The literacy program
Digital language experience (D-LEA) makes use of digital cameras to record experiences (Labbo, Eakle & Monterro 2002). Children may use a digital camera to take photographs that are printed out and displayed, and they can dictate the language experience story to accompany the photographs. This can later be made into a book for the children to read or into smaller books so that each child has a copy to take home to read with their parents. In some classrooms, the children use Kid Pix to create slide show presentations of their experiences using digital photographs, print and sound to represent their experiences.
The value of language experience The language experience approach is useful for making connections between oral language and written language in meaningful ways for children; however, it overlooks an important idea that oral language is not the same as written language. Oral language takes place in particular social situations where intonation, facial expressions and gestures contribute to the meaning. Written language has developed conventions to avoid ambiguity and to clarify meanings that may be provided by gesture and vocal tone. Also, the conversations about everyday events often deal with just that, everyday events such as visits to friends on the weekend, whereas written language is more difficult to produce and is often about more memorable events written about in words that convey special and exciting meanings. Language experience has an important part to play, but rich literature experiences and learning from information books provide vocabulary, new syntax patterns and meanings not found in everyday conversations. As Holdaway (1979) states: ‘If the labours of learning to deal with written language are to be thought worthwhile by the learners, they must be rewarded by special meanings and satisfactions such as those stemming form exciting stories or patterned language’ (p. 29), and I would add information books as well.
Guided reading Guided reading involves a teacher working with a group of four to six children reading individual copies of the same text. The texts are selected by the teacher to be at the children’s learning level (see page 96). They have some challenges, and the teacher prepares the children to use a range of problem solving strategies to read the text. The texts used over successive sessions should have a careful gradient of difficulty. A procedure for guided reading follows.
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