Translating Children's Everyday Uses of Print into Classroom Practice
Translating Children's Everyday Uses of Print into Classroom Practice
At my interview for graduate school in 1974, the professor looked at my papers and then, without warning, banged his hands on the desk and said, "What's a schwa?" Blankly, I had to tell him that I did not know. He patiently explained the term to me and eventually I was admitted to the program. Several months later, one of my assignments was to observe a "remedial" reading lesson. I sat in a classroom and watched in awe as a group of third, fourth and fifth graders moved with apparent ease through the carefully orchestrated activities, accruing M&M's for their finely tuned skills. At the end of the lesson, the teacher shared with me her concern for these children who found even a preprimer difficult to read. And then, by way of consolation, she told me that they all knew what a schwa was. Since that time, I have often wondered how these children came to know of "schwas" when they could not read, and how I learned to read without ever coming to know of "schwas." This paper explores one possible interpretation of this paradox.
In the early 1970s, a generally accepted definition of reading seemed to be that it was the meaningful interpretation of written or printed symbols. At that time, researchers in reading moved away from curriculum research which compared methods in the teaching of reading to theory-based research which focused upon the process of reading (Gibson and Levin 1975). The emphasis in the field was upon the discovery of the underlying cognitive processes of reading behavior as researchers struggled for recognition of their work as a legitimate scientific endeavor. Reading had become a complicated psycholinguistic process, a solitary effort which took place somewhere between the reader and the text. In tum, learning to read in schools became a series of diagnostic events as the findings of theory-based research were linked with the criterion referenced testing movement of the 1970s and the decade's strong desire for accountability.
While researchers in the reading field worked in the 1970s to establish their science, others were pursuing another course. This is reflected in the book Foundations in Sociolinguistics by Dell Hymes. Hymes argued that:
One cannot take linguistic form, a given code, or even speech itself, as a limiting frame of reference. One must take as context a community, or network of persons, investigating its communicative activities as a whole, so that any use of channel or code takes its place as part of the resources upon which the members draw. (1974, p. 4)
Later, in 1977, John Swzed, in his classic paper "The Ethnography of Literacy," brought together the contentions of Hymes with the work taking place in the reading field by stating that:
It is entirely possible that teachers are able to teach reading and writing as abstract skills, but do not know what reading and writing are for in the lives and futures of their students. (p. 3)
In other words, we have created learning environments for children in which reading and writing are presented as decontextualized language skills which have very little to do with reading and writing in everyday life. But worst of all, we know very little of the social uses and meanings of print in the lives of the children that we study and teach.
Swzed talked of literacy configurations, of literacy cycles, and of reading and writing as complex abilities which are highly dependent upon the social contexts in which people live. And he urged researchers to take a step back so that they could take a closer look at the social meaning of literacy. Swzed emphasized that we need to know more of:
the roles these abilities play in social life;
the varieties of reading and writing available for choice;
the contexts for their performance; and
the manner in which they are tested not by experts, but by ordinary people in ordinary activities.
Shirley Brice Heath was among the first to follow Swzed's lead. She conducted an ethnographic study of the literacy behaviors of families living in an all-black working-class community. Heath found that "the children read to learn information that they judged necessary in their lives," and that even the "preschoolers were able to read many types of information available in their environment" (1980, p. 127).
Heath identified seven types of literacy use within the community that she studied. These she describes as: 1) instrumental, 2) socio-interactional, 3) news-related, 4) memory-supportive, 5) substitutes for oral messages, 6) provision of permanent records, and 7) confirmation. I have some difficulty with Heath's typography which seems to be somewhat overlapping, and a mixture of process (memory-supportive) and content (news-related) "categories." However, I, too, have found these types of literacy use in the research that I have been conducting with middle-class families (Taylor 1982). The families that I have studied used literacy to solve practical problems and to maintain social relationships. They read newspapers and made lists, they left messages and kept records, and they collected recipes and read instructions.
It should not be inferred from these findings that the families in either of the studies were using print in identical ways, or in radically different ways. The uses of print are complexly patterned and not equally distributed. Particular configurations of use are highly dependent upon the everyday lives of the families in the communities where they live. The working parent may leave many more messages for the child coming home from school than the parent who is at home when the child returns; while the bus driver may read many more traffic signs than the worker who sits on the bus reading the newspaper.
These initial forays into the social contexts of literacy serve to emphasize how much we need to know of the local and distinctive meanings of print if we are to develop programs which enable children to bring their everyday experiences of print into the classroom. At the present time, it is entirely possible for a child to know of schwas, but be unable to read. It is also possible for a child to be a nonreader in school while using print for some significant purpose in life. An example of this dilemma was related to me recently by a mother whose son was upset when he found that he could not read in school. This first grader had been writing letters, reading road signs, collecting coupons and finding products when food shopping for many months. Pete used to think of himself as "a reader." But when he was in first grade, he was angry with his mother for not teaching him how to read. When his mother asked him what he meant by reading, he said, "You do it in groups!"
Somehow we need to bridge the gap between home and school so that reading in the one is reading in the other. Although helpful, Heath's work is not designed for classroom practice, which leaves us wondering how we can bring together these two disparate worlds of childhood. One opportunity to make the quantum leap is suggested by Don Holdaway. He uses the sociolinguistic research of Michael Halliday to bring the functions and uses of print into the classroom. Holdaway summarizes Halliday's (1974) categories as follows:
Instrumental The 'I want' function Fulfilling needs
Regulatory The 'Don't do that' function Controlling
Interactional The 'I love you' function Relating to others
Personal The 'This is me' function Defining self
Heuristic The 'What's that?' function Finding out
Imaginative The 'Let's pretend' function Making-believe
Representational The 'This is how it is' function Communicating about content (‘79, p. 148)
Taking the sharing of stories as a cornerstone, Holdaway builds a multifunctional literacy program that translates everyday uses of print into workable classroom practices. But, while critical of present practices, he does not disregard the extraordinary advances that were made during the 1970s. His book is, in many ways, an interpretation of the decade as seen through the eyes of a creative and imaginative teacher who is sensitive to the need within the reading field for researchers to examine "the meaning of meaning" in the definition of reading as the meaningful interpretation of written or printed symbols. It is within this context that Holdaway brings Halliday's multifunctional view of meaning to the development of literacy skills and values. Halliday writes:
For the child, all language is doing something; in other words it is meaning. It has meaning in a very broad sense, including here a range of functions which the adult does not normally think of as meaningful, such as the personal and the interactional. … But it is precisely in relation to the child's conception of language that it is most vital for us to redefine our notion of meaning; not restricting it to the narrow limits of representational meaning (that is, 'content') but including within it all the functions that language has a purposive, non-random, contextualized activity (1974, pp. 17-18).
We, too, need to redefine our notion of meaning to include within it all the functions that literacy has "as a purposive, non-random, contextualized activity." To do so, we must reach out into the communities where we teach and bring the functions and uses of print into our classrooms. Billboards and flyers, letters and newspapers, price tags and street signs, all have a place in classrooms littered with the print and paper of functional literacy programs. If the promise of the 1980s is fulfilled, the culturally remote decontextualized pedagogical strategies, which leave children knowledge of schwas but unable to read, will fade as children learn of the skills of reading within the meaningful contexts of their everyday lives.
References
Gibson, E. J. and Levin, H. The Psychology of Reading. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1975.
Hymes, D. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
Halliday, M. A. K. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold, 1973.
Heath, S. B. "The Functions and Uses of Literacy." Journal of Communication (Winter 1980): 123-133.
Holdaway, D. The Foundations of Literacy. Sydney: Ashton Scholastic, 1979.
Taylor, D. Family Literacy. London: Heinemann Educational Books Inc., 1983.