Literacy Acquisition

1. Literacy Acquisition Implications for teaching and learning FLAG. September 2009. Robyn Dillon and Marlene van der Merwe

2. Transition • ‘We invite children into formal education compulsorily by law. Teachers and schools are in control: They engineer the opportunities and create suitable transitions to school.’

3. Transition (continued) • ‘A school would do well to send a parent away confident that her child’s individuality will be respected, that his weaknesses will find support and his family will not be blamed for his failures.’

4. What is your school doing to ensure a smooth transition? • What other transitions must a child make and what adjustments to teaching need to occur to meet these challenges?

5. The new entrant teacher ‘‘The teacher of new entrants is not just minding the children until they mature, at which point they can moved on to a teacher who is really going to do some work with them. That is far from the true situation. These transitions from enormous variation in pre-school experiences to standardized school procedures and a curriculum imposed by society may be more important than any later transitions that occur in children’s schooling.

6. For children the first year at school is a very important time and the teacher who helps them make the initial transitions is a very important person.’ • What does your school do to ensure the new entrant teacher is highly experienced and trained? • Where do these first teachers learn their trade?

7. The five year old. • New entrants differ more, one from another, than at any other time for the next few years.’ • ‘-there are few children who do not show maturity in some respect, and no children entering school who have not learned anything.’

8. How can the behaviours that the child does control be translated in to behaviours that are: • ｷUseful for learning beginning reading and writing • ｷCommon to a group of children who can be instructed together?’ • Are you identifying and working with the children’s strengths or working with a ‘deficit model?’

9. Three steps to prevention 1. The first step towards reading and writing is to have good preschool experiences available to all children.’ 2.The second essential step in the prevention of literacy problems is to have a good curriculum for literacy learning in the early years of school taught by well-trained teachers. 3.The third step involves three things; A check… access to a second chance intervention,… and longer term help for the few children whose problems have not been solved.

10. In the first three years at school, educators have their one and only chance to upset the correlation between intelligence measures and literacy progress or between initial progress and later progress. • These steps reflect the MoE’s literacy strategy. Does your school have these three steps to prevention?

11. A teacher’s job…is always to bridge from the known to the new. There really is no other choice. Children are who they are. They know what they know. They bring what they bring. Our job is not to wish that students knew more or knew differently. Our job is to turn students’ knowledge and the diversity of knowledge we encounter into a curricular strength rather than an instructional inconvenience. We can do that only if we hold high expectations for all students, convey great respect for the knowledge and culture they bring to the classroom, and offer lots of support in helping achieve those expectations.

12. Authentic tasks. • Continuous text: ‘In psychological terms reading continuous text is a sequential solving process involving a network of interacting systems. Working on texts in either reading and writing, provides opportunities to develop this network.

13. Authentic tasks. • Item knowledge: Letters, words and punctuation (visual signposts). ‘Even though beginning readers and writers have small vocabularies of known words, any letter work or word work they are asked to do should arise from the texts they are working on, and not from the teacher’s extensive knowledge of the English dictionary. If something is to be recognised again then it should pop up in different contexts.’

14. Draft Literacy Learning Progressions after six months at school.Reading: • Recognize approximately twenty-five high frequency words automatically in and out of context. am see look me he like at school my come to the you can be a shouted mother father this my mum are from can

15. is I we Dad in it out look up his she an where here said with big little play on wake No go going went • What are the implications/expectations?

16. Draft Literacy Learning Progressions after six months at school:Writing • Identify all letters by name and match some lettersto sounds( reading?) and sounds to letters or identify a word that begins with that sound.

17. Observation survey results places the average band of children identifying letters in some way (any of the above) as: 5.00-5.50: Stanine 5 (43-49 letters) 5.51-6.00: Stanine 5 (52/54 letters) 6.01-6.05: Stanine 5 (52/54 letters) 6.51-7.00: Stanine 4/5 (53 letters)

18. Talking, reading and writing are interconnected. • ‘I argue that when we speak or listen to speech, we are constructing or composing; when we write any message, we are constructing and composing; when we read text we are again constructing and composing. The demands of each three activities are slightly different but each feeds into one pool of structural possibilities in the language.’ M.M Clay

19. Draft Literacy Learning Progressions places the two literacies (reading and writing) side by side and does not include oral language. However it does make some strong statements about their interconnectedness.

20. Neural pathways or circuits in the brain • ‘The human brain might be thought of as fiendishly generating rules and probabilities in counter-espionage against all those educators who are busily driving towards segregated component skills for three separated curriculum subjects: speaking reading and writing.

21. The… teacher’s task is to analyse the child’s learning in order to shape his encounters with language. The child should learn about constructing words and taking words apart in many places in many lessons. The aim of this work with words in isolation is to have him know about how words work and be able to use this awareness while reading and while writing. To be able to work on words in isolation is not enough; the reader and writer must also be able to handle those words flexibly in continuous texts.

22. Acquiring Literacy. • ‘It would be false to assume that a central processing system for literacy already exists in the brain when the child begins literacy learning. • ‘Think of children as building a network or system for working on print that becomes smart enough to extend itself.’ • Clay..defined the reading of continuous texts as ‘a message-getting, problem-solving activity which increases in power and flexibility the more it is practised.’ …most readers will take three or more years to reach the point where they can extend their own reading competencies with little help.

23. Processing the four sources of information • ‘There are many sources of information in texts. …Teachers pay particular attention to four kinds of information that young readers must learn to look for. Different kinds of information may be checked, one against another to confirm a response.’

24. Meaning : Does it make sense? • Structure/Grammar: Can we say it that way? • Visual : Does that look right? Sounds Say it. What can you hear? What would you expect to see?

25. The ways of solving in writing. • Fluency-accumulating a writing vocabulary. Gaining control over words used frequently writing shifting from laborious scribbling to fluent production. Being able to write many words with minimal attention frees the child’s attention to solving new novel words.

26. Analogy-it is helpful for the child to try to construct a new word because it is like another word he knows e.g cat-sat, cat-catch, cat-caterpillar • Boxes-hearing and recording the sounds of words in sequence e.g xma / eczema axing/asking bot / boat • English orthography-the teacher demonstrates particular features of English. No child could be expected to work these out for himself. Gradually the child will come to use them appropriately e.g Double consonants, inflections, unusual spellings (who)

27. Strategic activity in reading • Teachers aim to produce independent readers whose reading and writing improve whenever they read and write. • Children become independent: • If early behaviours are appropriate, secure, fast and habituated • If children learn to monitor their own reading and writing • If they search for several kinds of information in word sequences, in longer stretches of meaning and in letter sequences.

28. If they discover new things for themselves • If they check that one kind of information fits with other available information • If they repeat themselves as if to confirm what they have read or written • If they correct themselves, taking the initiative for making all the information they find fit the word they decide upon • If they solve new words through their own strategic activity. • By some intricate process of connecting up and integrating the elaborate networks of several strategic activities children increase their speed of processing.

29. Learning is not linear. • ‘As children work on simple texts they solve complex problems and become able to read slightly more difficult texts. Teachers provide a gradient of difficulty in texts and tasks intended to gradually lift the children’s problem-solving. This seems to be just what is needed if children are to construct a self-extending system (an effective neural network) for reading. If you successfully solve the problems of a simpletask then this prepares you to tackle a more complex problem at a higher level.’

30. New learning can create a disturbance in an old response that had seemed to be learned. If learning were just a matter of adding bits of knowledge to our memory banks this would not happen. When a response is controlled by a pattern of movements (and a network of brain reactions) it is not surprising that the established pattern could be disturbed by adding a new component to the pattern. It takes a little time to rearrange the old learning. And at times when two old ways of working seem to combine into one, the entire process might become uncertain for a time.

31. Transitions-implications for teaching • Pre-school to school • Class to class (often after a holiday break) • Teacher to teacher ( often after a holiday break)

32. Acknowledge the child’s processing system can be stressed by these moves. • Acknowledge that the earlier in the development of the processing system (with newly or incompletely formed neural pathways) the more likely the child will slip/slump backwards. These pathways will return quickly • With stronger, well established processing this is less likely and the child might make gains during this time.