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The promotion of literacy in the early years.
A comment to R. Gallimore & Cl. Goldenberg, Activity Settings of Early Literacy:
Home and School Factors in Children's Emergent Literacy.
The notion of context in relation to learning and development is undoubtedly one of the
hot issues of today's educational sciences. The research of emergent literacy in a school
and a home context reported by Gallimore & Goldenburg certainly contributes to the
further clarification of this concept of context. By defining contexts in terms of constitu-
ents of activity settings and subsequently analyzing collaborative reading sessions at
home, they could shed some light on the complex relationship between the learning
individual and social institutions like the family. As one interesting finding it turned out,
that the reading activity between parent and child at home was not completely determined
by the structure and content of the activity setting itself. The nature of the collaborative
reading activity depended also on the parent's interpretation of the purpose of this
collaborative activity. The adults in the study tended to use the books that they got from
school as an opportunity for focusing on decoding skills of their children rather than on
understanding and text interpretation.
Obviously, participating adults in a cultural activity bring with them a conception of the
meaning of that cultural activity; a conception that is derivative of the dominant and
firmly established conception of that activity within their culture. According to the
traditional view, reading is generally seen (not only by parents but also by many teachers
and researchers) as a process of decoding graphic characters on paper. No wonder that
parents, when encouraged to read with their children (with the educational purpose of
helping them to learn reading), tend to be focused on what they think reading really is
about: decoding skills. (By the way: we can see similar things happen when parents help
their children doing mathematics). Such findings suggest that culture is inclined to
reproducing itself by way of traditional and stabilized images of activities tending to
transmission of standardized and restricted ways of doing.
It is interesting to see how the research findings of Gallimore and Goldenberg confirm
these general relations between culturally established images of literacy and ways of doing
promoted at the individual level. However, the overwhelming power of this mechanism is
perhaps even more clearly illustrated by the fact that the researchers themselves seem to
be captured by it. Although they tell the reader that they prefer a broad conception of
literacy, including listening, speaking, reading and writing (see page 316), in their actual
research they focus mainly on reading. There seems to be no attention for oral activities
in classroom and home contexts, and just little attention for writing. The decision to
introduce books into the home environment is also biased towards reading (rather than
writing).
It is questionable whether this exclusive focus on reading creates optimal conditions for
early literacy development. The focus on (comprehensive) reading of books per se even
might reinforce the traditional view that literacy is basically reading. Moreover, this
approach covers up the writing activity and the intentions of a writer to convey meanings
by way of his/her writing. In my opinion early literacy should better start with the
production of meaningful symbols or networks of symbols (writing activity, drawing) in
order to articulate the communicative function of written language, and to promote
reflection on the relationship between signs and their meaning. Children should be able to
recognize reading as one part of a communicative activity between writer and reader. I
suppose that a focus on writing (and related reading) is a better literacy-producing
practice than just providing books and reading together. In his article about the prehistory
of written language (which is worthy of consideration in this context), Vygotsky argues
for the teaching of writing in the preschool years (not just the technique of writing
letters). He emphasizes that 'writing should be meaningful for children, that an intrinsic
need should be aroused in them, and that writing should be incorporated into a task that is
necessary and relevant for life'. Could there be something more meaningful for a child
than to write (or draw) its own booklet (message, announcement), bring it home and read
it with its parents? I suppose this is a better context for the emergence of literacy than the
one Gallimore and Goldenberg created. At least it is more consistent with the broad
definition of literacy, and it makes the pupils the real agents of their literacy activity.
However, this requires that researchers too have to get rid of a narrow conception of
reading and literacy. The introduction of school books into a home environment maximal-
ly avoids the risk of "cultural intrusion" or "violating the principles of a pluralistic
society" when it is combined with a broadly developed concept of literacy as a semiotic
activity of communicating with the help of written symbolic means.
Bert van Oers
Free University Amsterdam