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Developing early literacy: Assessment and teaching
Shared book is a joyful experience with rich texts, and it is important to use it in conjunction with guided reading of smaller levelled books. Holdaway points out that shared book experience procedures help to relieve some of the teacher’s strain from hectic, joyless guided reading sessions—sometimes with four different groups—because it injects lively group learning and enjoyment.
The language experience approach The language experience approach (LEA) became popular in the 1970s (Allen 1976) when children began to read texts composed from their own oral language. Children first dictate a story about a personal experience to the teacher who writes it down. The teacher reads the story back to the children and then gives them the opportunity to read it themselves. Children can illustrate the story and perhaps compile a book or a class book of stories. Language experience is based on the following principles:
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What I can think I can say. What I can say can be written down by myself or others What is written down can be read by me and by others.
Language experience comes from the experiences of children, their homes and communities. Many children like to talk about then have the teacher write their dictated stories about their holidays and weekend activities. This can become monotonous so it is important to arrange rich experiences such as trips to the zoo or bringing tadpoles and frogs into the classroom. These experiences then provide topics to discuss and write about. In New Zealand, Silvia Ashton-Warner wrote the book Teacher in 1965, about working with rural Maori children using the language experience approach. She found that the beginning reading books published in England and supplied to the school in the 1960s had little to do with the children’s lives, with sentences such as ‘John, see the house. “It is my house,” said Sally’. To engage the children, Ashton-Warner provided them with words that powerfully engaged them, words from the centre of their deepest fantasies—kiss, fight, beer, hit, Mum, aeroplane, fast, car, blood, skeleton (Holdaway 1979). These once-seen-never-forgotten words established an initial vocabulary for both reading and writing, and were written down on cards in a personal file for the children. Sometimes the cards were all mixed up and children had to find their own cards to read to each other and their friends.
