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Developing early literacy: Assessment and teaching
Emergent reading using predictable materials CASE STUDY
— Jennie Four-year-old Jennie listened and watched the pages turn as the preschool teacher read the story she had heard over and over again. When Jennie heard the words ‘and Drummer Hoff …’, she cried out ‘fired it off’. Jennie is processing the printed page in the same way as a competent mature reader. She is employing predicting, sampling, confirming and disconfirming strategies as she responds to the predictable language structure of the book. Later Jennie may take Barbara Emberley’s Drummer Hoff and read it to herself or a friend. She will point to the lines of print with her finger, pause at each page and look at the picture, and at times she may trace each word as she speaks it aloud. Jennie is learning that reading is not only a lot of fun but it is also a way to communicate and share experiences with another, be it a large audience or an audience of one.
Jennie is already involved in the process of reading as a meaninggaining, problem-solving activity which increases in power and flexibility the more it is practised (Clay 1979). Jennie is also developing hypotheses about words and their meanings and is developing strategies for improving her predictions about possible phrase and sentence combinations. She is not yet at school but she is already learning the powerful strategies of mature reading (Holdaway 1979). Learning the conventions of print related to the act of reading or to reading-related tasks are discussed by Mason (1982). These conventions include:
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knowledge of how to hold a book, turn pages and direct one’s eye while reading knowledge of terminology such as book parts (e.g. front page), location terms (top, bottom), actions (make a circle, underline), size (a big or little word) and reading words (letter, word, sentence). knowledge of rules and procedures for tasks such as reading, printing, writing and spelling.
Children may reread various predictable patterns in books. One of the simplest patterns is the repetitive structure in which a certain phrase or sentence is repeated at various parts of the story. In a more complex repetitive cumulative structure, a word, phase or sentence is repeated in each succeeding episode and each time a new word, phrase or sentence is added to the sequence. This repetitive cumulative structure is found in the tale There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly. Many predictable materials are based on sequences of cardinal and ordinal numbers, as in Ten Little Indians. Alphabet rhymes, days of the week, months of the year, colours and other common cultural sequences are often incorporated into rhymes with pattern sequences which make up predictable materials.
