Children's literacy development Flashcards
What is writing?
Using a common and agreed code of symbols (graphemes), recognising that these need to be combined to make understandable words, combining words and sentences to convey ideas, recognising an audience, using recognisable discourse and genre conventions, manipulating language to achieve specific effects
What is emergent literacy / writing?
describes early scribbles / representations of written symbols
What are Marie Clay’s principles of writing development?
Recurring, Directional, Generating, Inventory
What is Clay’s recurring principle?
When a child only knows a limited number of letters, they may use these repeatedly to create a message
What is Clay’s directional principle?
Reading and writing from left to right and then using a return sweep to start the process again
What is Clay’s generating principle?
When a child starts to realise that there are only a limited number of letters that can be used, but that these can be mixed and matched in different ways
What is Clay’s Inventory principle?
A child begins to package knowledge together into lists of letters / words that they know
What are the principles of emerging print awareness? (Yetta Goodman, 1986)
Functional, Linguistic, Relational
What is Goodman’s functional principle?
The notion that writing has a function and serves a purpose for the writer
What is Goodman’s linguistic principle?
The notion that writing is a system organised into words, letters and directionality
What is Goodman’s relational principle?
Children connect what they write on the page with spoken words - therefore understanding the written alphabet system has meaning
What is Lev Vygotsky’s social constructionist view?
MKO’s eg. teachers and parents offer scaffolding to help children learn
What is the Zone of Proximal Development? (Vygotsky)
Where children can reach a stage where they can attempt without support, then perform unaided - focuses on individual needs rather than large-scale testing
What did Shirley Brice Heath (1970s) study?
Community literacy
How did Brice Heath conduct her study?
Ethnographic study of American pre-school children and their families, focusing on different community demographics
What were Brice Heath’s findings?
-Affluent and middle class families developed children’s literacy in a more formal way eg. books / placing value on participation in literary activities
-Other communities had more limited imaginative discussion and verbal commentaries, focused on oral storytelling about people / things from everyday lives
What was the outcome of Brice Heath’s ethnographic study?
Affluent / middle-class communities were more academically successful, because the value placed on their form of literacy conformed to school expectations
What did Heath advocate for after her ethnographic study?
Schools should recognise alternative literacy practices and value them / incorporate them into curricula
What did Gunther Kress (1997) study?
The multimodal behaviour of his children
What did Kress find?
Children use objects and toys to construct ‘worlds’ in which they can act out narratives
How many phonemes are in British English?
44
How is spelling taught?
Recognising the profile of individual words, familiarity with common letter strings eg. -ful, awareness of word families and relationships between them eg. walk and walker, understanding of morphology and affixation, recognition of homophones, understanding etymology
What are Richard Gentry’s stages of spelling development?
Pre-communicative, semi-phonetic, phonetic, transitional, conventional
What does a child do in Gentry’s pre-communicative stage?
Imitate by scribbling, understand that symbols have meaning, don’t make sound-symbol connections
What does a child do in Gentry’s pre-phonetic stage?
Links letter shapes and sounds, awareness of word boundaries and how writing is organised on a page
What does a child do in Gentry’s phonetic stage?
Understand that phonemes can be represented by graphemes, consistently makes sound-symbol connections, have a sight vocabulary
What does a child do in Gentry’s transitional stage?
Combine phonetic knowledge with visual memory, awareness of combinations of letters and patterns
What does a child do in Gentry’s conventional stage?
Demonstrates knowledge of spelling system and rules, mostly correct spelling, knowledge of word structure
What are the common misspellings?
Insertion, omission, substitution, transposition (reversing correct word order), phonetic spelling, over/under-generalisation of rules, salient sounds (only writing key sounds)
What grammatical features do children use to knit textual structures together?
Anaphoric and cataphoric referencing, repetition, variation, connectivity
What are Katherine Perera’s stages of Children’s writing (1984)?
Preparation, consolidation, differentiation, integration
What is Perera’s preparation stage?
Up to 6 years old, basic motor skills are acquired alongside some principles of spelling
What is Perera’s consolidation stage?
7-8 years, children are able to express in writing what they can say
What is Perera’s differentiation stage?
9-10 years old, awareness of writing as separate from speech, understanding of writing for different purposes, becoming automatic
What is Perera’s integration stage?
Mid teens, ‘personal voice’, controlled writing, consistently appropriate linguistic choice
What are Martin and Rothery’s four genre theory groupings?
Observation/comment, recount, report, narrative
What is the structure of a recount, according to genre theory?
Orientation - event - reorientation
What is the pattern of a narrative, according to genre theory?
Orientation - complication - resolution - coda
What are Frances Christie’s four genre theory groupings?
Narratives, recounts, procedures, reports, explanations, expositions / discussions
