H714: Acquiring Literacy October 24, 2006 Kendra Winner

October 10, 2006 Agenda  Argumentation continued …  Literacy Acquisition An historical overview Current conceptualizations Literacy Events  Break (2:45)  Facilitated Discussion (3:00 to 3:45)  Course Administration: Take Home Essays (4:00)

Adolescent Discussion Analysis  How might these strategies translate into a classroom? Turn length Topic flow Listener support Vocabulary

Sarah Michaels (2005)  James 9, 10, 11 Because I know the answer. Because me and my sister plays school a lot. My sister teach me this when I play school.  Stephany The answer is 11 because you are counting by 3’s. The first number of the pattern is 2. And the second number is 5. There are three numbers from 2 to 5. The third number is eight. And there are three numbers between 5+8. And then that means that you just have to go up 3 numbers from 8 and then the answer is eleven.

Sarah Michaels (2005)  James, Working Class 9, 10, 11 Because I know the answer. Because me and my sister plays school a lot. My sister teach me this when I play school.  Stephany, Middle Class The answer is 11 because you are counting by 3’s. The first number of the pattern is 2. And the second number is 5. There are three numbers from 2 to 5. The third number is eight. And there are three numbers between 5+8. And then that means that you just have to go up 3 numbers from 8 and then the answer is eleven.

Literacy Acquisition

 What are each of these students doing in these two activities?  What can you infer about how each student understood the two activities?  What if any relationship do you see between how each student manages the narrative versus the think-aloud activity? Narrative & Poetry Analysis

Literary Response ….  Literary Response Abstract themes from literary texts Move away from concern with representing events depicted in the text Distance themselves personally from characters and events (Applebee, 1978, 1991; Rogers, 1991, Thomson, 1987; Vipond & Hunt, 1984)

Key Questions  What is literacy?  What does it mean to be literate?

“That literacy is a social practice is an insight both banal and profound” (Street, 1999)

A Historical Overview  Goody (1968) Literacy transforms social and cognitive processes.  Scribner & Cole (1981): ‘Literacy’ vs ‘Formal Schooling’ “Practice account of literacy”  Street ‘Autonomous’ and ‘Ideological’ Model

A Historical Overview  Scollon & Scollon Implications of mainstream literacy practices in diverse contexts  Heath Language use is dependent on the way social groups “take” meaning from the environment  Chall Stage Theory  Teale & Sulzby (1986) Emergent Literacy

Chall’s Stages of Reading Development Stage 1 Initial Decoding ( 1 st gr.) Stage 2 Fluency ( 2 nd /3 rd gr.) Stage 3 Reading for Meaning ( 4 th gr.) Stage 4 Relationships & Viewpoints ( high school ) Stage 5 Synthesis ( university) Learning to Read Reading to Learn

An integrative framework  Higher psychological processes like reading and writing are a reflection of the social processes that support these activities (Vygotsky, 1978). Social processes as manifested in “cultural routines”, e.g. storybook reading.

Emergent Literacy (Sulzby & Teale, 1986)  Everyday settings and activities provide the context for literacy development  Children learn through active engagement with their environments.  Reading, writing, and oral language develop concurrently  Literacy acquisition is not a stage-like process

So, what is literacy?  Literacy as a universal trait with uniform consequences  Literacy as a set of social practices to achieve functional objectives - a context-bound set of practices

What is a literacy event?  “Any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interaction and their interpretive processes” (Heath, 1982).

“Other People’s Words” (Victoria Purcell-Gates, 1995)  “[I couldn’t learn to read]…’cause I talk different. ‘Cause I’m you know…countrified, and my words don’t come out the way they’re suppose to. That’s the way I was brought up!”  “Print does not exist independent of experience”

Promoting Literacy: A “Deficit Model” School Practices Home Practices  Impoverished home environments  Adequate school environments  Academic failure attributed to lack of motivation and interest (Auerbach, 1989; Purcell-Gates, 1995)

Delpit, 1990 in Hynds & Rubin, Eds. Perspectives on Talk and Learning Within our celebration of diversity, we must keep in mind that education, at its best, hones and develops the knowledge and skills each student already possesses, while at the same time adding new knowledge and skills to that base. All students deserve the right both to develop linguistic skills they bring into the classroom and to add others to their repertoires.