Developing early literacy
CASE STUDY
— Sean Sean was interested in watching cartoons and videos and he had a very large video library. He liked to draw fighting machines and cartoon characters. Before he started school his mother thought that he had a learning difficulty when compared to his older brother. Most people she spoke to about Sean said to let him take his time and develop at his own pace. In preschool Sean spoke in short phrases and was hard to understand. Sometimes he communicated with gestures and by touching or grabbing people, and he sounded a lot like cartoon characters on television. When Sean began school his mother spent a lot of time at the school. She was very worried about how Sean was settling in and coping with the routines. If Sean was interested in a topic or a book the teacher had read aloud, he would engage. If he wasn’t interested he sabotaged instruction to get out of school work which he didn’t want to do—already he felt a failure. As he battled to gain respect from his peers he developed his great sense of slapstick humour, carefully honed by repeated watching of videos. After several months in school Sean struggled when reading a simple book with one- or two-word captions. He knew a few letters like S, N, E and A, the ones in his name. He had a small number of familiar high-frequency words that he could read. Over the next few years, Sean became more alienated from school. He felt a failure in the academic world and his mother was frustrated by this and paid for phonics-based tutoring outside school hours. But school was not a happy place for Sean and by the second year of school he had been suspended three times. Should more time be given to wait for Sean to develop? What does Sean do well? He does have quite a large vocabulary but it takes time and trust to access this. He knows a lot about cartoon plots, characters, sound effects. Would using Sean’s interest in cartoons and helping him construct simple oral sentences then writing them down on sentence strips to create early language experience texts be a useful way for Sean to progress? Sean required intervention very early on, before formal schooling. His language development in preschool showed that there were only some words that he used confidently. Support was needed at this stage as it is very difficult for children who speak in one- or two-word sentences to move confidently into learning how to read and write.
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