Handbook of Children’s Literacy PDF
Preview Handbook of Children’s Literacy
HANDBOOK OF CHILDREN'S LITERACY Handbook of Children's Literacy Edited by Terezinha Nunes Peter Bryant ~. " SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-90-481-6422-6 ISBN 978-94-017-1731-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-1731-1 Printed an acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved © 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 2004 No part of this publication may be reproduced or utIiized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Table of Contents Introduction to the Handbook Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant A. LITERACY: BASIC PROCESSES IN DEVELOPMENT Introduction 3 Peter Bryant & Terezinha Nunes AI. Childhood Conceptions of Literacy 11 Liliana Tolchinsky A2. Phonology and Spelling 31 Rebecca Treiman A3. Linguistic Processes in Reading and Spelling: The Case of Alphabetic Writing Systems: English, French, German and Spanish 43 Liliane Sprenger-Charolles A4. Connectionist Models of Children's Reading 67 Gordon D.A. Brown & Nick Chater A5. Morphology and Spelling 91 Peter Bryant & Terezinha Nunes A6. Children's Self-Perception as Readers 119 Ursula Pretzlik & Lily Chan B. READING AND WRITING TEXTS: AN OVERVIEW Introduction 149 Alison F. Garton & Chris Pratt Bl. The Development of Comprehension Skills 155 J. V. Oakhill & K. Cain B2. Text and Cognition 181 Michel Fayol B3. The Use of Context in Learning to Read 199 William E. Tunmer & James W. Chapman v VI Table of Contents B4. Reading Stories 213 Alison F. Garton & Chris Pratt B5. Computers and Writing 229 Gavriel Salomon, Ely Ko::minsky & Merav Asaf C. NON-NORMATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN'S LITERACY C I. Reading and Spelling Difficulties 249 Carsten Elhro C2. The Concept of Dyslexia 257 Severine Casali.l· C3. Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Brain Research 275 Nicky Brunswick C4. Epidemiology: Genetic and Social Influences on Reading Ability 293 Jim Stevenson C5. Reading Comprehension Difficulties 313 Kate Cain & Jane Oakhil/ C6. Early Identification 319 Carsten Elbro & Hollis S. Scarborough C7. Early Intervention 361 Carsten Elbro and Hollis S. Scarborough CS. Individual Differences in Dyslexia 383 Margaret 1. SnoH'ling & Yvonne M. Griffiths C9. Specific Speech and Language Difficulties and Literacy 403 Julie E. Dockrell & Geoff Lindsay ClO. Reading by Touch in Blind Children and Adults 437 Susanna Millar CIL Deafness and Reading 459 Jesus Alegria D. LITERACY CONCEPTS AND INSTRUCTION Introduction: Teaching Literacy: What Practices, When and Why') 493 Anne-Marie Chattier Table of Contents VB Dl. Literacy in Time and Space: Issues, Concepts and Definitions 499 Daniel A. Wagner D2. Teaching Reading: A Historical Approach 511 Anne-Marie Chartier D3. The Cognitive Consequences of Literacy 539 David R. Olson D4. Comparative Studies of Instructional Methods 557 Jane Hurry D5. Early Emergent Literacy 575 Madelon Saada-Robert D6. The Linguistic Consequences of Literacy 599 Jose Morais & Regine Kolinsky E. LOOKING ACROSS LANGUAGES Introduction 625 Terezinha Nunes El. Phonological Awareness and Learning to Read: 631 A Cross-Linguistic Perspective Sylvia Deflor E2. Morphology, Reading and Spelling: Looking Across Languages 651 Terezinha Nunes & Giyoo Hatano E3. Bilingualism and Reading 673 Linda Siegel E4. Grammatical Awareness Across Languages and the Role of Social 691 Context: Evidence from English and Hebrew Miriam Bindman E5. Literacy, Socialisation and the Social Order 711 Krishna Kumar E6. Segmentation in the Writing of Mayan Language Statements 721 by Indigenous Children with Primary Schooling Alejandra Pellicer E7. Paths to Literacy for Deaf British Sign Language (BSL) Users 741 Diana Burman & Ursula Pretzlik Index 767 Introduction to the Handbook TEREZINHA NUNES & PETER BRYANT Handbooks offer invaluable contributions to novices as well as to experts in a domain. A review of research is always handy to the expert and is a way into expertise for a novice. Handbooks may have a more specific focus: handbooks and useful collections have been compiled on word spelling, dyslexia, or reading acquisition in bilingual contexts. We felt that it was time to edit a handbook that allowed the multifaceted nature of children's literacy to come to the foreground. By including such different sections as non-normative literacy learning and looking across languages, basic processes in word reading and text comprehension, and by looking at language instruction across time, we wish to make it salient that children's literacy is a phenomenon that must be investigated from a variety of perspectives, with diverse methods and in order to answer different questions. No single method, no isolated theory, no unique educational input can be expected to explain children's literacy. The variety and creativity of methods for investigating children's reading and writing increased considerably in the second half of the last century. This variety is represented in the Handbook, where readers will come across experiments using a diversity of measures, predictive studies, qualitative analyses of children's performance, intervention studies, and investigations of the social and historical contexts for the teaching of literacy. The editors who contributed to the organisation of the Handbook ensured that their sections offer this refreshing breadth of coverage of methods so that no generalisations about the elephant are made from exploring only its tail. Theoretical accounts of children's literacy have also become increasingly more sophisticated in the last few decades. A major shift in the thinking about what is involved in literacy was accomplished when teachers, clinicians and researchers ceased to view reading and writing as simple perceptual and motor skills reinforced through repetition. When literacy became conceptualised as a linguistic and representational ability, new insights into its nature, development and the reasons for children's difficulty in literacy acquisition became possible. Literacy is now thought of as a generative ability: once we learn to read and spell, our reading and spelling are not restricted to the identification and production of the specific words we learned, we can read and spell words that we never saw before in print. We can even read and spell words that we never heard before. The processes of literacy acquisition must be conceived in a way that is in keeping with the generative and representational nature of literacy. Thus new theorising about literacy acquisition has explored from a progressively more varied range of perspectives the connections between oral and written language. These varied perspectives are represented in different chapters in the Handbook, and include x Introduction to the Handbook phonological, morphological, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language. Children's reading and spelling problems, the different authors show, can come from any of these aspects, which may be more important at one level of analysis than at others. Phonological and morphological analyses are emphasised in English more when the word level is concerned whereas the grammatical and pragmatic level (including inference making and genre issues) are discussed more often at the sentence and text level of analysis. The Handbook will bring the readers further than these cognitive issues would on their own. Learners have motivations and individual characteristics - they come from different social backgrounds and might have different levels of exposure to print; they may have different views of themselves as learners and different levels of motivation; in today's multicultural world, they might be learning to read their mother tongue or a language which is not that of their own community; they might be bilingual in two oral languages or bilingual in an oral and a signed language; they might be blind and use a sensory input different from the visual letter we are used to. How do all these variations influence children's literacy? Will research develop methods that lead to the understanding of all of these variations just as possibilities created from similar processes or do these variations result in different processes? The authors of the different sections contribute in their own ways to this discussion. No-one is a novice to the theme they are writing and because of their expertise they can identify issues of great significance to the particular angle from which they are considering children's literacy. We invite our reader to take the risk of looking at literacy from this multiplicity of angles. The result can be the discovery of new and unsuspected angles from which to understand the phenomenon of children's literacy. A. Literacy: Basic Processes In Development Introduction PETER BRYANT & TEREZINHA NUNES The time that it takes children to learn to read varies greatly between different orthographies, as the chapter by Sprenger-Charolles clearly shows, and so do the difficulties that they encounter in learning about their own orthography. Nevertheless most people, who have the chance to learn to read, do in the end read well enough, even though a large number experience some significant difficulties on the way. Most of them eventually become reasonably efficient spellers too, even though they go on make spelling mistakes (at any rate if they are English speakers) for the rest of their lives. So, the majority of humans plainly does have intellectual resources that are needed for reading and writing, but it does not always find these resources easy to marshal. What are these resources? Do any of them have to be acquired? Do different orthographies make quite different demands on the intellect? Do people differ significantly from each other in the strength and accessibility of these resources? If they do, are these differences an important factor in determining children's success in learning to read and write? These are the main questions that the different chapters in this section on Basic Processes set out to answer. In their quest for these answers, most of the chapters in this section concentrate on the beginnings of reading, and there are good reasons for their doing so. One powerful reason is the possibility that some of the basic processes in reading are not natural processes - not the product of an innate system or of children's informal experiences in the environment. Some basic processes may have to be acquired. They may simply not be part of our intellectual apparatus before we begin to learn to read and we may only acquire them as a result of being taught reading and spelling. We certainly need to know which basic processes in reading are a natural part of a young child's cognitive apparatus, and which they have to acquire, perhaps with great difficulty. One possible candidate for a basic process which comes to children only through the experiences that they have when learning to read is the process of detecting, analysing and manipulating phonemes. The case for this claim has often been stated and many of the arguments for it are re-stated in this section's chapters. First of all there is a strong and totally uncontroversial relationship between children's performance in phoneme judgement tasks and the progress that they make in learning to read: the more sensitive and skilled children are in these phoneme tasks, the better readers and spellers they tend to 3 T. Nunes. P. Bryant (eds.). Handbook oJChzldren·s Lueracy. 3-10 lQ 2004 Kluwer AcademiC Publlshers
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