AO2

Question 1

Bruner’s language Acquisition Support System implicated in reading

Answer 1

this theory explains how adults encourage children’s speech by using books to interact with babies and young children. he saw parent and child interactions as four phases.

Question 2

bruner’s four phases of reading interaction:

Answer 2

gaining attention - getting the babies attention on a picture
Query - asking the baby what the object in the picture is
Label - telling the baby what the object in the picture is
Feedback: responding to the baby’s utterances

Question 3

Who was Bruner inspired by?

Answer 3

Bruner was inspired by vygotsky who believed children learn not by being told how to do something but by being helped to do it when they are ready - part of the ‘scaffolding’ process. Both Bruner and Vygotsky see children as active learners and believe that the social contexts of their experiences are very important.

Question 4

‘look and say’ approach

Answer 4

children learn to recognise whole words or sentences, rather than individual phonemes

Question 5

Advantages of ‘look and say’ approach

Answer 5

some words are not phonetically regular and have to be learnt this way for example: most and who.

Question 6

Disadvantages of ‘look and say’ approach

Answer 6

children cannot decode words they haven’t seen before

Question 7

Phonetics

Answer 7

Children learn the different sounds made by different letters and letter blends and some rules of putting them together.

Question 8

Advantage of phonetics approach

Answer 8

it is quick and children are given the tools to decode any words that they come across, even if they have never seen them before

Question 9

Disadvantage of phonetics approach

Answer 9

Some words are not phonetically regular and cannot be learnt this way for example: most and who.

Question 10

features of children’s books

Answer 10

• often interact with their audience via lift-the-flap, question and answer etc
• suggest values (e.g. behaviour/politeness/morals)
• use rhyme and other phonological devices
• often use anthropomorphism
• use spoken language features
• use pictures and colour to gain attention
• use hypernyms/hyponyms and semantic field of concrete nouns
• use rhetorical devices (repetition, parallel sentence structures etc)
• create textual cohesion via lexical repetition, syntactical repetition, connectives).

Question 11

Analysis of early books

Answer 11

An interesting feature of books written for young children is the use of animals rather than human characters, as fictional narratives in English speaking cultures

Question 12

key features of reading schemes

Answer 12

lexical repetition: especially the new lexis introduced in each book but also proper nouns
Syntactical repetition of structures: usually subject-verb-object order and simple sentences containing one clause (in early books)
Simple verbs: Single verbs used rather than verb phrases.
One sentence per line: helping children to say complete phrases
Anaphoric referencing: pronouns refer to the names of characters already used
limited use of modifiers: this makes graded reading schemes different from imaginative stories where adjectives add detail and description.
Text-image cohesion: the picture tells the story of the text on the page.