Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95
From:Bert van Oers (PEDAfpp@banyan2.psy.vu.nl)
Subject: Book reports

Dear Colleague, In the attachment you will find my contribution to the collaborative review of CONTEXTS FOR LEARNING of Ellice Forman et al. I look forward to read the whole set of commentaries. It is an exciting experiment.
Bert van Oers

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