Young Children’s Literacy Experiences in Home and School

Author(s):  
Elfrieda H. Hiebert
2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Nutbrown ◽  
Julia Bishop ◽  
Helen Wheeler

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on how early years practitioners worked with the ORIM Framework to support work with parents to promote early literacy experiences. Design/methodology/approach – Co-produced Knowledge Exchange (KE) was used to develop and evaluate work with parents to facilitate their young children’s literacy. Information was gathered in discussion groups, interviews with parents and practitioners and feedback from all the parties involved. Findings – Practitioners and families engaged with each other in the further development of an established literacy programme, and families demonstrated “ownership” of the co-produced knowledge after the end of the project. Research limitations/implications – Project design in co-produced research and KE is necessarily flexible. The focus is on practitioners’ knowledge and ownership of the process, sharing knowledge with parents and enhancing children’s experiences. Practical implications – Practices that can enhance parental engagement in their children’s early literacy are varied and multiple and ORIM can be used flexibly to plan, develop and evaluate innovative and community – (and family –) specific practices. Social implications – Where parents have more knowledge of children’s early literacy development they are in a better position to support them; for learning communities there are implications in terms of future development of work with families to support early literacy development. Originality/value – This paper contributes an original approach to the co-production of research with early years practitioners. It also identifies specific issues around the ethics of ownership in co-produced research.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anat Stavans ◽  
Gil Goldzweig

Book reading appears to be a highly revered and widely practiced home and school routine within and across literate western cultures. This study examined the relationship between home practices and expected children’s production. We assumed the contribution of home literacy patterns such as storytelling to have a predictive value on the development of children’s narrative productions as one facet of children’s literacy development. To this end, we set out to investigate similarities and differences in the profile of parental narrative input and children’s narrative productions. We first looked at the structural and organizational characteristics of adult-child and child-adult narratives and the relationship between the two in terms of its narrative forms and functions. Then we analyzed the interaction during narratives to — and by- children to other adults. The participants of this study were 64 parent-child dyads recruited into three age groups. Parents were asked to tell their child a picture-book story and the children were asked to tell the same story to an adult experimenter. The stories were recorded and transcribed. The data were coded into structural and interactive categories and analyzed between parent and children productions and across the three age groups. The results showed a complex relationship between parental narrative input and child-adult output. While parental narrative input resembles child narrative input, this resemblance grows stronger as the child gets older. Yet the differences between parental and child narrative input may be motivated by the child’s linguistic, narrative and social development.


1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie MacGillivray ◽  
Ana Maritza Martinez

This article analyzes 13 “published” stories written by young writers during 1 month in a multicultural, mixed-age primary classroom. The first goal is to examine how primary children constructed gender in their own stories. The second goal is to explore how children, at times, wrote against the traditional gendered positions. The data were gathered as part of a 3-year longitudinal study on children's literacy experiences across home and school environments. Primary data sources utilized include (a) participant-observer fieldnotes; (b) interviews with the classroom teacher, parents, and children; and (c) children's writing. In analyzing students' writing and how they reified or redefined gender expectations, we relied heavily on Foucault's notion of power and how it is related to positioning. Although stereotypical images of dominant males and passive females were numerous, there were also disruptions of gender stereotypes. Implications include the need to help preservice and in-service teachers increase their awareness of how our children take up positions as gendered beings and also ways in which they break out of those traditional frames. Once upon a time there were princesses everywhere. There were princesses in the cave, in houses and castles too. They were all married except one princess. Her name was Amy. Then one day Amy started walking to the castle where all the princesses were dressing for the ball. They [all] had tickets for the ball except Amy. She was left behind. She was very embarrassed because her dress was so plain and ugly. Amy started crying and crying. She was very, very sad. The princesses were having fun at the ball. They danced and danced. They were very sad and happy because they thought about how Amy always loved them and helped them. When they came back home to the castle, they saw Amy with a knife stuck in her head. She was dead [see Figure 1]. They all cried. They were all sad, so they killed themselves too. Then the room was very sad and spooky. (Second grader Rachel's published book)


Author(s):  
William Tunmer ◽  
Jane Prochnow ◽  
James Chapman

Antinaturalists, interpretivists, critical theorists, postmodernists, and deconstructivists have been highly critical of educational research methods that are theory driven, hypothesis testing, or generalization producing. According to extreme versions of these views research can only provide findings that are “contextually bound”, in which case educational researchers should concentrate more on “telling stories” than “crunching numbers”. With respect to literacy, these critics have questioned the feasibility of attempting to develop a general theory of how children learn to read (and write), and what can be done to maximize the effectiveness of literacy instruction for all children in the light of such findings. Instead, children’s literacy experiences are seen as firmly embedded in social contexts that uniquely give meaning to their uses of literacy. In this paper we present an alternative view that begins with a definition of reading literacy that simultaneously incorporates psychological, linguistic, and sociological perspectives. We then present a brief critique of the position that literacy is primarily social, political, and relative, before turning to the primary focus of the paper, which is to provide specific examples of how theory-driven quantitative research can inform educational practice in literacy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cléa Girard ◽  
Thomas Bastelica ◽  
Jessica Léone ◽  
Justine Epinat-Duclos ◽  
Léa Longo ◽  
...  

AbstractPrevious studies indicate that children are exposed to different literacy experiences at home. Although these disparities have been shown to affect children’s literacy skills, it remains unclear whether and how home literacy practices influence brain activity underlying word-level reading. In the present study, we asked parents of French children from various socioeconomic backgrounds (n = 66; 8.46 ± 0.36 years, range 7.52–9.22; 20 girls) to report the frequency of home literacy practices. Neural adaptation to the repetition of printed words was then measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a subset of these children (n = 44; 8.49 ± 0.33 years, range 8.02–9.14; 13 girls), thereby assessing how sensitive was the brain to the repeated presentation of these words. We found that more frequent home literacy practices were associated with enhanced word adaptation in the left posterior inferior frontal sulcus (r = 0.32). We also found that the frequency of home literacy practices was associated with children’s vocabulary skill (r = 0.25), which itself influenced the relation between home literacy practices and neural adaptation to words. Finally, none of these effects were observed in a digit adaptation task, highlighting their specificity to word recognition. These findings are consistent with a model positing that home literacy experiences may improve children’s vocabulary skill, which in turn may influence the neural mechanisms supporting word-level reading.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY FEILER ◽  
JANE ANDREWS ◽  
PAMELA GREENHOUGH ◽  
MARTIN HUGHES ◽  
DAVID JOHNSON ◽  
...  

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