Inquiry into the Teaching of Reading
Submission from Early Childhood Australia
The Inquiry into the Teaching of Reading has generated significant interest throughout Early Childhood Australia. We canvassed each of our state and territory Branches asking them what they thought were the principles that should underpin the approach taken to the issues confronting the Inquiry. Not surprisingly there was a great deal of uniformity in the response.
This submission will not canvass the detail of the issues raised as these are well documented in the literature. Rather it will outline the broad principles that the ECA believes should underpin national efforts to engage young children in the process of becoming literate.
Reading and writing are interrelated and connected to other activities that the young child engages with to make meaning of experience, such as speaking and listening, drawing and playing. To separate the teaching of reading from broader issues involved in literacy learning is problematic and opens up the prospect of a decontextualised approach to the teaching of reading. Such an approach would ignore the ways a child has been ‘learning literacy' from infancy and fail to capitalise on the ‘funds' of knowledge she/he brings to the formal learning setting. For this reason this submission will speak to the task of ensuring that children become literate which is the best way to ensure that they read with a sense of agency and competence.
Literacy development is a social and cultural process the foundations for which are laid in a child's earliest experiences.
In thinking about how best to support young children to become literate it is important to remember that children grow and learn in their families and in their communities. Literacy learning is a social and cultural practice and therefore, learning outcomes are dependent on the quality and nature of the interactions that occur in home and everyday settings.
Literacy starts at birth. It is grounded in the need and ability to communicate.
The emotional foundations for learning are laid in these earliest experiences. The findings of recent “Brain Research” verify this – much of which has been documented as part of the development of the Government's National Agenda for Young Children. This research indicates unequivocally that trusting, caring relationships with known adults generate the neurological activity, (connections) which are the foundation for all future growth and development. Literacy development is enhanced when adults provide such a safe and stimulating environment and initiate communication with even very young children. Such adults respond to a child's attempts to communicate from the earliest years, with excitement, support and challenge.
Any approach to literacy development then must value family and community literacy practices, including the development and maintenance of a child's first language, and build on these in early learning settings. Young children acquire literacy knowledge as they participate in activities where literacy is used to meet everyday needs.
Effective literacy education recognises that family understanding and support is an essential foundation for young children's literacy learning.
All families have a rich repertoire of literacy practices, but the practices of different cultural and sub-cultural groups do not always connect strongly with ‘school literacy'. Middle class families can be said to engage in more ‘school like' oral language practices, use writing for a wider range of purposes, read more literature to children and more explicitly draw attention to print and how written language works. Some children have more of a struggle to make the transition from family and community literacies, to school literacies. Although there is no one pathway to literacy development what is clear is that all children need the richest possible literacy environment, before and out of school if they are to become literate.
It is very much a case of ‘schools being ready for children' as well as children being ready for school. Ensuring this will require approaches that connect with less privileged families and learners, that recognise and value what parents are doing already and build their capacity and confidence in their ability to support their children's literacy development. The clever thing will be to provide support for this in a way that engages rather than patronises or stigmatises. It is essential that real partnerships with families be negotiated.
The building of a literacy, or indeed any partnership, with hard to reach families is fundamentally about capacity building. ECA believes that capacity building is about supporting people/services/organisations (communities) to develop the confidence and skills necessary for them to achieve their purpose, in this case supporting young children to become literate.
Capacity is best built when existing relationships and expertise are leveraged. This is because capacity building best takes place within the framework of relationships that have a history where the player's commitment, capability and competence are known. Inherent in relationships is the potential to share, learn and create and sustain a conscious flow of information across the organisations and between people. This principle is fundamental to programs that can be sustained across generations within disadvantaged communities. Such approaches are not cost free or cost neutral and will require a commitment that is sustained over time. There are programs already in place as the Learning Together program in South Australia that seek to do this.
The foundations of literacy are in oral language
The development of literacy (including the capacity to read) is a social process with understandings about the spoken word, visual and written language constructed through interaction with others. The process of becoming literate begins with the first sounds a child hears, the first words spoken and continues throughout life. The significance of the spoken word and listening in the development of literacy (including the capacity to read) is fundamental. 'Phonological awareness – the explicit awareness of the sound structure of the language is the most accurate predictor of reading achievement' (Ericson and Julebo International reading Association, 1998) Children who have difficulty identifying individual sounds in words, have problems in reading new words and connected text.
Families, and even educators may have lost sight of the value of songs, rhymes, jingles and games in building children's awareness of sounds. Having children recite rhymes in a fun environment, talking about which sounds are the same, clapping syllables and identifying words that start with the same sounds and words that rhyme, are all enjoyable activities, available to all families and learning settings. When children have also learned about alphabet letters, and experienced modelled and shared reading and writing, they learn to ‘map' letters against speech – they are becoming readers and writers.
Supporting children to become literate requires early childhood qualified professionals, in children's services, preschools and the early years of school who have a deep understanding of the process of becoming literate and how to engage young children in literacy learning.
Becoming literate is a complex, non-linear process. Early childhood services, preschools and the early years of school clearly play a major role in supporting children's literacy development. They do this best when:
- They work in partnership with families and communities,
- They recognise literacy development as a component of all aspects young children's experience which cannot be quarantined to particular part of the school or early childhood service day and,
- They have a deep understanding of how literacy develops and detailed understanding of how early childhood pedagogy, supports that development.
There are no short cuts to becoming literate and there are no substitutes for being supported in this process by teachers who know what they are doing.
There are real challenges to providing this support to young children in early childhood services and schools. The challenge comes from at least two directions.
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With the exception of preschool services and long day care centres in NSW early childhood specialist teachers are not mandated in early childhood services. At the same time the specialist early childhood teacher is disappearing and is no longer a mandated requirement in early years classrooms in schools across the country. What this means is that many people who have direct responsibility for the growth and development of young children in these settings do not have a deep understanding of how literacy develops and how to support that development. Literacy development is hampered in such circumstances.
There are no simple solutions to this problem. What is needed are some short term strategies to support staff currently working in services and the early years of schools to transform their setting into environments in which young children can be immersed in the experiences that are essential to the process of becoming literate. Such support will need to be ongoing and require the provision of early childhood leadership.
Longer term strategies to strengthen and ensure the robustness of specialist early childhood degrees, including an intense focus on the literacy and how it develops will be necessary to obviate this problem in the future. At the same time school systems and licensing authorities for early childhood services will need to put in place a policies and regulations which require that people who have direct responsibility for children learning in the early years to have early childhood degrees.
Parents need to be confident that what is being done in early childhood services and schools will enable children to be active and successful participants in a world where being literate is essential. This means that principals, teachers and others who are responsible for young children need to be able to speak with confidence about what is happening in their classrooms and why and what contribution this makes to literacy development. If they do not understand well the multiple pathways to becoming literate this will not be possible and parents will be legitimately concerned.
There is strong evidence to suggest that teacher expectation is a key component in children's literacy success and that there is often a low level of expectation for the learning of less privileged children. Expectation tailors success – it is a self fulfilling prophesy.
At the same time some children starting school have not had the early literacy experiences that will enable them to be successful in the school environment. The temptation here is to turn to short term specific programs to remediate this problem. There is not much evidence that such programs result in gains that are sustained much beyond the period of the program.
Other approaches which set, reading for instance, within the framework of the social process of becoming literate and recognise the significance of family and cultural relationships need to be developed and tested through action research with capable teachers.
Such programs will undoubtedly require some reduction of the teacher:child ratios in the classrooms. Without this support even knowledgeable and capable early childhood teachers will struggle with the task of engaging alienated young children in the processes for becoming literate.
Children's early literacy development is too important to leave to chance.
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