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For many, the experiences gained by most Australian children prior to starting school don't match what the school literacy program expects of them. Marcelle Holliday looks at what makes an effective literacy program for school beginners.

Five-year-old Josh loves Wednesdays—the day he goes shopping with his mum. Right after breakfast, Mum writes the list while Josh checks the cupboards. At the supermarket they look for the special things they like: little cheese triangles with the red cow on the front and dog food tins with the picture of the labrador just like their Sophie. At the checkout, Josh watches as the words and pictures come up on the screen. He knows the numbers tell how much it will cost.

Then to the bank. While Mum waits in the queue, Josh sits at the table just for kids and fills in a form. He writes his name at the top 'JOSH'. He can't write his last name, 'Jackson', but he knows it starts the same way as 'Josh' and has some of the same letters. Then he writes a number with lots of zeros to stand for lots of dollars.

Afterwards, Josh and Mum go to a café. He loves looking at the menu and asking Mum what each thing is, but he always orders the same thing: toasted fingers with cheese and tomato. He knows how to find it on the menu and order it himself.

On the way home, Josh looks out for his new school, the 'big' school where he'll go next year. He's already been there and seen his classroom. He's excited about learning to read. Soon he'll be reading stories to Dad instead of the other way round.

So, is Josh's excitement about 'big' school justified? Will he soon be the one to read the bedtime story? Let's look at what he already knows and can do.

Firstly, Josh knows what literacy is and what it's for. He knows people use reading and writing in their daily lives to get things done; Josh is already doing some of the things that literate people do.

He knows people expect the texts they encounter to make sense. He sees his parents use texts to communicate with other people and find things out.

He knows what texts look like: they can contain print, pictures and audio, and they can be presented in many different ways, including on paper and on screen. He knows people use texts created by others, and they can also create texts of their own.

He knows texts can tell stories: funny, exciting, scary and sad. He's familiar with books, TV and movies and he knows that the words, pictures and sound all contribute to telling the story. He knows which part is the print and which is the picture, and he can identify some of the letters.

Josh is learning about his immediate world and, through books, TV and the Internet, is starting to learn about the wider world. He's beginning to learn vocabulary for naming and describing things. He uses spoken language in meaningful ways and has control over much of the grammar of his home language.

Most importantly, Josh sees literacy, in all its forms, as an integral part of his life. For him, literacy is just part of how the world is.

So, what type of school program will help Josh make the best use of what he already knows and can do? Will it build on his obvious skills and knowledge, or will it teach him that learning to read and write at school bears little relation to what he knows about literacy in the real world?

Will Josh experience a packaged program that is the same for every child in the class, or will he and the other children experience instruction targeted to their individual needs? Will children, whose early literacy experiences don't match the predetermined school program, fall further behind as they struggle to make sense of instruction designed with someone else in mind? Will children who can already read have to sit through lessons on content they already know?

If Josh and his classmates are to continue to develop as purposeful literacy learners, able to construct and interpret texts in a 21st century world, they need a rich and balanced literacy program that acknowledges and builds on their prior knowledge and experiences.

What would an effective literacy program for Josh and his classmates look like? The program would include a variety of experiences in which literary, factual and multimodal texts are used for real purposes in real contexts. Students would have experiences that demonstrate how different texts serve different cultural purposes and are therefore structured in different ways. Josh and his classmates would work with a range of interesting and entertaining texts including narratives, poetry, factual texts and multimodal texts of many types.

The children in Josh's class would need carefully structured learning experiences, built around whole texts, to help them develop knowledge of the four sources of information that contribute to effective reading.

These experiences would build on:

• semantic knowledge: knowledge of the world, specific topics, word meanings, common expressions, subject-specific vocabulary and figurative language;
• grammatical knowledge: understanding how words and word groups operate to construct coherent and meaningful texts;
• graphophonic knowledge: understanding how the sounds of the language (phonemes) are represented in print (graphemes);
• visual/pictorial knowledge: understanding how illustrations, including still and moving images, work together with print to construct meaning.

The children will need many structured experiences to learn how to draw on and integrate information from these four sources, fluently and automatically, in order to decode and construct meaning from texts. They will need shared reading experiences in which the teacher involves them in structured demonstrations of what effective readers know and do when decoding and constructing meaning from text. Explicit instruction in small guided reading groups, using texts matched to their reading level, will provide opportunities to focus on specific semantic, grammatical, graphophonic and visual/pictorial learning and to practise effective processing strategies. Hearing texts read aloud will enable them to hear how different types of texts sound, and to discuss how these texts employ different print and pictorial features to construct meaning. And independent reading will enable them to experience many enjoyable texts and to practise the reading skills and strategies they are learning.

Josh and his classmates will need daily writing experiences for a range of authentic audiences and purposes. Model texts, joint and independent construction of texts and reflection on the features through which texts construct meaning, will help them learn to construct a variety of texts for a range of purposes.

For Josh and his classmates, literacy achievement in the first year of school is crucial to their future success. Programs which expect all children to do the same tasks in the same way will leave many children struggling and unable to cope, and others bored and stifled. Differentiated programs, which recognise that children begin school with different knowledge and understandings, provide the best scenario for continued growth and success. And programs which treat literacy learning as a print-only school-based activity, separate from the new and divergent ways that literacy is used in today's world, will simply prepare children for a world that no longer exists. By involving children, from their first year at school, in literacy activities that mirror how literacy is used in today's world, teachers help to lay the best foundation for students' future success.

References

Hill, S (2005). Multiliteracies in Early Childhood, University of South Australia, www.plsa.plain.net.au

Louden, W, Rohl, M, Barratt Pugh, C, Brown, C, Cairney, T, Elderfield, J, House, J, Meiers, M, Rivalland, J & Rowe, K (2005). 'In Teachers' Hands: Effective Teaching Practices in the Early Years of Schooling', Australian Journal of Literacy and Learning, DEST, Canberra. www.dest.gov.au

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EQ Autumn 2007 © Curriculum Corporation

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