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Developing early literacy: Assessment and teaching
thing and knowing how to label and display this knowledge. In general, it has been assumed by educators that whatever it is that mainstream school-oriented homes have, these other homes don’t have it; thus these children are not from the literate tradition and are not as likely to succeed in school. The following is a condensed account of the three communities.
Maintown Children growing up in mainstream communities like Maintown are expected to develop habits and values which show their membership in a ‘literate society’. The children learn certain customs, beliefs and skills in early enculturation experiences with written materials; the bedtime story is a major literacy event which helps set patterns of behaviour that recur through the life of mainstream children and adults. Children have years of repeated practice with talking about books and taking meaning from books. They know how to display or show the teacher their skills and strategies, and have learned to listen and wait for cues from the teacher that signal when it is appropriate to display this knowledge. Heath comments that children in the years before school have been enculturated into: All those habits associated with ‘what’ explanations Selective attention to items of the written text Appropriate interactional styles for orally displaying all the know-how of their literate orientation to the environment. This learning has been fine tuned and its habits are highly interdependent. Patterns of behaviours learned in one setting or at one stage r eappear again and again as these children learn to use oral and written language in literacy events and to bring their knowledge to bear in school-acceptable ways (p. 79). 1 2 3
In Maintown there is a focus on what-explanations. What is the word? What is the book about? And children have learned to pick out topic sentences, write outlines and answer standardised tests which ask for the correct titles for stories and so on. They have internalised diverse ways of talking about and taking meaning from books.
Roadville Adults in Roadville believed that teaching children the proper use of words and understanding the meaning of the written word are important for success. Adults repeat the learning of literacy events they have known as children—for example, they might talk about how their parents had insisted they ‘read it right, say it right’. Children are not encouraged to move their understanding of books into other situational contexts or to apply it in their general knowledge of the