Childrens Literacy Flashcards
What is writing
Writing involves physical dexterity and technical expertise: all writing in history uses technology of some kind, from a chisel, a quill, a pencil/pen, to keyboards, touchpads, computer mouse etc.
● Using a common, agreed code of symbols (graphemes)
● Recognising that graphemes need to be combined to make words that a reader can understand
● Combining words and sentences to convey ideas
● Recognising that writing has an audience (even if it’s
oneself)
● Using recognisable discourse and genre conventions
● Manipulating language to achieve specific effects
Emergent early writing - Marie clay
The term ‘emergent literacy or writing’ is often used to describe children’s early scribbles or representations of written symbols.
Marie Clay described children’s interactions with the writing in books and their own imitation of this. She identified a number of key principles that children seem to adopt in early writing and her ideas are still influential, helping parents and educators to recognise that writing skills develop, and should be valued, long before a child can produce formal texts.
But she was writing in the 1970s, before the advent of computer usage at schools or home, so when we look at her ideas, consider if they still apply; Clay was really writing about writing composed with pen and not keyboard.
Clays principles of writing development
Recurring principle - when a child only knows a limited number of letters, they may use these repeatedly to create a message.
Directional principle - Reading and writing from left to right and then using a return sweep to start the process again.
Generating principle - When a child starts to realise that there are only a limited number of letters to use, but that these can be mixed and matched in different ways. The child recognises patterns that can be used to convey a message.
Inventory principle - A child begins to package knowledge together into lists of the letters and words that he or she knows.
Yetta Goodman principles of emerging print awareness
The functional principle
The notion that writing serves a purpose and has function for the writer.
The linguistic principle
The notion that writer is a system organised into words, letters and directionality
The relational principle
Children connect what they write on the page with spoken words - understanding the written alphabet Learn it system has mean
Vygotskys social constructionist view
Here, teachers (and parents) act as “knowledgeable others”, offering scaffolding to help children learn. Vygotsky sees children as active participants in their own learning, but needing individually tailored support at crucial times.
An important concept here is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which describes a recurring process: children reach a stage where they can attempt without support, then are able to perform unaided. This idea focuses on a child’s individual needs rather than seeing all children as having to reach government-driven definitions of development based on large-scale testing.
Community literacy - Shirley Brice heath
Shirley Brice Heath (1970s) conducted an ethnographic study of American pre-school children and their families. She focused on different community demographics (class and ethnicity).
Affluent, middle-class communities developed children’s literacy in a more formal way, explicitly using books and placing value on children participating in literary activities.
Other communities included some book reading but with more limited imaginative discussion and verbal commentaries. Used a different kind of literacy, based around oral storytelling about people and things from children’s everyday lives.
Once at school the former group tended to be more successful due to value placed because their form of literacy conformed to school expectations.
Heath argued schools should look to home and community practice and value these alternative literacy practices, and incorporate them into curricula.
Multimodal literacy - gunther kress
Children’s early literacy experiences are multimodal: they don’t separate their experiences into discrete modes by regarding speech as different from writing. Storytelling may be physical, acting out roles and using props etc to illustrate:
● Daily activities and rituals;
● Imaginative storytelling;
● Visually representing ideas and personal versions of
their emerging understanding of the world.
Gunther Kress (1997) studied his own children, observing their multi-modal behaviour. He observed the ways in which children use objects and mix with toys to construct ‘worlds’ in which they can act out narratives in play.
Richard gentry’s stages of spelling development
Pre-communicative- Imitate by scribbling, showing an understanding that symbols have meanings and messages. Use a range of symbols (numbers, letters, lower and upper case) and present some decipherable letter shapes but not make sound-symbol connections.
Semi-phonetic- Link letter shapes and sounds. Show an awareness of word boundaries and how writing is organised on a page.
Phonetic- Understand that phonemes can be represented by graphemes, making sound-symbol connections consistently. Have a sight vocabulary.
Transitional- Combine phonetic knowledge with visual memory. Show an awareness of combinations of letters and patterns.
Conventional- Demonstrate knowledge of spelling system and rules, using mostly correct spelling. Spell using a large sight vocabulary. Know about word structure.
Common misspellings
Insertion - adding extra letters - child has noticed some letters are doubled.
Omission- leaving out letters
Substitution- substituting one letter for another- often close in the way they look or sound.
Transposition- reversing correct order of letters in words- shows child knows what letters the word contains.
Phonetic spelling- using sound awareness to guess letters and combinations of letters.
Over or under generalisation of spelling rules- Over-generalising of a rule when not appropriate, or under-generalising by only apply rule in one specific context - in either case, knowledge is shown but more understanding needed.
Salient key words- only writing the key sounds in a word and missing out letters - the most noticeable aspects have been memorised.
Katherine Perera- phases of children’s writing
Preparation - up to 6 years old - basic motor skills are acquired alongside some principles of spelling.
Consolidation - 7-8 years - children are able to express in writing what they can say.
Differentiation - 9-10 years - awareness of writing as separate form speech emerges: a stronger understanding of writing for different audiences and purposes is evident, and becomes more automatic.
Integration - mid teens - this stage heralds the ‘personal voice’ in writing and is evidence of controlled writing, with appropriate linguistic choices made consistently.
Genre theory - Jim martin and Joan Rothery
Researched young children’s writing in Australian in the 1980s. Found that early writing within schools fell into distinctive groupings:
Observation/comment: The writer makes an observation (‘I saw a tiger’) and follows this with either an evaluative comment (‘it was very large’) or mixes these in with the observation (‘I saw a very large tiger’)
Recount: Usually a chronological sequence of events (e.g. recounting a school trip). The structure usually follows: orientation - event - reorientation. Orientation sets the scene, perhaps the journey to the place. The reorientation at the end of the recount completes the writing.
Report: a factual and objective description of events and things; it tends not to be chronological.
Narrative: A story genre where the scene is set for events to occur and be resolved at the end. It has a set pattern: orientation-complication-resolution-coda. The coda identifies the point of the story, but is not always added. Because of the structural complexity, few children achieve the whole structure early on, despite their experience reading stories that follow this structure.
Genre theory - Frances Christie
Narratives: introduce characters in a setting, unfold a series of events leading to a complication, and offer some sense of evaluation, eventually bringing about some resolution; these are found in storybooks etc.
Recounts: reconstruct experience in temporal sequence, particularly found in early writing of personal experiences, though they are also found in the writing of history in older writers and readers.
Procedures: direct behaviour in undertaking activities, and which are found in games, recipes, manuals, and science experiments.
Reports: classify some phenomenon and describe it, used in social and natural sciences.
Explanations: identify some phenomenon or historical event and explain how or why it occurs or what its consequences are. They are also used in social and natural sciences and in the humanities, such as history.
Expositions/discussions: argumentative genres, involved in exploring issues and arriving at opinions based on evidence (for/against or thesis/antithesis/synthesis models).
