. Because more channels were available to her in Texas, she saw reading the guide as necessary or helpful. However, in Vermont she does not need a guide to choose among the few channels available to her. Several students reported writing personal letters to family members for the first time when brothers or sisters moved far away. Finally, one woman who had completed seventh grade cited a move to town as beginning the practice of reading menus.

Health Change in the health status of the students or their family members was often cited in relationship to a change in textual practice. A common change reported was the beginning of, or increase in, reading associated with medicines—print on medicine bottles, prescriptions, and directions from doctors. Another relationship between health and literacy was involved in the need to read the print on food containers for the first time as part of the vigilance required in managing a chronic illness such as diabetes. Several people reported increased reading of books and stories as connected to an illness, presumably due to increased time available for such leisure activities. One woman reported that following a car accident in which her son was injured she now read road signs more frequently. Medical reference books were discovered and read by people who wished to avoid the cost of a doctor, and personal calendars and appointment books were begun following a health change that necessitated repeated doctor visits. Several participants reported stopping a written genre practice because of the onset of a health problem. One woman said that she no longer read the newspaper because of failing eyesight. Another woman stated that diabetes-related vision problems caused her to stop reading as much as she used to. And finally, a man whose injuries resulted from failure to read traffic signs attended to these signs much more faithfully!


Leisure Activities Textual practices were begun, increased, or stopped as participants took up different social activities and dropped others. The buying of lottery tickets brought with it the reading of the print on them. When participants stopped buying the tickets, they stopped this textual practice. The activity of writing to family members was sometimes temporary, and this literacy practice thus waxed and waned. Several students began keeping personal journals and writing reflective pieces, often after being introduced to the practice in school. Sometimes they would stop for periods of time and fill their days with other activities. One woman reported increased menu reading as she and her friends spent more time going out for lunch. This activity was relatively new to this participant and began when she started living alone and not cooking for herself. Similarly, song lyrics were read increasingly if participats began attending events at which songs were sung. These activities would often change, and thus the literacy practice of reading song lyrics would decrease. Changes in Financial Situation Changes in our participants’ finances brought with them changes in textual practices. When participants had increased income, they opened bank accounts and thus read and wrote checks, deposit slips, and bank statements. When they lost jobs, they often closed bank accounts and stopped, or decreased, this type of reading and writing. When their finances increased, they could buy items like appliances and thus, often for the first time, would read the directions that came with them. Increased income also meant money for tickets to ball games or shows and the reading of these tickets. The loss of income meant the inability to buy such tickets, thus the stopping of that textual practice. One woman stopped buying and writing on greeting cards when she lost her job and had to cut back on personal expenses. Ads for apartments were read when participants found themselves in need of cheaper living quarters. Job applications were filled out when finances dictated the need for more income. Finally, one man began receiving personal letters from an aunt when he inherited his house. This type of reading now increased for him.


Other Changes The remaining categories of life changes cited by the participants in relationship to written genre practice reflect this same connection between social activity and reading and writing. Increased or new reading of phone books/yellow pages or print on home entertainment items accompanied the purchase of phones or video players. The purchase of televisions brought the new practice of reading a television guide. On the other hand, one woman related that she no longer needed television guides after she purchased a television with a remote control that allowed her to channel surf in the same amount of time it would take to consult a guide. Directions and signs were read with greater frequency when participants began driving cars. One woman began reading labels on items in the grocery store when she first obtained her driver’s license and was able to drive herself to a store. New or increased practices of reading religious writing and hymn lyrics developed when participants began attending church services. Conversely, they stopped when other participants stopped attending church. Several participants reported beginning new textual practices when they began receiving help from family members or good friends. For example, one woman started reading bills and bank statements when her father sat her down and did this with her. Others reported receiving help with reading maps or ads and writing letters and notes from boyfriends or husbands. Access to, or loss of access to, the Internet brought with it concomitant reading practice changes. Finally, several of our immigrant participants reported reading documents for the first time as part of the process of obtaining U.S. citizenship. Development of Written Genre Learning Through Participation over Time We have presented theory and research strongly suggesting that print literacy learners—whether children or adults—develop knowledge and linguistic abilities of the written genres that are used within the literacy practices of their sociocultural communities. These communities shift and change over the course of one’s life, and, within this framework, people learn about different written genres and develop their written genre abilities within those genres according to the degree to which they participate, or fail to continue to participate,


within these sociocultural communities of practice. Our developing widened lens on print literacy development is portrayed in Figure 7.2. Of course, one cannot analyze these genres outside of a context that values some and devalues others. Although all texts can serve as a basis for learners to develop the knowledge and skills required for print literacy, not all are embraced in formal instructional settings. Indeed, many literacy researchers criticize schools for narrowing the range of literacy practices by not embracing a wider array of genres within schools.22 Additional questions can be asked about what types of genres children or adults in schools are exposed to and socialized into. Jean Anyon’s classic study used a socioeconomic class framework to look at what genre types children in school worked with (Anyon, 1988). Working-class children were faced with many “busy work” texts such as worksheets, while the children of professionals were trained to interact with longer texts in a critical fashion. Again,


Literacy Development

Values

Linguistic knowledge of written genres

Beliefs

Power Relationships

Figure 7.2 Linguistic knowledge of written genres develops according to the degree to which those genres are used within the literacy practices of sociocultural communities.


both genres provide opportunity for the acquisition of literacy skills, but each leads to and sustains very different literacy practices. In this way, school, as the sociocultural community of practice, has a tremendous influence on print literacy development.

Research on Decoding/Encoding/Conventions of Print Reading and writing print genres require the ability to decode and encode print—to master the symbols of the linguistic semiotic code. During the latter part of the twentieth century, there occurred a flurry of research into the emerging abilities of young children to acquire the skills at this level. Virtually all of the research that came out of the emergent literacy theoretical frame documented that this learning occurs as children attempt to read or write specific textual genres with which they have experience. In other words, as they participate in their communities of literacy practice, they appropriate with increasing conventionality those semiotic abilities needed to move from newcomers to masters.23 Research from more cognitive perspectives also focuses on learning “the code” of written language. We will present a summary of the research from both of these perspectives, along with implications for the model of print literacy development that we are proposing.

Emergent Literacy Research Emergent literacy research covers the developmental ground of birth through grades 1–2 and is grounded in a sociocultural view of literacy practice and learning. Overall, this research documents the following: As children interact with print within their communities of practice,24 they begin to sort out and acquire knowledge about the print itself, including concepts of print as well as the sound/symbol relationship rules. According to this research, the picture of the development of decoding abilities is one that proceeds along a path of increasing differentiation (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Goodman & Altwerger, 1981; Mason, 1980): (a) Print can at first be “decoded” only in highly meaningful contexts; (b) increasingly, learners are able to recognize a few words out of context and to begin to analyze words in terms of letter–sound relationship; and (c) finally, children are able


to read print in isolated form and to analyze new words in terms of letter–sound relationships. This last phase is usually not reached until after the start of formal instruction. Much of this learning comes from attempts to write as well as to read. The phenomenon of invented spelling became a focus of research and pedagogy following linguist Charles Read’s (1971) study of preschool children who had begun writing on their own from as young as age 3 1⁄2. All of the children first learned the conventional names of the letters of the alphabet and then began to spell words with movable letter toys such as blocks or magnetic plastic letters. From this activity they proceeded to produce written messages of all types, including stories, letters, and poems. He concluded that these children “tacitly organize phonetic segments into categories defined by articulatory features” and that these children “base their judgments of phonological relationships on certain specifiable features” (Read, 1971, 1). The articulatory features include place of articulation (front, mid, back), affrication, flaps, and nasals. Although the children, could not articulate them, they demonstrated sensitivity to phonological relationships and could categorize them, as evidenced in their invented spellings. These findings came from studies that observed children reading environmental print genres in their communities, children reading favorite books, and children reading and writing their names, writing their own stories, grocery lists, menus, picture captions, party invitations, personal letters, lists of football players, and other familiar print genres. Dyson makes a particularly compelling case for the notion that children do not develop as readers and writers along some predetermined linear continuum. Rather, she states, literacy development emerges from the “tangled threads of children’s textual lives” (Dyson, 2003, 2). The children in her study (first grade) sampled from a “constellation” of communicative practices, mixing and remixing to develop new ones: Analogous to rap artists, the children appropriated and adapted thematic content, textual features, technological conventions, actual lines, and whole practices themselves as they constructed their unofficial and playful practices. Moreover, they used that same material as they moved into the print-drenched practices of official school spaces. In the process, they juxtaposed, blended, and differentiated both communi-

122 Print Literacy Development cative practices and social worlds. No single multimedia production, and no written text, could be understood in isolation from the constellation of communicative practices that comprised the children’s world. (Dyson, 2003, 173)

Cognitive Research Marie Clay is arguably the best known cognitive researcher on early literacy development.25 It is difficult to know exactly how to characterize her, however, especially in the context of this discussion, since we have made the cognitive and the social practice perspectives so discrete. She studied learning to read from a psychological perspective, but she did so “in situ” by watching children engaged in learning to read in school. She also studied learning to write by studying children’s naturally occurring writing attempts. In this way, she is closer to social practice researchers like Dyson than to more cognitive researchers who tend to study development from task evidence, often obtained outside of any naturally occurring practice. Nevertheless, she did her work outside of, and for the most part before, the social practice theory; we have therefore placed her within the cognitive perspective. Clay concludes that learning to read and write means learning to effortlessly coordinate visual, semantic, and syntactic cues of printed text to arrive at meaning. Over the course of several different studies, she has documented certain principles about the nature of print that children discover during their reading and writing attempts. We will use these principles to organize the research: THE SIGN CONCEPT

This concept states that signs carry a message. Other researchers have referred to this as the intentionality concept (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Purcell-Gates, 1995, 1996). There is meaning to be found in print; it is not just a series of random marks. Researchers have consistently found that children learn this from frequent experiences with community members reading and writing all types of genres (Clay, 1975; Dyson, 1982; Goodman & Altwerger, 1981; Mason, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1996). THE MESSAGE CONCEPT

Through this concept, children understand that what they say can be written down. In the early phase of acquiring this concept, children


may ask adults to write their messages for them. If they attempt to write themselves, they appear to go through a progression of development, according to Piagetians Emilia Ferreiro and Ana Teberosky (1982).26 At Level One, the writing consists of reproducing the typical features of what the child identifies as the basic writing form—for example, curved and/or straight lines. When reading these units, children often reflect the belief that each letter stands for a whole, whether it be a whole word or a whole sentence. Also, children at this level will often reflect in their writing some of the characteristics of the represented objects. Thus, the word for bear is expected to be bigger than the word for duck because a bear is bigger than a duck. At Level Two, the graphic forms become more conventional because, as Ferreiro and Teberosky speculate, the children have come to decide that to read different things, the written forms must be objectively different. Level Three is characterized by attempts to assign a sound value to each of the letters that compose a piece of writing. Often each letter will now stand for a syllable. Level Four marks the passage from the syllabic to the alphabetic hypothesis—a phoneme/ grapheme match for alphabetic language (see the earlier discussion of Read’s work). T H E S PA C E C O N C E P T

Clay points out that when the children move from writing single words to groups of words, they are directly confronted with the problem of word boundaries. This is because children do not naturally hear words as segments of the speech stream. This is necessary for children to understand the function of the white space between words, the concept of word, in general, as well as the task of printspeech matching (saying one spoken word for one written word). This is not true universally, of course, for written languages such as Japanese do not have spaces between the words, and different contexual clues are needed to sense word boundaries. Clay was careful to point out, in consonance with Dyson’s stance, that there is no one progression of development. Children try to do different things with writing and reading at different times, and the principles they uncover will depend on their natures, their opportunities, and their preferences.


Learning about Print in and out of School Children who engage in genre-based reading and writing attempts before they begin formal instruction discover much about the nature of print and print conventions. The majority of literacy learners, adults as well as children, however, need some type of intentional instruction to become skilled decoders and encoders of print. We have now arrived at the focal point of concern for the cognitivist perspective.


Literacy Development Linguistic knowledge of written genres Values

Beliefs Print literacy development

Power Relationships

Figure 7.3 There is an interrelationship between learning to read and write print and the sociocultural context in which that learning occurs.


The research on print learning done through the cognitive lens documents a developmental path from acquisition of phonemic awareness (the ability to hear separate phonemes in speech) to ability to decode letters and words. This journey is accomplished by learning the systematic rules of relationship between letter and speech segments in words. Automaticity is achieved when the reader can accurately and fluently decode words without conscious attention, which can now be expended on higher-level comprehension skills and strategies.27 A review of the research on instruction has concluded that this learning of the systematic letter/sound correspondences is best accomplished through systematic and explicit teaching of sound/ symbol correspondences.28 We refer the reader to Chapter 5 for a more detailed description of the cognitive lens on the learning of print skills. The context of instruction for the learning of print skills may take several forms: apprenticeship learning outside of school walls; informal community-based instructional programs for adults and/or children; formal adult literacy classes; or institutionalized public education for children.29 Whatever the form, instruction is generally assumed to be a requirement for learning to decode and encode print for the vast majority of people. Given this need for instruction in an essentially cognitive skill—encoding and decoding print—the question becomes, to what degree does this instruction and this learning relate to, depend on, or is enhanced by the social practices of literacy in which learners participate? Our literacy development model places this cognitive learning within the social practice of literacy, as can be seen in Figure 7.3. We will speculate on the relationship between cognitive skill development and social practices of print literacy in the following chapter. Our theorizing is informed by research data that documents the ways outside-of-school literacy practice connects to in-school learning and practice.

m

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Course of Print Literacy Development in and out of School

We concluded the last chapter by placing the development of cognitive skills involved in decoding and encoding print within the social practice of literacy. We did so even though we also agree that these skills usually require some form of explicit instruction. This instruction takes place largely within schools, which are somewhat notorious for treating literacy as an autonomous skill—one that develops outside of localized practices and one that, once developed, can be applied as needed to different literacy demands as they arise. Beyond the decoding/encoding phase of print literacy development, schoolbased literacy instruction continues to treat reading and writing development as autonomous in the sense that the skills taught and assessed are those that are taught in schools—so-called academic literacy. Those other literacy practices that are actually engaged in outside of academic settings tend to be marginalized by formal instructional schemes. This is another fundamental distinction between the cognitive and social practice lenses. In this chapter we deal with these issues within the topic of schooling and instruction as we continue to argue for the ways that seemingly independent cognitive skills of literacy development are, in fact, embedded in the social practice of literacy.

In and Out of School 127

Symbol Systems Transcend and Depend on Textual Practices For the most part, the underlying symbol systems of written languages are not tied to particular literacy practices.1 With alphabetic languages, for example, the phoneme/grapheme system (which is, of course, language-specific) is the same for written narrative text as it is for written informational text. A person who can decode paint on a sign in the hardware store window can also decode paint in a fictional story about an artist and in a newspaper story about the restoration of an old house.2 This fact alone provides a sufficient rationale for those who believe that reading and writing, at least when defined as decoding and encoding (spelling), can, and should, be taught and learned as systems independent of any sociocultural use or practice. This is the underlying supposition of those who would focus primarily on methods of teaching reading without considering the sociocultural factors that contextualize rates of literacy achievement in school. But let us examine some of the ways that this belief should be at least tempered.

Children Learn Print Skills Within Actual Practices Before Instruction The issue here becomes whether or not it is (a) possible and (b) profitable to learn a code outside of a purpose for reading or writing (beyond the genre of “doing school work”), without understanding that the code is part of a larger whole. Put another way, can one learn, retain, and continue to develop technical skills associated with community-based practice in the absence of such practices? We suggest that the answer is no. Although a large body of theory and data exists to demonstrate this assertion as it relates to cognition and learning in general (as in the body of literature on “situated cognition”), we will explore this as it supports our thesis in relation to the acquisition and development of print literacy skills. As documented in the preceding chapter, before they begin school many young children, learn many aspects about the print system by participating in naturally occurring reading and writing practices in their homes and communities. Most of these children, however, still need instruction in school before they become skilled decoders and


encoders. We will now address how this out-of-school learning connects to formal instruction and appears to facilitate that instruction. The data converge to suggest that this out-of-school learning (as a result of participation in actual literacy practice) not only facilitates learning in school but may actually enable it in some way. The National Research Council report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, documented several child-level (we would say learner) factors of relative success at early reading in schools (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Among these factors are (a) phonemic awareness; (b) concepts of print; and (c) family support for literacy. With regard to family support they concluded that “a preschooler whose home provides fewer opportunities for acquiring knowledge and skills pertaining to books and reading is at higher risk for reading difficulties than a child whose home affords a richer literacy environment” (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, 122). Several research studies conducted by Purcell-Gates shed more light on this relationship. First, it appears that books are not the only written texts, or genres, that are instrumental in providing young children ammunition to succeed in school. Before we explain this statement, however, we need to provide short summaries of three research studies that we will draw upon to demonstrate our thesis that socioculturally based experiences with print facilitate and perhaps enable the learning of print skills in school. These studies were all directed by Purcell-Gates and introduced in Chapter 4. The first study was conducted in three elementary schools that served exclusively low-SES children (Purcell-Gates & Dahl, 1991). This two-year study worked with three different samples within each school. The first sample included all of the children within one kindergarten per school who were then followed into another classroom for first grade. Within this sample, 12 children per classroom were randomly chosen for purposes of assessment. From this second sample, 4 children were randomly chosen from each classroom for close observation during literacy instruction over their kindergarten and first grade years. The children were assessed at the beginning of kindergarten on a battery of emergent literacy skills and at the end of first grade on these same skills. School-administered achievement tests given at the end of kindergarten and at the end of first grade were also used in the analysis, as was teacher judgment of degree of


success. The analysis focused on documenting the relationships among different types and degrees of entering emergent literacy knowledge, how this related to the ways that the children made sense of their reading and writing instruction, and the relationships among these factors and end-of-first-grade success in literacy development. The three schools all used what is known as skills-based instruction.3 We will refer to this study as the K–1 Study. For the second study, Purcell-Gates placed researchers in the homes of 20 low-SES families, each of which included at least one child between the ages of 4 and 6 (Purcell-Gates, 1996). The sample of homes was racially mixed, and the researchers were matched by race to the homes. The charge was to observe in each home for an aggregated week during all of the hours that the focal children were awake. All instances of reading and writing were noted, along with the participant structures of each event and the text(s) involved. At the conclusion of data collection, the focal children in the home (24 children in all) were given the same battery of tasks designed to tap emergent literacy concepts used in the K–1 study. We will refer to this study as the 20-Home Study. The last study was the ethnography of the nonliterate family. For this study, the first author served as both tutor and researcher, primarily of Donny, a second grade boy, and occasionally of Jenny, Donny’s mother. Through this study, the first author was able to observe a learner who had not had any significant experience with literacy practice in his life before he began school. The ethnographic lens was used to try to understand how Donny was making sense of school-based literacy instruction as well as that delivered by the researcher. We will refer to this study as the Jenny-Donny Study. We briefly summarized the findings of these three studies in Chapter 4. We will draw on these findings now, weaving them throughout the discussion to provide empirical data to support our contention that learning print skills in school is heavily dependent on a sense of communicative purpose for written genres experienced within sociocultural contexts outside of schools.

Understanding That a Code Is a Code Literacy instruction during the primary grade years focuses primarily on learning to decode and encode print. As described in Chapter 5, this focus is determined largely by the cognitive perspective on skill


learning. According to this view, beginning readers and writers (and here we wish to include all literacy learners, regardless of age or grade in school) need to learn the code underlying the semiotic system of written language before any further print literacy development can occur. For alphabetic languages such as English and Spanish, this means learning the sound/symbol relationships that allow decoding and encoding of written words. Success in beginning reading and writing is usually measured by how well students have mastered this decoding and encoding process. In the K–1 Study, Purcell-Gates and Dahl discovered that those students who had the most success, as measured by standardized, norm-referenced, tests and teacher judgment, in learning to read and write by the end of the first grade (as in learning sound/symbol and other word-level skills) were those students who scored highest on the Intentionality task at the start of kindergarten. This task was designed to measure the children’s implicit knowledge that print “says” something and serves different purposes in people’s lives. Where did those children who scored high on this task get that knowledge of the communicative purpose(s) of print? The 20-Home Study revealed that children’s scores on the Intentionality task were significantly related to the sheer frequency of reading and writing events that occurred in their homes and community lives and that were experienced by the children, either through observation or through participation. This did not depend on particular types of literacy events or their related texts. It was not only experience with books that was significant; experience with any and all types of texts—the more the better—was the key ingredient. The texts that were observed in use for the 20-Home Study included coupons, directions, food container text, captions, labels, newspapers, documents, religious text, flyers, magazines, memos, personal letters, notes, novels, and children’s books. We used this corpus of texts for the questionnaire regarding change in out-of-school print literacy practices later for the LPALS study.4 Regardless of the type of text involved, children in the 20-Home Study learned the foundational emergent literacy concept that print is linguistically semiotic—it says something—by participating in sociocultural communities in which reading and writing of print for a variety of purposes was practiced. The Jenny-Donny Study provided the opportunity to check this


conclusion by examining a “negative-instance” case. Donny had grown up in a family and in a community of practice in which reading and writing played a very minor role. In Donny’s immediate family, no one read or wrote anything for any purpose beyond signing their name, which rarely occurred. Donny was never given the Intentionality task, but close ethnographic observation of him in his home and his neighborhood, as well as in school, resulted in countless demonstrations that he did not grasp this concept to the degree needed to make sense of his formal literacy instruction in school. This was the case even though he lived, played, attended school, and participated in a typical US city where print abounds on signs, products, schedules, television, in magazines, newspapers, and books. One of the primary conclusions drawn from the data from this study was that Donny did not fully understand that print functions as a linguistic semiotic system. Print, Purcell-Gates concluded, was phenomena and was not present for people in the same way unless it was engaged with through use—through reading and writing for actual purposes. It was the absence of this conceptual knowledge that prevented Donny from learning to decode and encode print in school. Without the conceptual understanding that print was a code, he found it nearly impossible to learn the skills to decode or encode it. We have just made a case for hypothesizing that the cognitive skill of decoding and encoding alphabetic languages is facilitated by sociocultural experiences with written texts that build the understanding that print is linguistically semiotic. This is one of our cognitive–social practice lens connections and is meant to counter the claim that learning the symbol system does not depend on any particular practice. While learning to “break the code” of written language may not depend on any particular practice, it does seem to depend on practice (of literacy in sociocultural contexts).

Learning the Code Another link between the cognitive and social practice lens is to be found in a reading of the research on phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Much of the reading research done within the last few decades from the cognitive perspective has focused on the link between phonemic awareness, phonics skill, decoding and encoding abilities, comprehension, and ultimate fluency in reading (Adams,


1990; Blachman, 2000; Goswami, 2000; Pressley, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Readers who initially lack the ability to hear the separate phonemes in the oral speech stream (phonemic awareness) are unable to master the sound/symbol correspondence of alphabetic languages (phonics), which in turn makes it difficult to progress or develop as independent readers who can read, understand, and learn from print (comprehension and fluency). The further along one is toward acquiring phonemic awareness and phonics skills when beginning school, the greater the chances of succeeding within school-based reading instruction (Purcell-Gates & Dahl, 1991; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Phonemic awareness and phonic skill ability are seen as absolutely crucial to subsequent reading development by cognitivists. Much data exists, however, to suggest that these abilities begin in the homes and within the community practices of written literacy events of young children (Purcell-Gates & Dahl, 1991; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Relationships among children’s reading achievements in school and home factors such as parents’ educational levels, the uses of print in the home, the number of books in the home, and the frequency of parent–child storybook reading events are well established by a confluence of correlational studies (Anglum, Bell, & Roubinek, 1990; Basic Skills Agency, 1993; Chaney, 1994; Downing, Ollila, & Oliver, 1975; Feitelson & Goldstein, 1986; Goldfield & Snow, 1984; Hiebert, 1980, 1981; Share, Jorm, Maclean, Mathews, & Waterman, 1983; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 1991; Walberg & Tsai, 1985; Walker & Kuerbitz, 1979; Wells, 1979; Wells, Barnes, & Wells, 1984). The skills and abilities that seem to account for success in learning literacy-related cognitive skills in school, and that emanate from home literacy practices, include: (a) vocabulary and language knowledge (Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992; Pappas, 1991; Pappas & Brown, 1988; Payne, Whitehurst, & Angell, 1994; Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, & Freppon, 1995; Senechal, Thomas, & Monker, 1995; Snow et al., 1991); (b) concepts about print and letter-name knowledge; and (c) phonological awareness and letter–sound knowledge (Bissex, 1980; Burgess, 1997; Clay, 1975; Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Goodman & Altwerger, 1981; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Hess, Holloway, Price, & Dickson, 1982; Hiebert, 1980, 1981; Lomax & McGee, 1987; Mason, 1980; Purcell-Gates, 1996; Read,


1971). Thus, what may appear to be purely cognitive skills in perception, recognition, and memory turn out to be cognitive traces of socioculturally based community literacy practices. All of the research to date suggests that the cognitive skills are embedded within these sociocultural practices. No research has shown the opposite—that the early cognitive literacy skills appear and develop well outside of sociocultural participation in community literacy practice. The reverse seems to be true: while children may be able to learn and master the simple sound/symbol relationships of print in school, given explicit and systematic instruction, research strongly suggests that those children who did not participate in community literacy practices before they entered school and learned these skills fail to either (a) retain them or (b) apply them in such a way that they develop as fluent and effective readers and writers as they proceed through school (Juel, 1988). In summary, our second response to the claim that the symbol system of written language transcends textual practices is the argument that existing data strongly suggests that learners’ abilities to take from instruction the skills needed to learn the code (decode and encode) are rooted in their experiences with print embedded within socioculturally shaped literacy practices in their communities. Therefore, it is again not possible to consider either the cognitive skills of decoding and encoding print, or the success of instruction that treats those skills as purely cognitive and autonomous, as independent of the social practice of literacy.

Relationship of Continued Print Literacy Development to Sociocultural Practices The sociocultural practice of literacy engaged in by members of individual learners’ social and cultural communities may also influence the development of print literacy beyond the early decoding/encoding phases. Research has strongly established the fact that children who are behind in reading achievement at the end of third grade will continue to fall behind as they proceed through the grades (Juel, 1988; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Since achievement in the first three grades is highly dependent on entering emergent literacy knowledge (see above), this finding alone links continued print literacy development in school to social practices of literacy outside of school


for learners. We will go beyond this link, however, to hypothesize about the ways that the sociocultural practices of literacy in the lives of learners continue to influence their success with academic literacy instruction.

Impact of Vocabulary Knowledge and Written Ways of “Saying” As learners progress beyond Chall’s “learning to read” phase, they face demands to read and write increasingly complex written texts. The ability to comprehend and to produce language that is becoming increasingly “written” (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1986) is heavily dependent on both vocabulary knowledge and the ability to control the syntactic and semantic systems of written language (as compared to speech) (Chall, 1983). Vocabulary knowledge is a strong correlate of reading achievement. According to Snow, Burns, and Griffin, “An important part of comprehension is concept development and knowledge of word meanings. . . . Research has found that comprehension is diminished by lack of relevant word knowledge” (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, 63). Although it is possible to increase students’ word knowledge in school (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986), Snow et al. concluded that the ability to learn and retain new words is highly dependent on the existing level of vocabulary knowledge. The vocabulary of written text consists of more rare words—words found more in writing than in speech. Research on the outcomes of reading to young children in the home has documented a strong relationship between this sociocultural practice and assessed vocabulary knowledge. Even for school-aged children, reading to them at home has been shown to relate to increased vocabulary and to increased comprehension of written text (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Cain, 1996). As is true for vocabulary, learners who possess knowledge of the structures of written language find it much easier to learn and produce new written forms of text in school. Again, possessing this linguistic knowledge at the start of formal literacy instruction provides a significant advantage in succeeding at school-based literacy instruction. The research of Pappas, Purcell-Gates, and Sulzby documented in linguistic detail how young children acquired such linguistic register knowledge from experiencing written text in the form of storybooks and informational text during their preschool years (Pappas,


1991; Purcell-Gates, 1988, 1991, 1992; Sulzby, 1985). The ability to construct syntactic structures typical of written text, to use vocabulary and written phraseology, and to recontextualize language so that meanings are linguistically present in the text and do not rely upon a shared physical context are all psycholinguistic skills that enable a writer to produce effective written text. Success at academic tasks depends on such abilities, and these skills emanate from the sociocultural practices of literacy in the outside-of-school communities of learners. Later in this chapter we describe several studies that bolster this argument by revealing how bringing the sociocultural practices of literacy into schools effects positive cognitive and linguistic outcomes relevant to written language knowledge.

Home Match with Academic Literacy Practices Another argument we would offer regarding the links between the social practices of print literacy and learning the cognitive skills of literacy in school is related to the well-documented association between socioeconomic status and academic achievement (Coleman et al., 1966; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1981). This relationship is so strong that it has been estimated that an individual’s score on a norm-referenced achievement test could be reliably predicted from the relative cost of his or her home! Unfortunately, the data do not go far in terms of explaining this relationship between family income and school achievement. We reject the notion that the isolated factor of money is the operative one. No one, we hope, would seriously conclude that simply handing individual families large amounts of money would concomitantly raise the reading achievement scores of the children in the family. Furthermore, we know that certain types of low-income families also have children who succeed quite well in school. For example, the children of ministers or pastors are usually among the high achievers in school. The same can be said for the children of school teachers and social workers—all professions known for their low pay. We believe a more plausible explanation for the relationship between SES and academic achievement lies in the strong correlation between parental education and family income. Education and income levels are highly correlated (Adult Performance Level Study, 1977; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1985; Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1988), and parental education seems more likely


to be operationally related to literacy achievement in school in ways we will now consider. Adults who go on to postsecondary schooling from high school are among those who have achieved academically at levels high enough to gain admission to college or university. This means that their reading and writing skills for academic tasks are already fairly well developed. During their postsecondary schooling, these adults continue to hone their print literacy abilities and to acquire skill within an expanding array of written genres. They also expand their interests in topics ranging from specific professional concerns to issues of national and global concern. All of these interests and skills will be reflected in their textual practices, both at work and at home. Although all children of adults who read and write will experience the written genre practices of their parents and communities, children of highly educated parents will also experience written genre practices that reflect those academic practices valued in schools.

Class, Status, and Textual Practices This relationship of class and school achievement needs to be unpackaged to ensure that we have not wandered away from our background frame of social practice of literacy and issues of power and access. Because the socioeconomic class dimension of reality and lived experience is always present,5 situated cognition takes place in a context defined in part by class. As noted above, this is not simply about money. Class status and class origin are not strictly determined by income. For example, ministers and teachers have a higher class status than plumbers, who may earn more money. This consideration is important in terms of the types of literacy practices children see among their parents. Children of ministers or teachers, for example, see their parents participating in a wide variety of job-related practices, many of which resemble, or are associated with, literacy practices in school. Children of plumbers or toy salesmen like Jimmy (see Chapter 5), on the other hand, may witness their parents involved in a host of literacy practices that are not associated with academic literacy. The ability to read a set of schematics or sales forms attests to a strong set of literacy skills, but however difficult the texts, these practices do not bring with them cultural capital.6 Class-defined contexts help in part to explain the differing impact of family literacy context on learners.


Thus, again we see the impact of socioculturally constructed literacy practices on access to and experience with written text types which themselves construct differing opportunities for print literacy development in school, including the cognitive aspects of textual features, vocabulary, topic, and so on. This last explanation rests much more on logical inference and theory than on actual data.7 However, this does not negate its potential descriptive or explanatory value. We offer it as a reasonable hypothesis regarding the ubiquitous SES– academic achievement correlation—one that is more reasonable, we believe, than any other available at the present time. We also offer it as further argument for embedding the cognitive lens on print literacy development within the social practice lens.

Effect of Cognitive Skill Learning on the Social Practice of Literacy We turn now to recent research to support our model of print literacy development that places both the cognitive and social practice of literacy perspectives in close symbiotic relationship. Almost no research has been done on the effect of typical skills-based instruction on the actual practice of print literacy in the lives of students. The only study we know of to date is the one we ourselves, conducted, on the Literacy Practices of Adult Learners (LPALS). As mentioned previously, it was the results of this study that initially prompted the writing of this book. The LPALS results revealed two statistically significant factors related to the practice of literacy in the lives of the students: (a) learning to read and write and (b) the degree of authenticity of texts and purposes for reading and writing in the classroom instruction. These two factors had virtually identical effects on the outcome of the practice of literacy. We will begin with the cognitive concern of skill learning, in this case the skills of decoding and encoding print as well as the comprehension strategies needed to understand this print. These skills are primarily involved in students’ notions of learning to read and write. Recall that the LPALS study was designed to explore the hypothesis that adult literacy students would begin to read and write more in their lives outside of their literacy classes (either begin to read and/ or write new text types or increase the frequency with which they already read/write specific texts) if their classes included more of


what we called authentic texts and authentic purposes for reading and writing those texts. In this way, we were making the social practice of literacy an outcome measure of instruction.8 Working with a final count of 159 student participants and 77 adult literacy classes, spread across the United States, we analyzed our classroom-level and student-level data using a combination of Item Response Theory (IRT) and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992; Lord, 1980). We included the following student-level, potentially explanatory factors in our analysis of the relationship between authenticity and literacy practice change: (a) literacy level at time of entrance into the current literacy class; (b) attendance record for the class; (c) gender; (d) ESOL status; and (e) whether or not the student studied with a tutor. All these student-level factors were possible sources of literacy practice change among the students, and they were statistically tested for this along with the instructional dimension of interest to us: authenticity of texts and purposes for reading and writing. One result of this analysis documented the significant effect of simply learning to read and write on the practice of literacy among the students. The statistical effect size for this variable was ⫺.379. This meant that the lower the student’s literacy level when beginning the class we documented, the more literacy practices were either added to their lives or increased in frequency. Among the LPALS students, 40% of them began their current classes at the beginning levels of reading ability (21% were preliterate; 19% were at the 1–3 grade levels). These beginning-level students made the greatest number of changes in their literacy practices. They began to read and write more and for more varied, real-life purposes outside of their classrooms. The statistical effect of this literacy level on print literacy practice change was an independent effect. That is, it showed this strength after the effect of authenticity (which was also statistically significant as we will discuss below) in the instruction was considered. That is regardless of the type of instruction encountered by these students— highly decontextualized skills-based or highly real-life literacy-based– they increased or adopted new literacy practices as they actually learned to read and write for the first time.9 Simply learning to read and write at a basic level affected their engagement in actual literacy practices.


This conclusion with regard to the role of schooling in the social practice of literacy is further strengthened by another result of the analysis. This was the significant effect of length of attendance in the class on the outcome measure of increased and new print literacy textual practices. The longer the students had attended their classes, the more they read and wrote new texts and more frequently in their out-of-school lives. Again, this factor of length of attendance was unrelated to the type of instruction they were receiving.10 Length of attendance had an independent effect on literacy practice change, just as did literacy level. We interpret these findings to suggest that the more time students have to improve and develop their literacy skills (the cognitive lens) in school, the more likely one will see changes in textual social practices of literacy in their lives outside of the classroom (the social practice lens). Of course, social factors may support the length of time a student stays in a classroom (see Chapter 7). Overall these results indicate the obvious: the ability to read and write is a precondition to engaging in a literacy practice, understood as the socioculturally informed use of literacy skills. Although some people may become literate without the benefit of formal instruction, the vast majority of people do not. Lack of access to schooling is the major cause of illiteracy around the world (UNESCO, 2001). Apparently, as least as far as our analysis reveals, learning to read and write in any type of formal setting dedicated to the teaching of literacy skills leads to the use of these skills in ways that mediate the social lives of individual students. This conclusion should be enough, we feel, to convince social practice researchers that issues of instruction are important, in fact crucial, to issues of social practice of literacy. Perhaps more so, issues of beginning reading and writing instruction as it focuses on the decoding and encoding of print are inextricably intertwined with issues of access, definition, and social construction of literacy practices in the lives of people.

Effect of Bringing Social Practice of Literacy into the Schools Research Evidence on the Effect of Authenticity Another way to look at these issues is to examine the effect of instruction that is more embedded in the actual social practices of lit-


eracy on print literacy development. As one may suspect, little research has actually been carried out exploring the effect of authenticity, although New Literacy proponents have made theoretical claims about authentic literacy instruction for decades. Recently, however, some evidence has emerged that actually documents these theoretically based claims empirically. We will now present these findings as we continue to argue for a model of print literacy development that includes both cognitive and social practice perspectives. The research that is examining these issues is framed largely by an evolving construct of authenticity as it applies to literacy practice and literacy instruction in schools.11 To frame this discussion, we will first operationally define and illustrate what we mean by authenticity. We use this term primarily to capture qualities of texts and purposes for reading or writing texts. Authentic texts and authentic purposes for reading and writing those texts are juxtaposed within several of these research studies with texts and purposes for reading and writing texts that we term school-only. Within this frame, authentic texts are those that are read and written by people in their lives to accomplish communicative purposes. Authentic purposes for reading and writing are those that function communicatively for people beyond learning to read and write.

Authentic Materials/Activities The following quote was obtained by a data collector while talking with one of the LPALS participants about his literacy practices: “If you don’t read or keep up with some of these coupons and things, you’re always gonna be paying a high price than you would be, but by knowing how to read these coupons and find out that you can get a discount on the same thing then, you know, I go on ahead and do that now, but I used to couldn’t do that.” This quote, and the picture the words conjure of a real-life reading practice, captures the essence of our construct of authenticity. At the center of this construct are two interrelated factors: texts and purposes for reading and writing those texts. In this particular student’s case, the text is coupons (one that occurs with high frequency in any market economy), and his purpose for reading them is to save money and avoid high prices (a purpose that creates, and is created by, the text). Written texts that are used outside of school, and that would thus


be considered authentic texts are relatively easy to identify. All one needs to do is spend some time noting all the texts that one sees people reading and writing in the world. Depending on the social contexts surrounding the literacy activities and participants, these texts would include such print texts as signs, coupons, newspapers, magazines, novels, information books, forms, leases, bibles, song lyrics, and so on. These would not include such texts as worksheets, comprehension questions following a short story, reading tests, or spelling lists. These latter texts are not considered authentic within our frame because their occurrence is limited to schooling contexts, specifically to the purpose of teaching/learning to read and write. For this reason, they are defined as “school-only.” The purposes for reading and writing these texts, however, may be more obscure to those who may not have reflected on why, and for what, they read and write different texts. One way to think about this is to use Halliday’s typology (see Chapter 7) of the functions of language. This is an exhaustive list of the purposes that language serves and thus can be applied to the purposes that written language, or texts, serve in the lives of people who read and write. When questioning the purpose of a reading and writing event, you can ask yourself if the text was primarily read for a purpose that falls into one of these language functions. Is a newspaper read to find out what happened at the United Nations yesterday or to confirm the score of the baseball game (heuristic)? Is a novel read to enjoy a fictional adventure and to relax (imaginative)? If the purpose of reading, or writing, does not fall into one of Halliday’s language functions, then it is being read, or written, for a nonlanguage purpose, is not communicative, and thus is not authentic in the sense that we use it. Over the course of several large-scale studies, including the LPALS study, we have documented many ways that teachers may use authentic texts and/or purposes in order to render them less authentic. For example, a third grade teacher may assign her class to write thank you letters to a fictional character as a means of teaching the proper forms for salutations and personal letters of thanks. However, the letters are never sent but are instead displayed on the bulletin board. Although the textual form of a thank you letter is an authentic one, the purpose for writing it was not. It was not written to an actual person in gratitude for something that was real but was, instead, written for the purpose of learning and practicing a written


language skill and for displaying or demonstrating skill acquisition— all school-only purposes. In another example, we can see an adult literacy teacher using actual newspapers in her class (an authentic textual form) but asking her students to underline all of the words with long vowels in them (a school-only purpose for reading the text). Within this frame, for these studies, we typed classes or instruction along a continuum of authenticity to school-only. Those instructional activities that involved students in reading/writing authentic texts for authentic purposes were rated highly authentic; those that involved school-only texts for school-only purposes were rated highly schoolonly. Activities that involved a mixture of authentic and school-only texts or purposes were rated either somewhat authentic or somewhat school-only. The meaning and implications of the word authentic often prompt some debate, particularly when the term is used to indicate out-ofschool literacy practices as compared to texts and purposes designed primarily for print literacy skill development. Some people believe that school itself must be considered authentic because it is undoubtedly “real.” We recognize that school is a context with its own purposes, text types, and discourse and that school activities such as workbook skill work can be viewed as authentic within a particular frame of pedagogy since they are a “real” part of school that students must master. Note that we do not label texts and textual purposes that are designed primarily for skill development as inauthentic. Rather, we assign the descriptive label school-only to reflect the fact that these texts are engaged in the context of print skill development, which usually occurs in some type of schooling environment. We are concerned primarily with this issue of social practice of print literacy and how it relates to cognitive skill development. Thus, our differentiation between authentic and school-only textual practices is useful and allows us to describe instruction in ways that provide insight into this cognitive/social practice issue. We will discuss the findings of two large research studies that have used the construct of authenticity. Both of these studies have produced converging evidence on the positive effect of bringing social practice perspectives into the classroom on print literacy development and use. We will first continue to present findings from the LPALS study. We will then describe emerging findings from a second study, which is usually re-


ferred to as the TEXT study, as they inform this topic. Following the discussion of these two studies, we will synthesize data from other smaller studies that document cognitive and linguistic growth as they relate to the authentic literacy practice of reading to young children in the classroom.

Literacy Practices of Adult Learners Study The second major finding to come from the LPALS study related to the effect of authentic materials and activities on the evolving literacy practices of the adult learners. Again, our outcome variable was change in literacy practices, operationalized as either an increased frequency with which one read or wrote a text or as the initiation of a new textual practice while attending the class we had typed along the authentic/school-only continuum. Using IRT analysis for the questionnaire data regarding literacy practices (see Chapter 2) and HLM to model the relationship between the degree of authenticity of the literacy activities in the classes and the students’ reported print literacy practice changes, we found a statistically significant effect of authenticity on print literacy practice change. We also controlled for other class-level variables such as (a) the number of hours per week the class met and (b) the type of adult literacy class (for example, Adult Basic Ed, Family Literacy, GED, or ESOL). Student-level factors were also included as control variables. Our analysis confirmed our hypothesis: The more authentic and real life the texts and the purposes for reading and writing those texts are in adult literacy instruction, the more the students will report change in their literacy practices outside of school. This was an independent effect, like that of Literacy Level, discussed above. Thus, in this case we can say that the effect of involving students in authentic reading and writing in the classroom had a significant effect (Effect Size ⫽ .34612) on their practice of literacy in their lives, regardless of their literacy level upon beginning the class. Figure 8.1 portrays the cumulative effect of increasing degrees of authenticity of instructional activities on out-of-school print literacy practice. This is impressive testimony to the use of texts and textual functions that reflect the social practices of literacy in classes designed to increase print literacy skill. This result demonstrates that, despite the growing Back-to-Basics rhetoric, the involvement of students in the


Predicted increase in number of changed literacy practices for each move toward authenticity in the classroom

social practice of literacy in the classroom is statistically significantly more related to growth and development of literacy practices than decontextualized skill work. Furthermore, since this study controlled for the literacy level of students, it also suggests that there is no reading-ability threshold at which this type of practice is inappropriate (Freire, 1993). Finally, the predicted impact analysis demonstrates that those adult students who showed the least transference of reading and writing from school to their out-of-school lives in highly school-only classes would be the most positively impacted by participating in classes with increasing amounts of reading and writing that was consonant with the social practices of literacy outside of school.

8

Highly authentic Somewhat authentic

7

Somewhat school only

6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0

5

10

15

20

25

Predicted number of changed literacy practices in a highly school only classroom Figure 8.1 Predicted impact on students’ literacy practices on moving from a class with little or no use of authentic texts and literacy activities to classes with increased degrees of authenticity.


What did these highly/somewhat authentic classrooms look like? First, they all included skill-instruction along with authentic texts and purposes for reading/writing. Also, to varying degrees, they included direct instruction not only about skills but also about texts and reading and writing purposes. We will provide short portraits of classrooms across the authentic/school-only continuum to make more concrete the implications for instruction of bringing the social practice of print literacy into classrooms to connect with cognitive skill learning.

Somewhat School-Only and Highly School-Only Adult Literacy Classes As the students of Mr. Findley’s adult basic education walk into his classroom at the community learning center at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, they each retrieve their reading textbooks and Focus on Spelling workbooks before they sit down at three different tables in the center of the room. There are 11 students in class today. There are 18 students enrolled in the class, but owing to childcare, job, and transportation issues, as well as personal reasons, attendance is quite variable. The classroom is small but clean and bright. In addition to the three tables for students, there are several shelves against the walls with textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other books and supplies. The teacher’s desk, which is at the front of the classroom, is piled high with teacher manuals and papers. On the walls are various maps of the world and the United States. There is one poster with the parts of speech and another that shows how to write a business and a personal letter. A bulletin board displays notices about job openings and information about community services and activities. One wall contains a large white board on which Mr. Findley is currently writing the class schedule for the day. While Mr. Findley writes, the students chat amiably with each other. They rarely see each other outside of class, so this class and break time are the only opportunities that the students have to socialize with each other. Mr. Findley then goes over the schedule with the class: the first half hour will be spent working independently, completing yesterday’s work on contractions. Next, there will be a spelling quiz. After that, they will read and answer questions about


a selection from their textbook on the Titanic. After a short break, the students will move to the computer room, where they will work on skills programs of their choosing in spelling, grammar, or reading comprehension. Mr. Findley asks the students if they understand the schedule for the day. Everyone nods and opens up their workbooks to get started on their work. The lesson on contractions asks students to read a series of sentences, circle the contractions in each sentence, and then write down the two words that form the contraction. Because the students in the class possess varying levels of ability, some of the students breeze through this work, while others have much more difficulty. Mr. Findley works with individual students, providing assistance and support to those who need it. Most of the students finish their work early, and they use this time to do various things: some get out flash cards to quiz each other on the spelling words that will be on the quiz. Some help the students next to them who are still working on the contractions. Others go over to a small bookshelf, where they find a variety of books and magazines written especially for ABE students, and choose something to read. When all the students have finished the assignment, Mr. Findley asks everyone to come back to their seats to correct their work together. After they finish, the students get out a blank piece of paper for their spelling quiz. The quiz for today includes “er,” “ir,” and “ur” words. Mr. Findley tries to base his spelling lessons on words that his students have had trouble reading and writing, and this lesson came as a result of much confusion among the students when writing words with the three different patterns. He reads each word twice, includes each word in a sentence, and then repeats the word one more time. (“Number 1: TURN . . . TURN . . . Please TURN around so I can see you . . . TURN.) At the end of the quiz, a couple of the students ask for words to be repeated, and Mr. Findley obliges. He then collects the papers and asks his class how they thought they did. A few minutes of casual conversation ensue, while students talk not only about the spelling quiz but also about their weekend plans, their children, and so on. Mr. Findley participates in the conversation, listening to what the students have to say and adding his own input. Mr. Findley has a warm demeanor, and it is obvious that he and his students care about and respect each other. However, as one student begins complaining about the difficulties she is having with


her ex-husband and child support, Mr. Findley cuts the conversation short because he begins to worry about getting through the day’s plans. Mr. Findley tells the students to open up to page 105 in their reading textbooks. The story on that page is called “Mountain of Ice” and it is about the Titanic. Mr. Findley asks the students if any of them have seen the movie Titanic. About half of the students raise their hands. Mr. Findley asks them to read the title of the story, and they do so in unison. The students are instructed to read the passage to themselves, circling any words that they don’t know. When they are finished, he reads the first page of the story aloud while the students follow along. After he finishes reading the page, he asks students to look at the first word of the story that is in bold—“immense.” He explains that today’s lesson is about using context clues to determine what unknown words mean. He instructs the students to write down the word “immense” on a piece of paper and then look at the sentence that the word is in to determine its meaning. Together, the students determine that “immense” is another word for very big. Mr. Findley tells the students to write down all the other words in bold and use context clues to come up with definitions for each word. After about 10 minutes of the context clue work, Mr. Findley tells the students that they should complete the assignment for homework. The class breaks and the students file out of the room to smoke a cigarette, use the washroom, and/or buy food from the vending machines. They reconvene in the computer room, where each student sits at a separate computer to begin individualized skill lessons. Students let Mr. Findley know what they most want to work on, and he helps them to choose computer programs that best match their needs. Some students request work on spelling, others on phonics, comprehension, or writing. For the remainder of the class time, students work independently while Mr. Findley circulates around the room, observing the students and providing assistance when necessary. The class ends at 12 p.m. sharp, and the students turn off their software and return to the classroom. They gather up their belongings and bid Mr. Findley good-bye. He stands by the door as they file out, and then he gets to work grading their spelling quizzes.


Highly Authentic and Somewhat Authentic Adult Literacy Classes The classroom into which Ms. Wilson’s students enter each morning is filled with many different types of texts: a bookcase along the far wall is filled with novels, short stories, historical accounts, science books, poetry, and children’s books. Next to it is another bookcase with diverse textbooks, workbooks, and reference materials such as bilingual and monolingual dictionaries and one set of encyclopedias. The local newspaper and different magazines are piled up on top of a table by the wall. In one corner is a computer, and next to it, a panel displays a set of basic instructions for e-mail and Internet use, in big font and in three languages: English, Spanish, and Haitian Kryeo`l. Next to the door, there is a bulletin board that displays different flyers on school and community news. For example, one flyer contains the Learners’ Council meetings calendar. Other flyers provide information about the diverse school working committees. One of the committees is preparing the Christmas festival. Flyers relating to community issues and information are also posted on this bulletin board. Ms. Wilson often designs the class activities around issues that arise in the neighborhood in which her students live. For example, one day some of the students came to class very disturbed. A young girl in the neighborhood had been assaulted. The learners felt that the police, the school, and the community were being very passive about the case. Many women in the class have daughters about the same age as the assault victim, and as they learned more about the case, they, too, became very upset. Ms. Wilson realized that this issue really mattered to the students, so she devoted much of the next week’s instruction to learning more about this case. She brought in different newspapers that covered the case for the students to read and discuss. The class decided to write a letter to the editor about the incident. As the class wrote the letter together, Ms. Wilson took the opportunity to teach a short lesson on writing a “Letter to the Editor,” using models from current newspaper issues. As part of this exercise, they also reviewed some spelling patterns that would be needed to write this particular letter. Ms. Wilson also proposed that the class do some research on issues of women’s rights and safety. Using the Internet as well as other


resources, the class spent much time reading about and discussing these issues. At the same time, Ms. Wilson pulled out unfamiliar vocabulary words from the different resources to work on with the students. She assigned groups to look up the words in the dictionaries in the classroom and to write out the definitions and sample sentences, using the words to post on the wall for students to use during their reading and writing activities. Once the letter to the editor was composed together, several students wrote it on the computer, utilizing the spell-check option to ensure complete accuracy within this domain. Finally, the letter was sent, following a whole-class lesson on addressing envelopes, which included where in the newspaper to find the necessary information for mailing letters to the editor. One can see in these portraits how the two types of classes differed in their uses of authentic literacy practices. For the LPALS study we were not measuring skill development in the ways typically measured by those operating out of a cognitive perspective. Thus, we cannot say anything about the impact on the reading levels, or abilities, of the LPALS students, constraining the meaning of “level” to the typical cognitive one of “as measured by standardized tests.” However, we can work our way around and closer to this concern through an analysis of the types of texts that students read or wrote for the first time or more frequently. The IRT analysis allowed us to scale the print literacy practices that changed for the students since they had begun participating in their adult literacy classes. The Print Literacy Practices Questionnaire included eight writing practices. Student responses indicated that when they began their classes, they did very little writing in their lives: only the writing of names and labeling fell within the top half of the scale. However, the Change in Literacy Practices scale revealed that four out of the eight writing practices were either new or had increased in frequency after the students started their current literacy classes. Writing names and labeling was apparently an earlier-learned practice, falling near the bottom of the change scale. Another insight into changes in skills level comes from the analysis of change in print literacy practice. This involves an increase in the complexity of the texts that the students reported reading and writing. The two print practices most affected by the changes that occurred in literacy use reported by the participants were (1) reading


essays, compositions, and text for information (expository text) and (2) reading books and stories (fiction). In addition, one of the writing practices that fell into the top half of the change scale involved writing the language of speeches, reflections, stories, and poetry.13 These types of texts contain discourse at the greatest levels of writtenness and complexity, as described by Chafe and Danielewicz and Rubin (see Chapter 7). Compare the following samples of print from two types of texts. The first is a sample of coupon or container print text. The second is text from fiction and expository text. • Coupon: Boneless Round Steak, USDA Choice beef, 1⁄8” trim,

$1.59 lb. Sold as steak only. • Fiction: “I haven’t had occasion to mention the Baron, but Ma-

meha was referring to Baron Matsunaga Tsuneyoshi—her danna. We don’t have barons and counts in Japan any longer, but we did before World War II, and Baron Matsunaga was certainly among the wealthiest” (Golden, 1997, 184). • Expository Text: “For the first time, members of Congress have

dipped directly into a pot of highway money destined for the states to help pay for local projects dear to lawmakers.”14 To address issues of skill level change, we must turn to the cognitive definition of practice, as in “practice makes perfect.” Recall from Chapter 5 that an important part of skill learning from a cognitive perspective is that of the associative stage, during which learners, by practicing and applying a just-learned skill, detect errors in their understanding and strengthen the connections among the various elements involved in the skill (Anderson, 1980). Successfully moving through this stage brings the learner to the stage of autonomy where the skill becomes automated. In the reading field, from the cognitive perspective, these stages are represented by learners reading connected text frequently enough to achieve automaticity and fluency (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). To progress along the print literacy developmental path, learners must read a lot of text at increasing levels of complexity. This is what we detected among the LPALS participants. They were reading and writing more, and they were reading and writing more complex texts. And the more their instruction included literacy events that mimicked the actual social practices of literacy, the more these


students did this. Thus, it can be reasonably inferred that these students’ skill levels were increasing as the result of this practice. Furthermore, we assert that this is one more data-based argument that ties cognitive perspectives on development with social practice perspectives on literacy practice. Finally, we can also link instructional issues to issues of intergenerational literacy development and social practice of print literacy through this analysis of print literacy practice change. As the 20Home Study revealed, those children who experienced the reading and writing of more complex texts, such as that of the fiction/expository type above, in their homes and communities had the greater degree of emergent literacy knowledge–knowledge that allows them to begin school and formal literacy instruction quite a bit ahead in terms of their cognitive knowledge about the reading and writing (according to the K–1 Study) of the children who only experienced text at the coupon level of complexity. We can therefore conclude that adult literacy instruction that brings the social practice of literacy into the classroom, in terms of authentic texts and purposes for reading/writing, most likely contributes to the success of the children of adults who experience that instruction. It does so by helping the adult students begin to read and write more often and to read and write more complex texts, thus creating a more optimal emergent literacy environment.

TEXT Study Links Authenticity to Genre Reading/Writing Skills The other large research study that links our construct of authenticity to print literacy development in school is the TEXT study (PurcellGates & Duke, 1999). Although the LPALS study focused on the adult literacy student population, the TEXT study was situated in second and third grade public school classrooms. The experimental study—at the teacher level—and the quasi-experimental study—at the student level—were designed to test the effectiveness of explicit teaching of genre language features on growth in genre-specific reading and writing abilities. The written genres chosen for the study were informational science text and procedural science text used as part of second and third grade science instruction. The link to our topic is the fact that the two experimental condi-


tions both included the construct of authenticity, which was defined in a similar way as in the LPALS study. Therefore, teachers in both conditions were taught to engage the children with authentic informational or procedural texts and authentic purposes for reading and writing them. The two conditions were (a) Authentic-Only reading and writing of informational and procedural texts and (b) Authentic Plus Explicit Explanation of Language Features of informational and procedural texts. For the purposes of the TEXT study, authentic informational and procedural texts and purposes were defined as (adapted from the Authenticity Coding Manual):

Authentic Purpose Authentic purposes are reading or writing purposes that exist in the lives of people outside of a classroom. The authentic purpose for reading informational texts is to read for information about the natural or social world that is not known to the reader who wants or needs to know it for real-life reasons. The following sample scenario demonstrates how this may play out in the classroom and was used during the teacher training: The day following the eruption of a volcano in Mexico, a discussion emerges about volcanoes and how they happen. Students disagree about where the lava comes from and how hot it is. The teacher puts together a group of information books about volcanoes. She distills the questions and assigns students to work in pairs to read for the answers to the questions. The authentic purpose for writing informational texts is to convey information that the writer possesses to a reader who does not possess that information and who wants or needs it. The following example was given to the teachers in the study: In groups of three, students create picture books about different animal babies for the kindergarten children in the school. They either draw or use cut-out pictures and write simple labels, captions, or sentences to go with each. They laminate each page and bind the books. The books are then presented to the kindergarten classes where the students who created them read them aloud to the children. An authentic purpose for reading procedural science texts is to read procedures in order to carry out the procedure that will demonstrate or inform on a science topic that the reader and procedure-doer wants or needs to be informed on. For example: As part of a unit on


“Insects,” students decide to build and stock their own ant farm. They get the instructions off of the web and divide into groups to build one and to stock it, according to the directions. Authentic purposes for writing procedural texts are so that real people will actually carry out the procedure on a science topic on which they want or need to be informed. They will use the results of the procedure in some way. Here is an example used with the teachers: Students are assigned different tasks related to the growing of corn plants inside the room. As spring break approaches, they compose—in their taskrelated groups—a list of instructions for the aide who has volunteered to take care of the plants while the students are away.

Authentic Text Authentic text is a text type that occurs naturally in the lives of people outside of a classroom. You can find it in bookstores, or you can order it to be delivered to your home. This category also includes those texts that are written primarily for instructional purposes but mimic almost exactly the naturally occurring texts. Authentic informational texts are those that reflect the genre purposes and characteristics of informational texts—for example, information text from the newspaper, information books purchased in a bookstore or checked out of a community library. Authentic informational texts to be written would include writing an information book, an encyclopedia or encyclopedia entry for an encyclopedia, or writing information text for the web. Authentic procedural texts are procedural texts that are found naturally in the world outside of the school context. Included in the category are also those procedural texts that mimic exactly in purpose, style, and form those found naturally in the world but are contained in books or science kits that are published for schools. Examples of these texts for reading include procedures for science experiments in a book that can be bought in a bookstore, procedures for making a chicken coop that can be downloaded off of the web, and procedures for science demonstrations/experiments that come from a book or a science kit published primarily for school use but mimic real-world procedural texts. For writing, authentic procedural texts could involve such texts as instructions/procedures for feeding the hamster, or procedures for making silly putty. The TEXT study was a longitudinal study, and the sample of 400


children was followed through second and many through third grade. The sample also consisted of 16 second grade teachers and 10 third grade teachers. The schools were randomly selected from 11 randomly selected districts. Each selected school was randomly assigned to condition. The science instruction was carefully monitored, and the two constructs of (a) explicit teaching of language features and (b) authenticity were coded weekly. The children’s reading and writing of informational and procedural science text was measured across six time points across both years, and growth in these two abilities was modeled using HLM. The analysis revealed statistically significant growth in the children’s abilities to comprehend and write informational and procedural texts across the two years. The experimental variable of explicit explanation of language features, however, was not significantly related to growth. Of interest to our topic here, however, was the fact that the variable of authenticity was significantly related to growth in reading comprehension and writing of both genres. The more the teachers involved their students in the reading and writing of authentic informational and procedural texts for authentic purposes, the higher were the students’ scores on measures of reading comprehension and writing. This was true for all of the teachers across both conditions. The effect sizes for authenticity ranged between .51 and .62. Taken together, the results from the LPALS study and the TEXT study provide impressive and intriguing data on the facilitative effects of bringing real-life print literacy practices into the literacy classroom (Condelli & Wrigley, 2003). While previously this may have been assumed to have had a primarily motivational effect, leaving skills instruction to be dealt with contextually or at least through schoolonly procedures, these data open the way to considering ways that cognitive skill learning can proceed within reading and writing activities that reflect actual social practices of print literacy with greater effects than if skill learning were addressed in instruction as an autonomous, decontextualized process. We turn now to a summary of data from a series of smaller studies whose findings converge to support this frame—that cognitive and linguistic growth can result from bringing authentic print literacy practices into formal literacy instructional contexts.


Cognitive and Linguistic Effects of Reading to Children in School Reading to young children is a socioculturally constructed literacy practice that is common among middle-class parents in several Western developed countries.15 The cognitive and linguistic benefits of this practice have been researched and documented, and they essentially reveal a significant effect on vocabulary and language abilities—both of which have been shown to be related to achievement levels in school-based literacy tasks. A reanalysis of three different studies that utilized Purcell-Gates’ pretend-to-read task revealed that bringing this practice into the classroom results in the same benefits for children who had not been read to before they began school. Within these three studies, the first sample consisted of children who had been read to extensively during their pre-K years. The last two samples consisted of children from low-income families who had been read to very little, if at all, prior to kindergarten. The data for the reanalysis came from the beginning of kindergarten for all three samples and from the end of first grade for the two low-SES samples. The children in the first of the low-SES samples participated in literacy instruction for kindergarten and first grade that was characterized as “skills based.” The children in the other low-SES sample participated in kindergarten and first grade instruction characterized as “whole language.” Of interest to the reanalysis was the documented increase in frequency with which the children were read to in the whole language sample across the two years of instruction. Was there a difference between the written register knowledge of these children and that of those in the skills-based classes? How did their relative scores measure up to those of the well-read-to kindergartners? Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, and Freppon reanalyzed the pretend read data from the three previous studies using the pretend read task (Dahl & Freppon, 1995; Purcell-Gates, 1988; Purcell-Gates & Dahl, 1991; Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, & Freppon, 1995). The reanalysis of these data revealed in stark detail the degree to which children who have not been read to differ linguistically from those who have. The randomly selected, low-SES (total N of 37 used for the reanalysis) children in both samples could produce oral narratives that were coherent and unambiguous, both to the researcher during the telling


(and thus sharing the physical context with the speaker) and to readers of the transcripts for whom paralinguistic factors (such as facial expression and gesturing) were unavailable. However, they could not, for the most part, produce appropriate recontextualized written language at the beginning of formal literacy instruction— kindergarten—as the more well-read-to children could.16 Thus, these data suggest that the operative linguistic difference between the middle-class and low-SES children lay in the written narrative language sphere and not in the oral. At the end of first grade, however, the children in both low-SES samples produced pretend readings that showed similar levels of knowledge of written register vocabulary, syntax, and recontextualized language to the well-read-to children’s beginning kindergarten levels. In other words, in the two years of being read to in school, they had caught up. In addition, the children in the whole language samples where children heard books read aloud more frequently revealed written register abilities that were significantly different (higher) from those of the children in the skills-based classrooms by the end of first grade.

“Why Can’t They Teach Me Words I Need, Like ‘Potato’ or ‘Corn?’ ” The preceding research studies employed statistical inference to conclude effects of real-life literacy practices within literacy instruction. One final demonstration comes from the ethnography of Jenny and Donny, and, therefore, does not produce data that can be interpreted in the same fashion. However, it does provide descriptive and suggestive data relating to this issue. Essentially, the close analysis of Jenny and Donny revealed the indisputable outcome that Jenny and Donny only began to make progress toward full literacy when a teacher attempted to make reading and writing functional for them in their lives—to connect print to their experiences, their language, and their purposes for reading and writing. As described earlier, both Jenny and her husband had dropped out of school in the seventh grade without being able to read or write anything beyond their names. Jenny was painfully aware of the consequences of nonliteracy and had been trying for years to learn to read by attending adult literacy classes. However, she had so far been


unsuccessful in learning to read or write anything beyond those texts presented to her in class–workbooks, worksheets, short stories of adult scenarios with fill-in-the-blank comprehension questions. Over the four years she had attended these classes, she had learned to do most of the school assignments like circling the right answer, learning the words in a passage well enough to read out loud, and filling in the blanks. However, she had failed to learn any skills that transferred to the print in her world: store signs, directions on food packages, memos and notes from Donny’s teacher (informing her that he was failing to learn), and so on. When she first met Purcell-Gates, Jenny had not attended a literacy class for six months. After documenting her inability to read any written text, PurcellGates decided to use Jenny’s own language and experiences written down as a text with which to learn reading and writing skills. She convinced Jenny to write journal entries, even though Jenny protested that she did not know how to spell words. Purcell-Gates took those entries and typed them using conventional spelling and punctuation. She then had Jenny read them back both to herself and aloud to Purcell-Gates. These reading and writing events were the first time that Jenny had both encoded and decoded her own words (“I always only read and wrote [copied] other people’s words!”), and the conceptual opening of a new door to the nature of print was profound for her. Soon, she was beginning to read the print around her and to write to others to communicate. This success led her to return to school where she was confronted once again with anomalous reading and writing tasks. One afternoon, upon bringing Donny to the Literacy Center for his session, she asked for help with an assignment that centered on learning vocabulary that consisted of nominals, such as representation and democratization. As she and Purcell-Gates discussed the words and what they meant, Jenny burst forth with the quote that heads this section, “Why can’t they teach me words I need, like ‘potato,’ or ‘corn?’ Then I could go shopping by myself and not need to bother no one (to go along to read the signs and prices in the stores).” As we described earlier, when the opportunity arose to study outcomes of adult literacy instruction, these words Jenny spoke came to mind. If Jenny’s instruction over the years that she had attended adult classes had reflected her life, her needs, and her responses to academic


literacy as compared to “real-life” literacy, would she have begun reading and writing more for her own purposes? Thus, the LPALS study was born. Jenny continued to develop her reading and writing abilities as she wrote more complex journal entries, began to read children’s books to her two boys, read notes from Purcell-Gates and the staff at Donny’s school, wrote messages to Purcell-Gates and to Donny’s teacher, and, in general, developed written literacy practices that were functional for her and her community of practice.

Summary Within this chapter, we have continued to argue that a model of print literacy development needs to represent both the cognitive and social practice of literacy theoretical frames. Through demonstration with empirical data, we have argued that learners develop print literacy skills as they participate in real-life uses of literacy. This is true both from the beginning of the developmental process, as literacy abilities and conceptual understandings emerge within communities of practice, and as learners continue to learn new print genres for authentic communicative purposes throughout their lives. In the following chapter, we will address some implications that a model of print literacy development such as this has for both research into print literacy development and for instruction.

m

CHAPTER NINE

Signs and Symbols: Research Implications for Best Practice

Learning to read and write in order to read and write one’s world involves situating print literacy learning within existing literacy practices. Listen to Larry, one of the LPALS participants, explain what it means to him to finally learn to read. We’ve taken the liberty of shaping Larry’s response into a presentational mode that metaphorically, as well as literally, helps us to make this point. Furthermore, Larry’s exploration of what literacy means to him speaks to ways that learners transform literacy practices in this increasingly semiotically complex world as they appropriate them for themselves:1 I could see a sign, a certain sign in the road and I didn’t know what it mean. But now they changed the highway system so much, until if you can’t read and write you is lost. So since I was going to school, I learned how to read the road signs better. I could see a sign way off and I could recognize what the sign mean. And I can see a curve sign. I know the difference in left and right, and right and wrong. I know the difference in a detour; I know the difference in a yield. All those signs are very important.

160 䡠 Print Literacy Development You got to know school zone sign; when you see a sign . . . amen. A lot of time when you see a sign, you get close to it before you recognize it! But now, I can see it well. And I can recognize that sign, knowing that this is a sign for the yield, for children, for crossing. Speed limit sign, I can recognize speed limit sign. I used to see a sign . . . If it said 85 miles, then I didn’t know no better. I thought that was 85 miles an hour. I saw the sign say 85, so that’s what I try to do. I’m able to recognize the law better too, ’cause now I don’t have to worry about the man running up on me, stopping me for trying to keep up with all the signs I see on the road. And so I know I know I know

now signs don’t bother me. highway signs, the regular road signs what it means.

I can look up . . . I can see the sign, see where I’m supposed to make my turn, see what street I’m supposed to get on, and it’s good. When you can look and see the sign . . . that you know you’re supposed to make your turn, right hand turn or left hand turn, then you turn at those, following the instruction that you get from the sign, you not gonna go wrong. Some people get killed by not paying enough attention to the sign. They out there, but if you don’t know what they mean,

Signs and Symbols 䡠 161 you can get hurt You’ve got to know these signs. So now I can see the word and I call it what it is, because I know what the word mean, and what it is.

How do we begin to think about powerful and effective literacy instruction that allows for access to print literacy development for all learners, young and old(er)? In particular, how do we make informed choices about fashioning a more effective educational experience for learners like Larry and others whose own schooling failed to address his needs, life, and linguistic contexts? We chose to address these questions through a focus on research, and in this chapter, we do some thinking about some implications for future research of this broadened lens on print literacy development. We focus on research because we believe that pedagogy for educationally underserved people suffers seriously from a lack of critical insight and knowledge among those who would design instructional policy. Thus, we purposively do not include implications for instruction alone. We do, however, propose research on instruction that may be suggested by this lens that includes cognitive skill development within the context of different social practices of literacy.

Instruction That Counts As we stated early on, we have approached the issues raised in this book primarily from the perspectives of teachers—teachers of children and adults; teachers of first- and second-language speakers; teachers of mainstream and marginalized learners in the United States and elsewhere. We believe that the implications of a widened lens on print literacy development are greatest for the field of instructional practice and policy. This is the primary arena for new research, we believe, and this research must devote resources to understanding, from this broadened lens, issues of disparity of outcome in terms of access and achievement of print literacy goals. The primary implication of this model of print literacy development is that print literacy instruction should be for the people, of the people, and (whenever possible) by the people. The ongoing national

162 䡠 Print Literacy Development

and international concern with “levels” of literacy achievement is for the most part about the lag in literacy achievement of some of the people, not all of the people. There has always been a select people who succeed in schools as they are constructed by those in power. We believe that for these fortunate ones, print literacy instruction is for them, of them, and by them. We suggest that many of those students who learn to read and write relatively easily and well in school do so to a large degree because the socioculturally constructed literacy practices of their communities contextualize their school instruction with a hand-to-glove type of fit. Those students who do not learn to read and write as easily in school more often than not2 belong to minority and marginalized communities whose socioculturally constructed literacy practices are not reflected in school-based print literacy instruction. This is certainly not a new thought; it is often stated, or implied, as fact by many concerned with these issues. What we are proposing, however, is a systematic program of research around this hypothesis. The goals of this research program should include both model building and theory testing, with the intent of ending achievement disparities that are disproportionately explained by class, race, gender, or ethnic membership. We do not consider the current efforts in place to address these achievement gaps as sufficient to accomplish these ends. As data come in, for example, on the results of the heightened high-stakes assessment policies, they are revealing that those districts that are failing to meet the new achievement standards continue to disproportionately represent a high percentage of low-income families. This pattern of failure reflects the fact that the instructional methods being proposed, and in some cases imposed, ignore as trivial a crucial aspect of the print literacy development process—the socioculturally constructed literacy practices of the students. Rather, they assume that the socioculturally constructed literacy practices of the students who are already succeeding (in other more mainstream districts) are the only ones that exist, or count, as far as these things might inform instruction. The current literacy instruction reform efforts operate from the belief that cognitive skill learning must be improved among the historically underachieving students. Without taking into account the sociocultural literacy practices of communities, however, these efforts to “erase the achievement gap” are operating on half-baked models

Signs and Symbols 䡠 163

of print literacy development, and are, we believe, destined to fail in the end.

Local Texts as Base There is no reason to continue to believe that all children or adult literacy learners will enter the classroom door with the same notions of what literacy is, what and who it is for, who engages with it, where, and when. What little data we have to date suggest that print literacy instruction that builds on the literacy worlds and practices of the learners stands a much better chance of succeeding than that which does not. By succeeding here we mean the steady growth of the ability to read and write print for purposes that are functional in the students’ current and future lives, whatever those lives and purposes may be. Essential to research into this hypothesis is valid information regarding the literacy practices of differing socioculturally defined and constructed communities. “Communities” need to be understood as shifting and variable rather than rigid, and individuals’ memberships within communities must be acknowledged as multiple and contextually constructed and changing over time. Although social practice researchers have begun such a research program (see preceding chapters), we want to suggest that this type of work be done in conjunction with concurrent research that focuses on those literacy practices privileged by schools. Data on the literacy practices of both in- and out-of-school communities will be needed to draw conclusions about the interrelationships, continuities, congruencies, or lack of same as they affect or effect print literacy development. This type of research must, by necessity, be qualitative and combine both ethnographic and descriptive methods. Social network methods of analyzing this data seem promising, and innovative, for these types of data.3 Model and theory building require multiple studies over time and from differing aspects of the situation of interest. We present some aspects of this issue below as they may be played out in different research studies. Emergent Literacy and Intergenerational Literacy Practice The governor of Michigan recently announced that she was cutting state funding for adult education by 74% while increasing funding


for preschool literacy programs (Hoffman, 2003). This particular governor, as many others in the United States, is convinced that there will be a bigger payoff in terms of educational outcome if more money is devoted to the preschool years, particularly in the area of literacy. However, we believe that existing data suggest, and future research could confirm or disconfirm, an inextricable relationship between adult literacy instruction and early child literacy learning and achievement. We built a case in the preceding chapters for a close and integral tie between frequencies of reading and writing events by adults and the emergent literacy knowledge and subsequent early reading success in school of their children. We can portray this intergenerational cycle as in Figure 9.1. We concluded from the LPALS results that non- or low-literate adults who take part in adult literacy instruction that incorporates real-life, authentic, printed texts and purposes for reading and writing them will increase the number of reading and writing events in their lives and/or begin reading and writing new, more complex texts. Thus, we suggest that (a) adult literacy instruction and (b) adult literacy instruction that includes more authentic literacy activities will

Home Literacy Culture

Child School Success

Emergent Literacy

Figure 9.1 The home literacy culture/school literacy success cycle.


have a positive effect on children of adults who seek help for their reading and writing skills. We can portray this effect on the intergenerational literacy cycle as shown in Figure 9.2. Future research needs to examine this conclusion, heretofore based on aggregated research findings and logical inference, that funding for adult literacy education that includes authentic texts and purposes for reading and writing them for parents of young children will result in improved chances for school literacy achievement for those children. Furthermore, this research could also directly contrast the effects of particular types of adult literacy education on these childlevel results. This type of research would be operating within our expanded lens on print literacy development and could thus focus much more sharply on what we believe are significant aspects of cognitive and social practice relationships. Such research could also address the current dissatisfaction with existing family literacy programs, particularly in the United States. In 2002, the National Institute of Child Health and Development

Home Literacy Culture

Authentic Adult Literacy Instruction

New Home Literacy Practices

Child School Success

Emergent Literacy

Figure 9.2 The home literacy culture/school literacy success cycle as affected by authentic adult literacy instruction.


(NICHD) put out a call for research in response to the growing belief that the adult literacy components of family literacy programs were not increasing the literacy levels of adults to the degree that would justify the money being spent on them by federal and state governments. This particular call for proposals was directed at comparing outcomes between adult basic education models and family literacy ones.4 Similar concerns exist regarding the success of programs devoted exclusively to adult literacy efforts. Clearly, the model proposed here for print literacy development that calls for explicit attention to the literacy practices of the students suggests more research on the comparative outcome of instructional models for adults alone as well as on the effects of different models of instruction on intergenerational transmission of literacy values, beliefs, and practices.

Early Childhood Programs and Literacy The Michigan governor’s interest in early childhood education reflects a renewed national interest in the United States in programs for young children. Too many children, it is believed, begin kindergarten or first grade “not ready” to learn. What the term not ready to learn actually means is that many children from minority and marginalized communities have not developed the cognitive skills in reading, writing, and mathematics by the time they are age 5 or 6, to the same degree as that of many children from mainstream homes with more highly educated parents. Thus, the early reading/writing curriculum designed for the children of mainstream homes is not appropriate for them. Within the last decade, too, the educational demands of mainstream 5- and 6- year-olds have significantly increased, with entering kindergartners expected to know what, in decades past, entering first graders were. This makes the gap even greater between historically underachieving students at the beginning of formal instruction and those from the mainstream. Thus, what was a matter of concern earlier is now of even greater significance. This explains to a large degree why policymakers are turning once again to preschool programs for children from homes of poverty. Clinging still more desperately to the belief that the cognitive skill aspect of learning to read is of utmost and singular importance and is identical for all children, regardless of social literacy practice differences, officials are moving rapidly to put more emphasis on early reading skills in early childhood programs like Head Start. Histori-


cally, early childhood experts have resisted what they term academic content in programs for children as young as 2–3 and up to 5. Rather, they believed that young children of this age should more appropriately be focused on social skills, self-monitoring, large and small muscle development, and oral language. However, this battle is slowly being lost, and print is making its way, slowly but surely, into Head Start and other federally financed early childhood programs in the United States. We applaud efforts to bring print into these programs.5 However, we question the nature of the print activities to be integrated into traditional early childhood classrooms. Many print literacy curricula being suggested for young children seem to focus almost exclusively on one of two types of activities: (a) learning the letters of the alphabet and (b) phonemic awareness training (the pre-phonics skill so focused upon by cognitivist researchers).6 We suggest that, using our broadened focus lens, researchers and curriculum designers step back and look at how these two types of literacy activities fit with the socioculturally constructed literacy practices of the communities from which these young children come. Emergent literacy research has taught us that young children learn these skills, and others, by observing and participating in different print literacy practices that are considered important and integral to their own communities. Thus, children learn the letters of the alphabet in order to read and write specific local texts. Functional literacy purposes are absolutely apparent to the children and drive their print learning. We cannot assume that teaching letter and sound-level skills to young children in the absence of functional written language purposes will result in the same level of conceptual understanding about written language as when they are arrived at in the process of engaging in functional reading and writing events. This is itself a research study, or series of studies, that cries to be done. Aside from this particular type of study, we also would like to see this implication of our broadened lens applied to research on preschool literacy instruction. We would like to see an experimental study investigating the effectiveness of a written language curriculum for young children that is centered around the texts and functional purposes for literacy that exist in the communities of the children. This model could be contrasted with others that focus primarily on


the cognitive aspects of learning to read and write in ways that are decontextualized from the students’ world. A functional model of early literacy instruction would of course require actually learning what the texts, purposes, and practices of different communities of children are. This itself constitutes a program of descriptive research that is badly needed, given the many different sociocultural communities from which our school children come. These communities are becoming even more diverse in ways relevant to literacy practice, given the ongoing globalization of nations. Dyson makes a similar argument for early literacy instruction for the primary grades. Attempting to understand the task of appropriating literacy in school from specific children’s perspectives, Dyson (2003) describes children drawing on their accumulation of resources tied to their participation in the varied practices in their sociocultural communities. She calls for teachers to allow children to bring their different experiences and resources with them to school, to experiment and orchestrate among symbol systems as they sort out the written language puzzle. We call for more research such as Dyson’s with children from a variety of backgrounds and experiences to fill in our own landscapes of this process. In addition, we call for research on the long-term outcomes, as regards the development of reading and writing abilities among children who experience different types of beginning literacy instruction, including the type recommended by Dyson.

Other Languages as Local Texts Jacobson (2003) has recommended that schools and teachers also build on students’ at-home literacy experiences in languages other than those used in the classroom. As students are acquiring, building, and expanding their reading and writing abilities in school, they are increasingly bringing literacy experiences in multiple languages—languages that they may be using or choosing from in their lives outside of school. For example, researchers who studied Bangladeshi families in the United Kingdom found that mainstream schools ignored the non-English languages used by families for education in other schools (for example, community schools, Qur’anic schools). By doing so, the mainstream schools lost a potential resource for literacy instruction (Blackledge, 2000).


Jacobson argues that too often these languages are disparaged or dismissed as an impediment to learning literacy in the official language of the school. Even if the school does not offer instruction in those languages, he suggests, teachers could engage students in discussions of the ways they interact with print in different languages. By exploring along with students how they tend to use a given language for a certain type of text, they could identify what types of texts the students would be most motivated to study in the language of schooling. Teachers could also identify skills that students have in other languages that could be built upon in school. Rather than narrowing the range of languages that are acceptable for literacy instruction, we suggest that schools take a more expansive view, including promoting biliteracy. As for the previous suggestions for print literacy instruction, we believe that including biliteracy dimensions should also be the focus of research. Experimental research could reveal whether or not approaching English print literacy learning by using students’ literacy experiences in other languages would show an improvement in the print literacy development of multilingual students. We do not imagine that this research could be adequately addressed with one study, however. As for previously discussed research, we would suggest first a program of descriptive research to uncover the many different ways that different groups of students move between and among languages and texts before designing experimental or quasiexperimental studies to assess the impact of the instructional approach on development (Luke, 2003).

Local Texts as Stepping Stones Recently, a number of descriptive studies and ethnographies have been published describing the ways that popular culture, including local print texts, have been used in the classrooms of disaffected adolescents. Most of these efforts attempt to bridge the sociocultural communities of urban African-American students and traditional school cultures in the United States (Baker, 1993; Lee, 1993; Mahiri, 1998; Powell, 1991). Ernest Morrell and Jeff Duncan-Andrade describe a unit they designed for African-American high school seniors utilizing Hip-Hop music with canonical English poetry (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). Their goal was to engage their students in critical reading of


Hip-Hop on its own as well as to provide a bridge to critical reading of poetry from other periods that is part of the academic canon. They believed that utilizing their students’ involvement with Hip-Hop culture would scaffold the critical and analytical skills they already had to the canonical literature they needed to succeed academically. They concluded that they had been successful in meeting their goals and that the “students were able to generate some excellent interpretations as well as make interesting linkages between the canonical poems and the rap texts” (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002, p. 91). Clearly, our lens suggests that much more work needs to be done along these lines. Research must move beyond descriptive accounts of single instances of such instructional efforts to (a) aggregating, synthesizing, and interpreting descriptive accounts over time and place; (b) detailing specific literacy achievements and development that occur in the context of such instruction; and (c) testing different models of instruction within differing sociocultural communities to examine academic outcomes for students. The effort involved in reaching across cultural borders for relevant pedagogies is worthwhile. Moreover, it is required before we can begin to think that our schools are for and of every learner.

A Cautionary Note Our insistence on placing print literacy development within the social practices of literacy should not be regarded as a deterministic stance that could “ghettoize” those whose community literacy practices do not reflect mainstream practices of power (Delpit, 1986, 1988). We object to research that reifies theoretical connections between literacy practice and identity or community membership. As we noted above, neither identities nor literacy practices are fixed, and their shapes and meanings exist in response to changing environments. Thus, the suggestion is not simply to celebrate “diversity” as an end in itself, focusing on a limited number of identified local literacy practices and leaving students without a chance to learn new types of literacy skills, or to gain insight into other types of literacy practices. Rather, we view literacy development as a process that is controlled by the learner. As our informants in the LPALS study revealed, and as Barton and Hamilton demonstrated in Local Literacies, people acquire knowledge of different genres of print as they encounter the need or opportunity to use them in their lives. In this way, the de-


velopment of print literacy continues as long as a person continues to find new purposes, contexts, and genres for reading and/or writing. The key here, we suggest, is that the developmental process is driven by purposes and practices of print literacy, not the other way around. We need more research into the ways in which people learn to read and write new genres in their lives. What strategies does the housekeeper use to learn to read and write genres of the business world when he decides to enter the commercial sector and start his own small business? What strategies does the engineer use to learn to comprehend and compose written genres central to the medical field when she decides to become a doctor and enters medical school? Are there stages to this process? Are there instructional strategies that can ease this process or ensure its success? How much is this learning tied to and integral to actual participation in the social practice and social communities of the new written genres, as suggested by Gee (1992)? Answers to these questions and others will provide critical insights for formal educational programs—for K–12 as well as for higher education and adult literacy programs.

Power, Social Reproduction, and a Broadened Lens We end with a final thought about issues of power and literacy practice. We have not dealt much with these issues in this book but have always assumed them as a backdrop to our discussion. However, we suggest here that pedagogy that includes a broader view of culture and literacy practice may result in a way out of the double bind described by Pierre Bourdieu: Because formal institutions of education are constructed and run by those in power, it is not possible to conduct pedagogy officially without “symbolic violence” on those who must participate in that education who are not of the “ruling class” (Bourdieu & Passerson, 1977; Bourdieu, 1991). Bourdieu’s concept of the social reproductive role of education resonates with many educational theorists. Certainly, data continues to support it. However, many of us are unhappy with this seemingly dead-end street. Yes, we say, educational inequities and disparities in achievement do seem to be the inevitable result of the role of power in education and within that in literacy education. But we do not want to end there as so many seem to do—crying in the wilderness, so to speak. Although Snow correctly asserts that including a rec-


ommendation to “end poverty” (see Chapter 6) in a report will not ensure the end of economic exploitation and oppression, this statement does not go without saying. One goal of teaching and of research into teaching is to explore how best to help students live and thrive within current socioeconomic conditions. Research concerned with these issues should move from detailed descriptions of what is actually happening to descriptions of the most effective ways of changing conditions. This entails both political clarity and a commitment to rigorous analyses of methods of instruction. If, as we propose, cognitive skill development in print literacy is enabled by contextualizing it within local sociocultural literacy practice, and if pedagogy takes this seriously for all learners, then perhaps the role of power will be made visible to those who currently ignore, or deny, it. At the same time, learners who already understand how current power relations are working against them can be helped with contextualized support to learn the print literacy genres that will help them in their struggles. Furthermore, if all learners’ cultures and contexts are recognized as legitimate and incorporated into literacy education, the role of power in language education may be mitigated. The acceptance of languages, dialects, texts, and literacy practices from all learners to support print literacy acquisition and development would seem to move us forward, at any rate, and move us away from, rather than toward, a strong instantiation of social reproduction and the symbolic violence we inevitably commit in our educational institutions.

Literacy for Life We close with a montage of voices from the participants in the Literacy Practices of Adult Learners Study—those previously unsuccessful learners who attested to the power of learning the skills of reading and writing print within socially constructed—authentic— literacy acts in school. For these learners, their skills translated quickly into literacy practices, replete and awash with values, beliefs, and sociocultural meanings, intentions, and outcomes. How did their lives change as a result of their literacy instruction? They reply: I feel free . . . I go to the doctor . . . now I drive . . . I do my own things . . . I go to the store and I don’t have to walk all over. I know how to look up there and find what I’m looking for . . . Pick up the Bible now, and I read and I get excited, about what God is doing . . . I can teach

Signs and Symbols 䡠 173 Sunday school now . . . I can teach Bible school . . . I go places now, I don’t have to worry about how to get there. Praise God I can go at night now . . . The more I read, the more my mind opens up to a lot of different, a variety of stuff . . . I don’t need people to help me . . . I’m able to read a bulletin . . . Grocery lists . . . Filling out applications . . . Reading, like, all these letters that I’ve been getting for child support, I’m reading them, you know . . . I read magazines now . . . I can read my own letters. I have my personal life now . . . read books to my children . . . I read English . . . letters from the children’s school . . . Write a check . . . the food can . . . the recipe . . . I handle my own finances now . . . calendars, appointment books . . . the newspaper . . . I can go to a lunch counter and look on the bulletin board and read it . . . read the driver’s book . . . this story I read was about behind the iron curtain. And I wanted to know what was behind the iron curtain so I kept on with the book. I read the book and I read the book so I learned . . . spell names, and that is very important when you see a person, or you see a name that you need to know what it’s all about, know that person’s name . . . my Bible, and I can read a scripture . . . newspaper and pick out different coupons . . . different things to do for the best buy where you get the best bargain at, and the best place to go to get it . . . look at the panelling section . . . Look in the appliance section . . . I look down the aisle until I see where it says paint . . . my wife’s letters and things . . . Go to the automobile place and I can read . . . the optometrist say, “You can read that?” I say, yeah I can read that . . . write my own little poems . . . a prayer journal . . . fill out my checkbook . . . pay bills . . . vote . . . write stories . . . write down facts . . . novels . . . If I need more details, an encyclopedia . . . Basically look in a phone book . . . if I know the name of the place I can look in the business section and find the phone number if they supplied it to the phone company . . . I read about the brain and mind, it’s a book, and you have more axons nerve endings and things like that that the brain is open to and acceptable to learning when you are a baby . . . books about parent tips . . . fundamentals of nursing . . . scuba diving . . . I’m learning sign language on my own . . . book about how to do rear shocks—how to do mufflers and brakes and stuff . . . Today I can see the news, I can see newspaper, I can go to market. I can go to the bank. I can go to anywhere!

We close with the hope that these transformations and possibilities can exist for everyone. Literacy skill develops across school and community borders, weaving in and out, beginning and ending in the socioculturally constructed lives of people.

Notes

2. The LPALS Study 1. For complete descriptions of the LPALS study, analyses, and results, see Purcell-Gates et al. (2000 & 2002). 2. See the following for theoretical and empirical arguments for the dimensions of real-life literacy and dialogic teacher–student relationships in adult education: Brizius & Foster (1987); NCAL (1995); Fingeret (1991); Freire (1993, 1997); Glen (1996); Purcell-Gates & Waterman (2000); U.S. Congress, Office of Technological Assistance (1993); Nwakeze & Seiler (1993); Auerbach (1995); Lytle (1994); Reder (1994); Sticht (1988); Freire & Macedo (1995); Auerbach (1996); Barndt (1993); Shor (1987). 3. Readers will find more complete descriptions of the procedures for this study than is provided here in the following reports: U.S. Adult Literacy Program Practice: A Typology Across Dimensions of Life Contextualized/Decontextualized and Dialogic/Monologic, NCSALL Reports #2. Cambridge, Massachusetts: the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Adult Literacy Instruction: Degrees of Authenticity and Collaboration as Described by Practitioners. (2001). Journal of Literacy Research. 4. This analysis is not included in previously published accounts. Thus, we provide more detail regarding it. 5. Effect size for literacy level at start of class was .379; effect size for degree of authenticity was .345. This last effect size differs from that reported in Purcell-Gates, Degener, Jacobson, & Soler (2000, 2002). This is due to a recalculation of the results to account for multiple levels of data. 6. We found no relationship between the degree of collaborativeness between

176 䡠 Notes to Pages 23–39 students and teachers. A post hoc analysis led us to conclude that we did not have enough power (not enough sites) to find a relationship if one does exist. However, degree of collaboration was highly correlated with degree of authenticity: r ⫽ 4.71.

3. How Does Print Literacy Develop? 1. Strictly speaking, we cannot accurately account for the results in a causal way because this study was not designed as an experimental one. However, because we controlled for all other influencing factors identified in the data, and we came close to random selection of teachers (most of the surveys and subsequent solicitations to participate were sent to randomly selected programs), we do conclude tentative causality based on the logic of causalcomparative research (Hittleman & Simeon, 1997). 2. Purcell-Gates teaches in clinical and tutoring settings; Jacobson teaches adult classes to second-language learners, whereas Degener taught elementary school students (and their parents in a school-based family literacy program) for six years. 3. The discipline of literacy studies has emerged to encompass this focus on literacy as situated social practice. See the works of scholars such as Scribner & Cole (1981), Street (1984), Barton & Hamilton (1998), Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanicˇ (2000), Besnier (1995), and Gee (1996). 4. See Street (1984), Barton (1994), Gee (1992), and Dyson (2003). 5. Chall (1983), Moats (1998). 6. See Cole & Scribner (1974), Scribner & Cole (1981), Tobach, Falmagne, Parlee, Martin, & Kapelman (1997).

4. Literacy as Social Practice 1. There has been a long-standing debate about whether Volosinov was Bakhtin writing under another name, or whether he was a member of Bakhtin’s writing and research group. For our concerns this is not important. 2. See Kalmar (2001) for a detailed description of Mexican immigrants working together to create their own method for transcribing English. Looking at the negotiation of phoneme–grapheme pairs points to the thoroughly social nature of language. 3. See Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanicˇ, eds. (2000) for an account of this work. 4. Lewis (2001). Awarded the Ed Fry Book Award, 2002, by the National Reading Conference. 5. See Gee (1992) for his argument that cognition and meaning are socially constructed within ideological and political cultural contexts. 6. We also were looking for the impact of the degree of collaboration between the students and the teachers in adult literacy classes on literacy practice

Notes to Pages 41–45 䡠 177 change. However, the analysis could find no effect for this variable. See Purcell-Gates et al. (2000) for details of the design, analysis, and results.

5. Print Literacy as Cognitive Skill Development 1. Many cognitive psychologists in literacy do not focus on development per se. We have selected this aspect of cognitive literacy work because of our interest in print literacy development and in ways that the cognitive and social practice camps can be brought together to give us a broadened lens on print literacy development. We in no way wish to provide a thorough and exhaustive critique of cognitive and social practice epistemologies. That is not the purpose of this book. 2. See James (1890). 3. See Watson (1930) and Skinner (1953) for theory and research examples within the Behaviorist paradigm. 4. FMRI refers to functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is a form of brain scanning that gives researchers a look at brain structure and shows where brain activity is occurring while certain mental events, as in reading a word or memorizing a list, are occurring. This method has been used, in particular, to observe children with language deficits and reading disabilities. For more information, refer to Shaywitz & Shaywitz (2001); Bruck, M. (1992); Shaywitz, Pugh et al. (2000). 5. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000). The NRP report is the final report of a panel of reading researchers, educators, and policymakers, formed to assess the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of various approaches to reading instruction. The NRP report has influenced federal legislation, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 200l (U.S. Department of Education, 2002), which seeks, among other things, to influence reading instruction throughout the country by providing Title I funds only to those schools that use methodologies and instructional strategies that have been proven effective by scientific research such as that detailed in the report. Criteria for inclusion in the research review included: (a) study published in a refereed journal; (b) study focused on reading development in preschool–twelfth grade; and (c) study used an experimental or quasi-experimental design, with a control group or multiple-baseline method. The following five areas were found to be critical for effective instruction in reading: (a) phonemic awareness; (b) phonics; (c) fluency; (d) vocabulary; and (e) text comprehension. 6. In the 1980s, Chall began research on adult literacy learners and modified her stages to apply to adult literacy development as well (1991). She noted that adult learners have different strengths and needs that make their literacy development different from those of children. For example, adult learners have more advanced oral vocabularies than children. John Strucker (1997)

178 䡠 Notes to Pages 45–72

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

has used Chall’s research on reading development in his own work with adult literacy students, finding that many of the adult learners he studies have problems in Chall’s earlier stages (decoding or word analysis), which reflect the difficulties they had learning to read as children. See also Collins & Gentner (1980). Snow, Burns, & Griffin (1998). Wood (1994). At this stage, reading comprehension is not emphasized, though neither is it ignored. According to those who follow a cognitive approach to learning to read, becoming adept at decoding allows a reader to pay less attention to letters and words and more attention to constructing meaning from the text. Until this happens, the focus should be on word study and analysis. Comprehension can be worked on through stories that are read aloud to children. We understand that as learners get on with literacy as it is presented and valued in academic settings, the cognitive focus on skills becomes less evident and the influence of “the academy” and the valuing of academic learning grows. Thus, we are intentionally less explicit and concrete in our application of instructional content to the cognitive perspective as we move further and further from the beginning stages of print literacy development where the cognitive perspective is so apparent. The National Reading Research Center was co-directed by Donna E. Alvermann at the University of Georgia and John Guthrie at the University of Maryland. Funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement, it existed from March 1992 to February 1997.

6. The Seeming Incommensurability of the Social and the Cognitive 1. See Goody & Watt (1968). 2. Gee, August 26, 2001, at Crossing Borders Conference, Baltimore, Maryland. 3. See Kaestle et al. (1991) for an historical discussion of the role of instruction in the spread of literacy across the nations of the world. 4. For example, Dewey (1900, 1914, 1938). 5. See Laqueur (1976). 6. See Abrams (1953); Peckam (1970). 7. By the term New Literacy, Willinsky was referring to instructional approaches to literacy such as Whole Language in the United States, the National Writing Project in the United States, the New Hampshire School of Writing, and the Language for Life/London School movement in the United Kingdom. 8. The public rhetoric of crisis is apparent on an almost weekly basis in the media. We are told that there is a literacy crisis in this country and that

Notes to Pages 73–81 䡠 179

9.

10. 11.

12.

school children are failing to learn to read and write at levels needed to participate in the new economy, in the new information age. The American public is reminded daily of the importance of learning to read and write. This same concern and rhetoric is heard in other nations as well. Wealthier nations echo the clamor heard in the United States: literacy levels are too low; children are not learning enough or fast enough; economies are as a result suffering; new and tougher standards for teachers and students are needed. Economically underdeveloped countries, on the other hand, are still struggling with the fact that access to schooling, and thus to literacy, is limited. The United Nations and the World Bank are operating countless programs to try to raise global literacy with mixed and, for the most part, unimpressive results. The U.S. government drives much of this rhetoric, relentlessly issuing reports and then initiatives designed to improve the literacy levels of children and of adults. Instructional programs are drafted and enacted (for example, Reading First, www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/readingfirst/ index.html; Teacher Advancement Program, www.mff.org/tap/tap.taf; NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment in Reading and Writing, nces.ed .gov/nationsreportcard); assessment schedules are issued along with new and improved tests; states are held to new and rigorous standards; teacher education is assailed, and money is made available to improve it. In the United States, this applies to public school students. Private schools are, by and large, exempt from these requirements. The same type of action is either in place or being contemplated in countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. No Child Left Behind (United States); the National Literacy Strategy (United Kingdom). Note that by literacy practice, as this term was just used, we do not mean practice in the sense of practicing skills. Certainly, cognitivists and skills practitioners agree that families that encourage a positive attitude toward schooling and its demands contribute to the academic success of their children. Similarly, from the cognitivist perspective, language development, including reading-related activity, in the home produces “ready to learn” children who will succeed in school. For example, it would be inappropriate (and flawed in reasoning) to begin to think of different literacy practices in a hierarchy, assign “blame” for people’s participation in “lower” or more common practices (for example, reading street signs and other environmental print) to less effective literacy instruction, and credit people’s participation in “higher” literacy practices (for example, high academic literacy) to effective and good literacy instruction.

7. Print Literacy Development through a Widened Lens 1. Paper entitled The Sociocultural Context of the Cognitive: Transactions and Connections, delivered at the 1999 Annual Meetings of American Educa-


2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

tional Research Association and Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Montreal, Canada. Portions of the following discussion are based on this paper. We grant the positivist, modernist slant to the epistemological presuppositions of this statement. As Street explains, “The ideological model . . . does not attempt to deny technical skill or the cognitive aspects of reading and writing, but rather understands them as they are encapsulated within cultural wholes and within structures of power” (2001, p. 161). Macedo and Bartolome´ (1999) make a similar point in calling for both “political clarity” and “competence in methods” on the part of teachers. Striving for political clarity does not necessarily imply a willful ignorance of issues such as technical skills. Conversely, striving for methodological clarity does not imply political clarity (or lack of it). Gee (2000) writes, “Work in the New Literacy Studies hardly denies the importance of development. However, it views ‘skills’ as ways of participating in culturally, historically, and institutionally situated social practices, not just as internal cognitive states manifested in behavior” (p. 126). See Freire (1993) for his description of this belief that students “receive” knowledge from teachers as a “banking” model of education. Confirmed by work such as Perfetti, Goldman, & Hogaboam (1979) and Stanovich, West, & Feeman (1981). See R. Anderson & Pearson, 1984 for a list of research studies focused on schema theory and reading. Researchers in other disciplines are also trying to develop models that successfully account for both the cognitive and the social. For example, Zerubavel (1999) writes from the perspective of cognitive sociology, and Strauss and Quinn (1999) and others examine cognitive anthropology. In Zerubavel’s case, schema theory is used as a frame for the analysis of mind in society, while Strauss and Quinn modify a connectionist model to examine cultural meaning. See also D’Andrade & Strauss (1995). Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) groundbreaking ethnography of literacy practice in three different communities forms the essential basis on which this proposition is based. We also are relying on the accumulated knowledge of subsequent studies of literacy in the community such as Barton & Hamilton (1998). Our thanks to Kristen Perry who provided this portrait of a literacy world based on her experiences in Lesotho as a Peace Corps worker. Engels (1975). Barton’s (1994) ecological model for literacy is useful here. Building on the biological construct of ecology, he asks us to consider the ecology of written language: “An ecological approach takes as its starting-point this interaction between individuals and their environments . . . When applied to human activity . . . the idea of ecology has often been used to situate psychological activity, placing it in a more complete and dynamic social context where

Notes to Pages 95–97 䡠 181 different aspects interact . . . Ecology seems to be a useful and appropriate way of talking about literacy at the moment, and of bringing together its different strands. Using the term changes the whole endeavour of trying to understand the nature of reading and writing. Rather than isolating literacy activities from everything else in order to understand them, an ecological approach aims to understand how literacy is embedded in other human activity, its embeddedness in social life and in thought and its position in history, language and learning . . . An ecological approach (to studying literacy) is one that examines the social and mental embeddedness of human activities in a way which allows change” (31–32). 12. It is also true that a dominant literacy may impact a local community even if the dominant literacy is not practiced, and therefore not “functional” in a sense. Even from afar, the Spanish-language literacy of conquistadors certainly helped define the Spanish colonial context, as did English literacy in the history of Native American oppression and genocide. 13. Bakhtin (1981). One can think of local literacies as always translocal, at least in part, for they do not exist in discrete forms or in isolation. A local literacy consists of one attempt to set meaning and value for a group of practices (many of which may be shared with a contrasting group of practices). It is therefore part of an ongoing struggle over meaning and the value of a certain form of literacy. An individual may engage in the same literacy event that takes on new meaning as part of different literacy practices, and these meanings coexist. Consider the “tagging” of a wall with graffiti. It is simultaneously accepted and rejected by different communities. Bakhtin writes: “All socially significant worldviews have the capacity to exploit the intentional possibilities of language through the medium of their specific concrete instancing. Various tendencies (artistic and otherwise), circles, journals, particular newspapers, even particular significant artistic works are capable of stratifying language in proportion to their social significance.” (1981, 290). Thus, “graffiti” is seen as “vandalism,” but this is not an objective assessment. Print literacy activity, as language in use, exists in this setting where its meaning and value are open to interpretation. Bakhtin highlights the “primacy of context over text.” He suggests: “At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and time will have a meaning different than it would under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve” (1981, 294). This means that “The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents” (276). At the moment of its utterance, “The word in language is half-someone else’s” (293). 14. Named after New London, Connecticut, to reflect the initial meeting place


15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

in 1994 of a group of influential and innovative language educators who began the development of new theories of language and literacy. This group includes Courtney Cazden (United States), Bill Cope (Australia), Norman Fairclough (Great Britain), James Gee (United States), Mary Kalantzis (Australia), Gunther Kress (Great Britain), Allan Luke (Australia), Carmen Luke (Australia), Sarah Michaels (United States), Martin Nakata (Australia), and Joseph Lo Bianco (Australia). Much of the following section is derived from a chapter by Purcell-Gates that appears in the Family Literacy Handbook, edited by B. Wasik (2003). The reader is referred to this chapter for a full discussion of why emergent literacy research should be primarily focused on the development of written rather than oral language knowledge. See Purcell-Gates (1988) for details of this study. See also Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, & Freppon (1995) for the results of a meta-analysis of studies using the pretend-to-read task that describes a learning trajectory from being read to, either at home or at school, and acquisition of written-narrative language register. See Purcell-Gates (1991) for an analysis of the ability of primary grade children to recontextualize oral language into written narrative language through lexical choice and syntax. Other studies that have examined the genre learning of young children include Bissex (1980); Cambourne & Brown (1987); Chapman (1994); Christie (1984); Kamberelis (1993); and Kroll (1991). See Duke (July 1996) for a thorough review of genre and genre learning by young children. See Purcell-Gates (1988) for details of the procedures for this study. See Purcell-Gates (1988, 1991, 1992) for a complete picture of the analysis of this data set. This is certainly not just our thesis. See Barton & Hamilton (1998); Street (1995); and the work of many genre theorists—for example, Halliday (1978); Reid (1987). Indeed, this seems to be one of the most common recommendations coming from social practice perspectives. See the theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation within Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Readers should note that we are imposing this construct of communities of practice in our review and (re)interpretation of the research on print learning. Those researchers we are citing did not use this term because, for the most part, the theory of social, situated learning was not yet developed or known to them when they conducted the cited research. The exception is the research of Anne Haas Dyson. See Clay (1991) for a thorough presentation and compilation of her work in this area. This research was carried out with Spanish-speaking children in Argentina and Mexico. It has been duplicated with English-speaking children.

Notes to Pages 125–130 䡠 183 27. See Snow, Burns, & Griffin (1998) for a thorough review of the research on beginning reading. 28. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (NIH Publication No. 00–4769), Washington, DC, U.S.: Government Printing Office, 2002. 29. For accounts of such varied learning contexts see, for example, Barndt (1993), Purcell-Gates & Waterman (2000), Purcell-Gates, Degener, & Jacobson (2001), Scribner & Cole (1981), and Street (1984).

8. The Course of Print Literacy Development in and out of School 1. In some cases, however, use of a script may be limited to certain classes of people, and in this way, the script becomes associated with the literacy practices of the group in question. In ancient Egypt, for example, only the clerical class was allowed to use the Theocratic script (Coulmas, 1994), and in the European Middle Ages, it was the clerics who used Latin. Limitations on script use can also be connected to text type. For example, in Japan’s Heian period, women were limited to using the Japanese language and its written form, kana. Men spoke and wrote Chinese, which was the prestigious language. Given the limited number of kana texts, Japanese women began to write novels for their own enjoyment. In fact, women’s writing in this period played a leading role in “the remarkable growth of indigenous Japanese literature” (Gaur, 1992, p. 161). As another example, it has been reported that the Tuareg of North Africa “have known writing for a long time, but have used it for little else but love letters, charms and occasional poems” (Friedrich, 1966, 94ff; cited by Coulmas, 1994). 2. By this example we do not mean to imply that some words do not have ambiguous meanings, nor that words that are spelled the same but have different meanings will always be decoded with equal ease. 3. For this analysis, skills-based instruction was defined as: “literacy instruction (that) consisted of traditional kindergarten readiness programs and firstgrade basal reading programs. Teachers followed the scope and sequence of the basal program and each teacher can be characterized as holding a conventional view (Knapp & Shields, 1990) of learning and teaching. The instructional emphasis was on the sequential mastery of discrete skills ordered from the basics to higher order skills, and there was a high degree of teacherdirected instruction” (Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, & Freppon, 1995, p. 664). 4. For the LPALS study, we wished to include an exhaustive list of text types that people may read or write in the course of living their lives. We began with those text types uncovered through participant observation in the 20Home Study. We then piloted that list with middle-class families to see if other texts emerged that may have been missing from the 20 low-SES fam-


5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

ilies’ practices. As a result of that pilot, we added a few more text types. Furthermore, as the nationwide LPALS study proceeded, all texts mentioned by the participants that were not on our original list were added. There were only a few of these, such as the dictionary—reflective to a great degree of the involvement in school for the LPALS participants. See Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, for example. Ibid. An exception to this lack of data comes from the Purcell-Gates & Duke (1999) study where the initial scores of second and third graders on reading comprehension and writing of informational and procedural texts were positively correlated with parental education. Authentic texts were defined as texts used outside of school by people reading and writing in the world. These texts were contrasted, for our purposes, with school-only texts which are texts written and read as part of learning to read and write. Thus, authentic texts included such texts as signs, coupons, newspapers, magazines, novels, information books, forms, leases, bibles, and song lyrics. School-only texts included such texts as worksheets, comprehension questions following a short story, literacy tests, and spelling lists. Authentic purposes for reading and writing were operationalized as reflecting at least one of Halliday’s (1975, 1976) seven functions of language. These were contrasted with school-only purposes for reading and writing which were to participate in instruction or literacy assessment—to learn to read and write. School-only purposes included such purposes as reading to answer comprehension questions, reading to find all of the past tense verb markings, writing to demonstrate learning, writing as part of a spelling test, and so on. Of the 77 classes in the final analysis, 3 were coded as Highly Authentic, 21 as Somewhat Authentic, 40 as Somewhat School-Only, and 13 as Highly School-Only. Length of attendance was figured by computing the days between the student’s start date and the administration of the first questionnaire and the number of days the class met per week. Although the statistical analysis showed that this effect was independent of the types of instruction we were examining—authentic/school-only—it may very well have been the case that students who were more satisfied, or happy with their classes, stayed in them longer. However, our design, data, and analysis were not able to explore this hypothesis. Literacy researchers have studied instructional innovations such as writing and reading workshop, Book Clubs, and literature-based reading instruction for some years now. However, this research has been primarily descriptive, which does not detract from its value but also does not materially advance the thesis of this book. Therefore, our discussion will focus primarily on documented outcomes of instructional strategies that reflect more out-ofschool literacy practices than school skills-based practices. This effect size differs from that reported in Purcell-Gates, Degener, Ja-

Notes to Pages 150–167 䡠 185

13.

14. 15.

16.

cobson, & Soler (2000, 2002). This is due to a recalculation of the results to account for multiple levels of data. When these data were collected, we went to considerable trouble to ensure that new literacy practices reported by the students did not reflect simply assignments from their teachers. Thus, these new practices should be interpreted as texts that the students read or wrote for purposes of their own, excluding such activities as school work or homework. From Lansing State Journal (February 4, 2001), p. 1. Reading to young children, though often described as a universally accepted “best practice,” has to be understood as a literacy practice that is more common in some communities than in others. That there is variation in how communities read to their children is important to keep in mind. No statistical difference was revealed between the oral language samples of the well-read-to children and the low-SES children. However, the differences between the written language, pretend read samples of the well-read-to and the low-SES children from both studies were significantly different.

9. Signs and Symbols 1. See Cope & Kalantzis’s (2000) edited volume on multiliteracies for a theoretical argument for, and description of, a new pedagogy for multiliteracies. In this volume, the authors argue for a pedagogy that includes (a) situated learning; (b) overt instruction; (c) critical framing; and (d) transformed practice. Larry’s riff seems to us to capture an account of these practices and outcomes. 2. Mainstream children experience difficulties learning to read and write for several reasons, including ill health, interrupted schooling, poor teaching, and neurologically related processing differences that require targeted instruction beyond the expertise of most teachers. Although issues of class and language may transact with these factors, they do not function as the primary variable in low literacy achievement for mainstream children. Rather, class and language largely mitigate these factors. 3. See Wasserman & Faust (1994) for examples of social network analytic methods. 4. RFA #02–004, NICHD. 5. After all, a great deal of research has documented the degree to which print use and learning about written language saturates the lives of children from middle-class, highly parent-educated homes. Why child development advocates would fight to exclude low-income children from these experiences is beyond understanding. 6. Head Start teachers are also encouraged to increase the amount of time they read to their students. This, however, is not thought of as focusing exclusively on print skills but rather on language skills and on the affective nature of reading.

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Index

Academic literacy, 66 Academic vs. non-academic literacy practices, 126 Activity theory, 83 Actualized literacy instruction, 40, 74 Adult literacy programs: authentic vs. school-only, 15–16; collaborative vs. teacher-directed, 16–17; potential effects for children, 164–165; proposed funding cuts, 163–165 Adult literacy students: self-blame and, 4; understanding of school failure, 1 Advanced reading skills, 60–61 Anyon, Jean, 119 Associative stage of learning, 42–43, 150 Authentic: debate about meaning and implications of, 142, instruction; 13, 22; texts, 13, 138, 184n8; vs. school-only, 140–143 Authenticity, 1; definition of, 140; impact on literacy practice change, 39; in adult literacy instruction, 12; research on, 139–140, 151–154 Automaticity, 54–55 Autonomous approach to literacy, 64 Autonomous stage of learning, 43, 150 Bakhtin, M. M., 29–30, 97, 181n13 Bartolome´, Lilia, 65

Barton, David, 31–32, 33–34, 64, 84 Bear, D. R., 46–47 Behavioral psychology, 41 Bourdieu, Pierre, 171 Brandt, Deborah, 35, 62, 65 Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write, The (Dyson), 34–35 Burke, Carolyn, 105 Burns, W. S., 134 Chafe, Wallace, 100–102, 150 Chall, Jeanne, stages of reading development, 44, 48–50, 51–53, 54–55, 56–60, 60–61, 134 Chomsky, Noam, 42 Class status, textual practices and, 136– 137 Clay, Marie, 36, 122–123 Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on literacy: debate, 67–72; disconnect between, 82–83; polarization of, 72; reconnecting, 72–73; relationship between, 81–82, 88, 133; research supporting relationship between, 137 Cognitive perspective on literacy development, 23, 28, 41–62; developmental milestones, 43; limitations of, 73–74; skill learning, 130– 132; social context and, 43

204 䡠 Index Cognitive processes and textual forms, 99 Cognitive psychology, 41 Cognitive research: acquisition trajectory, 45; early literacy development, 122; inclusion of social forces, 62 Cole, Michael, 28, 64 Collaborative instruction, 12, 13 Communities of literacy practice, 120, 182n24 Concepts of print, 49, 122–123 Concepts of print assessment, 36 Cultural capital, 136 Danielewicz, Jane, 102, 150 Debate between James Gee and Catherine Snow, 67–69 Dominant literacy, 95, 97, 181n12 Dyson, Anne Haas, 34–35, 86, 121, 168 Early childhood programs, literacy instruction in, 166–168 Educational reform, 162–163 Ehri, Linnea: phases of reading development, 44–45, 48–50, 51–53, 54– 55 Emergent literacy, 71; research in, 36–38, 120, 155–156 Emergent reading stage, 47 Engagement, 61–62 Experimental research in reading, 45 Fairclough, Norman, 76–77 Ferreiro, Emilia, 123 Flower, Linda, 45 FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 42, 177n4 Functional literacy, 94–95 Gee, James, 35, 67–69, 78, 171; on cognition, 66 Genre theory, 105 Graff, Harvey, 64 Griffin, P., 134 Guthrie, John, 61–62 Halliday, M. A. K.: functions of language, 95–97, 141; genre theory and, 105; language as social semiotic, 95 Hamilton, Mary, 31–32, 33–34, 64, 84 Harste, Jerome, 105

Heath, Shirley Brice, 76 Hegemony, in cognitive approach to literacy, 66 High-stakes assessments, negative effects of, 73–74 Home literacy practices, relationship to reading achievement, 132, 134–135 Hruby, G. G., 35 Hull, Glynda, 76 Ideological approach to literacy, 31, 64, 180n3 Information processing theory, 42 Instructional methods: importance of, 69; problems with, 65–66 Intentionality of print, 37, 130, 131 Intergenerational literacy development, 151, 164–165 Introspection, 41 Invented spelling, 121 Jacobson, Erik, 168–169 Kapitske, C., 34 Kress, Gunther, 97 Lave, Jean, 83, 104, 109 Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), 83, 109 Lewis, Cynthia, 35, 65 Literacy: as contextualized, 34, 63; as ideological, 31; as political, 67; as socially situated, 29–30; contexts for, 26; definition of, 26; ideological approach to, 31, 64; time and, 34 Literacy as cognitive skill development perspective. See Cognitive perspective on literacy development Literacy as social practice perspective. See Social practice perspective on literacy Literacy development of children, 88; examples of, 89–94 Literacy events, 32–33, 37 Literacy in American Lives (Brandt), 35 Literacy instruction: authentic, 13; cognitive perspective on, 47; collaborative, 13; comprehension strategies, 57–58; decoding skills, 126; desired outcome of, 74–75; effective, proposed research on, 161–172; focus

Index 䡠 205 on academic literacy, 66, 126; formal, 124; local text use in, 169–170; out-ofschool learning and, 128; sound/symbol correspondence, 125 Literacy learners, expectations of schooling, 24–25 Literacy Myth, The (Graff), 64 Literacy practice, 26; definitions of, 33 Literacy practices: changes in, 12, 20–22; in-school and out-of-school, 75; power and, 31; sociocultural perspective on, 32 Literacy Practices as Social Acts: Power, Status and Cultural Norms in the Classroom (Lewis), 35–36 Literacy Research Group at Lancaster University, 31, 34 Literacy skill, 26 Local literacies, 66, 94–95 Local Literacies (Barton and Hamilton), 33–34, 170 LPALS (Literacy Practices of Adult Learners Study): criteria for participating, 18–19; data analysis, 20– 22, 138, 149–150; data collection, 19– 20, 39; emergent literacy research and, 36; purpose for, 12; research implications of, 161–172; results, 137– 139, 142–145, 154; social practice perspective as context for, 36 LPALS participants, 2, 10; histories of, 2– 4; perspective on literacy practice changes, 20–22; school failure of, 4–6; Spanish speaking, 19; support and motivation for, 6–10 Luria, Alexander, 86 Macedo, Donaldo, 65 McIntyre, Ellen, 86 “methods fetish,” 65 Motivation, reader, 61–62 Multiliteracies, 77 Multiple literacies, 31, 94 National Reading Panel report, 44, 177n5 National Reading Research Center, 61–62, 178n12 National Research Council report, 128 New Literacy, 178n7; characteristics, 70; criticism of, 72, 76; instruction, lack of

research supporting, 71–72; scholars, 29, 31 New Literacy Studies, 67–68 New London Group, 97–98, 181–182n14 Oral language: development, 48–49; different from written language, 99–102; phonological awareness and, 49; pragmatic constraints, 104; reference use in, 103–104; syntax and, 103 Palmer, Stephen, 85 Pappas, Christine, 106, 134 Parental education: correlation with family income, 135–136; relationship to literacy achievement, 136 Phoneme/grapheme correspondence, 43 Phonological relationships, children’s understanding of, 121 Power and education, 171 Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, and Griffin), 67– 68, 128 Print as code, 43–44 Print literacy, definition of, 26 Print literacy development, 24, 27, 28; cognitive perspective on, 41, 125; contexts for, 94; definition of, 26; formal instruction in, 125; school influence on, 120; sociocultural contexts for, 25; stages of skill learning and, 42– 43; theoretical view, 87 Print literacy instruction, 28 Print literacy skills, acquisition of, 127 Purcell-Gates, Victoria, 81; emergent literacy research, 36–38, 128–130, 155– 156; ethnographic literacy research, 38– 39, 129, 130–131, 156–158; research on development of written vs. oral genres, 100, 101, 106–108, 134 Read, Charles, 121 Reader engagement, 61–62 Reader motivation, 61–62 Reading aloud in schools, cognitive effects, 155–156 Reading and writing, purposes for, 24, 34 Reading as developmental, 68 Reading comprehension, 56–60

206 䡠 Index Reading instruction, cognitive perspective, 47 Reading success/difficulty, and level of family literacy support, 128–129 Reading to learn, 56–60 Real life literacy, 94–95 Recontextualized language, in written and oral language, 103–104 Reference use, in oral and written language, 103–104 Rubin, D., 150 Rumelhart, David, 85 Schema theory, 56–57, 86 Schultz, Katherine, 76 Scribner, Sylvia, 28, 64, 83 Self-blame and adult education students, 4 Semiotic code, 120, 130 Skill learning, role of practice, 150–151 Skills necessary for school, 132 Snow, Catherine, 67–68, 77–78, 134, 171– 172 Social constructionist vs. social constructivism, 35 Social Mind, The (Gee), 66 Social practice perspective on literacy, 28, 29–40, 64–65; context for LPALS study, 36; criticism of, 69; limitations of, 75– 80 Social reproductive role of education, 171 Social semiotic functions of language, 95, 97, 98 Sociocultural perspective on literacy, 23. See also Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on literacy Socioeconomic status, as related to academic achievement, 135 Stages of reading development, 44, 48–50, 51–53, 54–55, 56–60, 60–61, 134 Stages of skill learning, 42–43 Stages of spelling, 46 Stages of writing, 46 Stanovich, Keith, 84–85 Strategies for teaching comprehension, 57– 58 Street, Brian, 31, 63–64, 76, 94

Sulzby, Elizabeth, 106, 134 Survey of Adult Literacy program directors, precursor to LPALS study, 14– 18, 175n3 Symbol systems of written language, 127 Syntax, 102–103 Teberosky, Ana, 123 TEXT study, 143, 153–154; authenticity and, 151–154 Textual practices, 98–99; class status and, 136–137 Time and literacy, 34 Tusting, K., 34 Vai, Scribner and Cole’s study of the, 64 Vernacular literacies, 94, 95, 97 Vocabulary: reading achievement and, 134; study of, 58; written language and, 102 Volosinov, V. N., 29–31 Vygotsky, Lev, 30, 35 Wenger, Etienne, 83, 104, 109 West, Richard, 84–85 Whole language instruction, 70–72 Whole language movement, 69–72 Wigfield, Allan, 61–62 Willinsky, John, 69–70, 71 Woodward, Virginia, 105 Word recognition, 84–86 Writing development, 45–47 Written genres: differences among, 101; knowledge of, 105–108; reflective of sociocultural contexts, 108; taught in school, socioeconomic differences, 119– 120 Written language: constraints of, 101; different from oral language, 99–102; learning, 104–109; pragmatic constraints, 104; purposes for, 101; syntax and, 102; vocabulary and, 102 Written language knowledge: acquisition of, 134–135; connection to being read aloud to, 107–108 Written linguistic feature knowledge, research on, 105–106

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