Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology
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- Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction
- Summary 348
- EMERGENT LITERACY DURING THE PRESCHOOL YEARS
- Emergent Literacy During the Preschool Years 335
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CHAPTER 14 Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction MICHAEL PRESSLEY 333 EMERGENT LITERACY DURING THE PRESCHOOL YEARS 334
Emergent Literacy 334 Phonemic Awareness 336 FIRST GRADE AND THE PRIMARY YEARS 337
COMPREHENSION 343
WRITING
344 ENCOURAGING ADULT LITERACY 346
CLOSING COMMENTS 348 REFERENCES 348 When first asked whether I could prepare a chapter summa- rizing literacy research, my initial response was that the request was impossible. What came to mind immediately were the three volumes of the Handbook of Reading Re-
Mosenthal, Pearson, & Barr, 2000; Pearson, Barr, Kamil, & Mosenthal, 1984), the most prominent compendiums of read- ing research, which collectively include 3,000 pages to sum- marize just reading research (although some writing research found its way into those volumes). Even more daunting than just the volume of research, how- ever, is its diversity. From a methodological perspective, there are experimental and correlational traditions in literacy studies. In recent years, however, such traditional and quantitative ap- proaches have been supplanted largely by more qualitative methods, including ethnographies (Florio-Ruane & McVee, 2000), verbal protocol analyses (Afflerbach, 2000; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995), narrative approaches (Alvermann, 2000), and single-subject designs (Neuman & McCormick, 2000). Conceptually, literacy at one time was primarily seen from a behavioral perspective, with such behaviorism yielding to cognitivism in the 1970s and 1980s. Although there is still much cognitive study of reading, sociocultural emphasis in the field has been increasing, beginning in the 1990s and mov- ing into the twenty-first century (Gaffney & Anderson, 2000). Literacy is also a decidedly international field of study; exciting ideas have come from Australia and New Zealand (Wilkinson, Freebody, & Elkins, 2000), the United Kingdom (Harrison, 2000), Latin America (Santana, 2000), and in- creasingly from former Iron Curtain countries (Meredith & Steele, 2000). Although much of literacy instruction has been and remains focused on kindergarten through Grade 12 instruction, in recent decades a great deal of work has been done on literacy development during the preschool years (Yaden, Rowe, & McGillivray, 2000) as well as research ex- tending into the college years (Flippo & Caverly, 2000) and beyond (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993). Also, there has been a clear shift away from thinking about literacy as a development that occurs purely in the schools; it is now conceived as more an acquisition that occurs in families, (Purcell-Gates, 2000) in the workplace, and in the larger, in- creasingly technological community (Reinking, McKenna, Labbo, & Kieffer, 1998). Of course, one way to deal with this enormous and multi- dimensionally expanding literature would be to focus only on the parts that are decidedly psychological because much of lit- eracy research was not carried out by psychologists and seems rather far afield from psychological issues; in fact, that is a tactic taken in this chapter. The downside of this approach is that some of the most interesting and cutting-edge directions 334 Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction are neglected. Some ideas that might start psychologists thinking about new directions they might pursue are not put before readers’ eyes. The serious scholar in literacy—or any- one who wants to have a broadly informed opinion—will (at a minimum) spend much time with the 3,000 Handbook pages now available at the beginning of this millennium. Another tactic that I employ here is to focus on primary and significant issues and questions—ones that have been of con- cern for a very long time. This approach in particular makes sense because it does lead to some answers—that is, a number of important issues in reading and writing have been studied long enough that replicable findings have emerged. This em- phasis on replicable findings—on the surface at least—makes this chapter consistent with the approach of the National Read- ing Panel (2000). I am inconsistent with the National Reading Panel, however, in that I am willing to consider a greater di- versity of methods than that group was. That group generally limited itself to experimental studies; it admitted only the oc- casional quasi-experimental study and distanced itself from qualitative approaches entirely. This chapter certainly does present much coverage of outcomes produced in true experi- ments and approximations to experiments, but these out- comes are complemented by other scientific findings as well. In particular, descriptive methods, including ethnographies, have provided rich understandings about the complexities of some important instructional approaches—understandings that never would be produced in true experiments or repre- sented in the write-ups of experimental studies. This chapter could have been organized in a number of dif- ferent ways; I have decided to organize this one along devel- opmental lines. In fact, there have been studies of literacy development beginning in late infancy and proceeding through adulthood. Of course, what develops varies with each develop- mental period; the development of general language compe- tencies is particularly critical during the preschool years. Although beginning reading instruction during the early ele- mentary school years focuses on the development of letter- and word-level competencies in reading and writing, this focus eventually gives way to the development of fluent reading as a goal and increasing concerns with comprehension and compo- sition in the later elementary and middle school grades. By high school and college, much of the emphasis is on honing lit- eracy skills in the service of the learning demands of secondary and postsecondary education. Researchers interested in adult literacy have often focused on adults who did not develop lit- eracy competencies during the schooling years; such research generally attempts to develop interventions to promote literacy in these populations, whose members often suffer socio- economic and personal disadvantages directly attributable to their reading problems.
What happens to children during the preschool years relates to later literacy development. Many developmentalists inter- ested in literacy have focused on what is known as emergent literacy, which is the development of the language skills un- derlying literacy through interactions with the social world. Other developmentalists who have been interested in chil- dren’s beginning letter-level and word-recognition skills have focused more on a competency known as phonemic aware-
sounds blended together. Emergent Literacy One of the more heavily researched topics by developmental psychologists is the nature of mother-infant attachment. When interactions between the principal caregiver and an in- fant are constructive and caring, the attachment that develops can be described as secure (Bowlby, 1969). In particular, when parents are responsive to the child and provide for its needs, secure attachment is more likely. The securely at- tached baby interacts with the world comfortably in the care- giver’s presence and responds favorably to the caregiver after a period of caregiver absence. Matas, Arend, and Sroufe (1978) made a fundamentally important discovery. Children who experience secure at- tachment during infancy engage in more effective problem solving with their parents during the preschool years. When parents are securely attached to their children, they are more likely to provide appropriate degrees of support as their chil- dren attempt to solve problems (Frankel & Bates, 1990; Matas et al., 1978). A related finding is that when parents and preschoolers are securely attached, they interact more productively in situa- tions involving literacy. Bus and van IJzendoorn (1988) observed both securely attached and insecurely attached mother-child pairs as they watched Sesame Street together, read a picture book, and went through an alphabet book. The interactions involving securely attached parents and children were much more positive than were the interactions between insecurely attached parents and children. Securely attached preschoolers were more attentive and less easily distracted during interactions, and much more literate activity was ob- served in the interactions of securely attached pairs compared to those of insecurely attached pairs. Storybook reading was more intense with the secure pairs than with the insecure pairs; the secure parent-child pairs talked more about the story than did the insecure pairs. An especially interesting
Emergent Literacy During the Preschool Years 335 finding was that securely attached parents and their 3-year- old children reported doing more reading together (Bus & van IJzendoorn, 1995). That storybook reading brings greater rewards when at- tachment security is greater is an important finding because high-quality storybook reading during the preschool years clearly promotes literacy development. There are clear corre- lations between the amount of storybook reading during the preschool years and subsequent language development, chil- dren’s interest in reading, and their success as beginning readers (Sulzby & Teale, 1991); this is sensible because storybook reading at its best is a rich verbal experience, with much questioning and answering by both reader and child. Storybook reading permits practice at working out meaning from words in text and pictures, as well as opportunities for the child to practice relating ideas in stories to their own lives and the world as they understand it (Applebee & Langer, 1983; Cochran-Smith, 1984; Flood, 1977; Pelligrini, Perlmutter, Galda, & Brody, 1990; Roser & Martinez, 1985; Taylor & Strickland, 1986). As a child matures and gains experience with storybook reading, the conversations between reader and child increase in complexity (Snow, 1983; Sulzby & Teale, 1987). Older preschoolers who have had much storybook reading experience are much more attentive during such read- ing than are same-age peers who have had relatively little op- portunity to experience books with their parents or other adults (Bus & van IJzendoorn, 1988). Many correlational data sup- port the hypothesis that storybook reading is beneficial for children’s cognitive development—that it stimulates language development and sets the stage for beginning reading. This body of evidence in the context of storybook read- ing is complemented by other data substantiating striking connections between the richness of preschoolers’ verbal worlds and subsequent language development. One of the most ambitious and most cited analyses was made by Uni- versity of Kansas psychologists Hart and Risley (1995). They observed 42 families for 2.5 years, beginning in the second semester of a child’s life. During these observations, they recorded all actions and interactions. The first im- portant finding was that there were significant differences between families in both the quality and the extensiveness of verbal interactions. The quality of interactions in terms of completeness and complexity of language was greater in professional homes than in working-class homes, and lan- guage complexity in working-class homes was greater than in welfare homes—that is, in homes of higher socioeco- nomic status, parents listened more to their children, they asked their children to elaborate their comments more, and they taught their children how to cope verbally when con- fronted with ideas that were challenging for the children to communicate. Quantitatively, the differences in verbal inter- actions were really striking: Whereas a child in a profes- sional home might experience 4 million verbalizations a year, a child in a welfare family could be exposed to only 250,000 utterances. Did these vast differences in experience translate into later performance differences? There was no doubt about it; superior language was detected by age 3 in the children raised in professional families compared to children in working-class and welfare families. Of course, the problem with correlational data is that causality is never clear. Yes, it could be that the richer experi- ences promoted language development, or it could be that more verbal children stimulated richer language interactions during storybook reading and throughout their days. Fortu- nately, complementary experimental studies establish more definitively that high-quality verbal interactions result in linguistic advances in children. Grover Whitehurst and his colleagues (Whitehurst et al., 1988) hypothesized that if parents were coached in order to improve their verbal interactions with their children during storybook reading, the language functioning of the children would improve. Whitehurst et al. worked for a month with the parents of 14 children between the ages of 1.5–3 years. In particular, the parents were taught to use more open-ended questions as they read storybooks with their children; they were also taught to ask more questions about the functions and attributes of objects in stories. Whitehurst et al. (1988) also taught the parents to elaborate and expand on comments made by their children during reading. In short, the parents were taught the tricks of the trade for stimulating productive and verbally rich conversations with young children. In contrast, parents and children in a control condition simply continued to read together for the month corresponding to treatment for the experimental participants. First, the intervention worked in that it did increase the verbal complexity and extensiveness of communications between parents and children. Although experimental and control parent-child interactions were similar before the study, the experimental group conversations during book reading were much richer following the intervention. More- over, clear differences appeared in the language functioning of the experimental group children following the interven- tion, reflected by performance on standardized tests of psy- cholinguistic ability and vocabulary. These effects have been replicated several times, both by Whitehurst’s associates (Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst et al., 1994) and by others (Crain-Thoresen & Dale, 1995; Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Lonigan, Anthony, & Burgess, 1995). In short, evidence suggests that preschool verbal experi- ences promote language development, potentially in ways
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