LITERACY LEARNING
A well-rounded literacy programme for the early grades aims to interleave child-led exploration with a lot of guided practice. Component skills of literacy to master include symbol knowledge, reading accuracy, reading fluency, spelling, reading comprehension and narrative writing.
Equally important is mastery in the spoken language (e.g., vocabulary knowledge, listening comprehension and grammar knowledge). There is a rich interconnectedness between the many subskills of language and literacy.
We see language and literacy teaching as drawing upon the cultural traditions that children and their teachers come from. Programmes for literacy learning must be sensitive to the child’s context. In other words, we are concerned when a literacy programme is borrowed wholesale from another context. Similarly, translating a literacy programme from one language to another is problematic.
We are also concerned that tests of literacy attainments find resonance within the culture, context and language of the child.
Emergent Literacy and Early Childhood Education
Programmes to support and promote emergent literacy typically come bundled within an early childhood programme. These programmes are typically offered to children between the ages of three and six. We see our early childhood programmes as Stimulation Intervention Programmes (SIP).
A poorly thought through curriculum for Early Childhood Education (ECE) may leave a child in a resource poor setting doubly disadvantaged.
- Firstly , the ECE programme may not sympathetically bring the home culture and the social realities of participating children into the ECE setting. Ignoring of the child’s home and community experiences makes the school distant from the child’s lived reality.
- Secondly, the programme may not include enough general information from the larger world. When the curriculum is narrow and simplistic, then information that may be common knowledge for similar-age children in resource-rich settings may not be available to other children because these topics are also not part of their routine discourse in the home and community.
Our programmes attempt to create a balance between local experiences and information from a wider world.
Deepening and Widening Children’s Skills
Skills and knowledge around spoken language gained during early childhood go a long way in supporting later literacy development. These links between early spoken language and later written language skill attainments is true for all children, but particularly important for children in resource-poor settings. We have repeatedly found that reading comprehension attainments of primary and middle school children in resource-poor settings are low. There are several reasons for these attainment gaps. We highlight two.
- Authors often assume the child has prior knowledge about some elements in their story or essay. However, children from resource poor homes such prior knowledge may not be easily available to them. They may not have encountered these types of information in school, at home, or in their neighborhood.
- Children may have fallen behind in different domains of linguistic knowledge. Children from resource poor homes are often disadvantaged in their knowledge of the ‘formal’ sentence structures and the type of vocabulary found in written language. This is often because they have very few books to read and little or no discussion around books.
Our approach to developing an emergent literacy curriculum as part of ECE attempts to deepen and widen the roots for later linguistic fluency.