Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures

247 Pages·2010·10.37 MB·English

by  Anna C. Both-de Vries

Literacy Development and Enhancement
Across Orthographies and Cultures
LITERACY STUDIES
VOLUME 2
Series Editor:
R. Malatesha Joshi, Texas A&M University,USA

Editorial Board:

Linnea Ehri, CUNY Graduate School, USA
George Hynd, Purdue University, USA
Richard Olson, University of Colorado, USA
Pieter Reitsma, Vrije University Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Rebecca Treiman, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge, UK
Jane Oakhill, University of Sussex, Brighton, JK
Philip Seymour, University of Dundee, UK
Guinevere Eden, Georgetown University Medical Center, USA
Catherine McBride Chang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
While language defines humanity, literacy defines civilization. Understandably,
illiteracy or difficulties in acquiring literacy skills have become a major concern
of our technological society. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of literacy
problems would put the figure at more than a billion people in the world. Because of
the seriousness of the problem, research in literacy acquisition and its breakdown is
pursued with enormous vigor and persistence by experts from diverse backgrounds
such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education. This, of
course, has resulted in a plethora of data, and consequently it has become difficult
to integrate this abundance of information into a coherent body because of the
artificial barriers that exist among different professional specialties. The purpose of
the proposed series is to bring together the available research studies into a coherent
body of knowledge. Publications in this series are intended for use by educators,
clinicians and research scientists in the above-mentioned specialties. Some of the
titles suitable for the Series are: fMRI, brain imaging techniques and reading skills,
orthography and literacy; and research based techniques for improving decoding,
vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension skills.
A complete list of titles published in this series can be viewed by going to the following URL:
http://www.springer.com/series/7206
Dorit Aram Ofra Korat
●
Editors
Literacy Development
and Enhancement Across
Orthographies and Cultures
Editors
Dorit Aram Ofra Korat
Constantiner School of Education School of Education
Tel Aviv University Bar-Ilan University
Tel Aviv Ramat Gan
Israel Israel
[email protected] [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-0833-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-0834-6
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0834-6
Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009940320
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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Printed on acid-free paper
Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Professor Iris Levin on her retirement. An internationally
known and influential researcher, Professor Levin is a developmental psychologist
at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She has studied early liter-
acy for over 25 years and has published many studies in leading journals. She is one
of the leaders in early literacy policy in Israel.
Before beginning her work on literacy, Dr. Levin’s work focused on children’s
growing physical concepts, particularly the concepts of time and speed, within Neo-
Piagetian and Information Processing frameworks. In this domain, she published
leading articles and edited a book with contributions by prominent researchers in
cognitive development, collaborating with Robert Siegler and Friedrich Wilkening.
Later, she turned to the development of early literacy and sociocultural factors
that shape and enhance children’s progress in this domain. Dr. Levin focused on
emergent writing and how writing initially grows from drawing. Her collaboration
with Adriana Bus enriched this work. Levin also demonstrated the major role of
letter knowledge in bridging oral and written words, and how it fuels early writing
and initial steps of reading. This work grew in collaboration with Linnea Ehri.
The study of early writing expanded to include analysis of parental mediation of
writing to kindergartners and young elementary schoolchildren, and of ways to
improve parental mediation. She demonstrated the significance of parents’ media-
tion of writing in promoting their children’s literacy, and prescribed ways to
improve this mediation. Storybook reading, another common parent–child joint
activity believed to be central in promoting language and literacy, was compared to
joint writing, showing differential effects on children’s development. This work
grew in collaboration with Dorit Aram and Ofra Korat in Israel, and with Catherine
McBride Chang in China and Liliana Tolchinsky in Spain, adding a cross-cultural
aspect to this line of research.
As an active participant in the Price Brody Initiative in Jaffa (a poor Jewish–
Arab city), she initiated, developed, and implemented literacy enhancement projects.
Within this initiative, she led a line of pioneering literacy interventions within the
Jewish and the Arab communities. This work grew in collaboration with Dorit
Aram, Elinor Saiegh Haddad, and Margalit Ziv.
Iris Levin served on several national committees dealing with early education at
large and with teaching of reading in Israel. She chaired the Levin Committee,
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vi Dedication
which developed a program for 3- to 6-year-olds in literacy and language. The
Israeli Ministry of Education endorsed this program in 2007 as a national obliga-
tory curriculum for preschoolers and kindergartners.
In addition to her academic endeavors, Iris Levin has volunteered to assist the
Clinical Unit of the School of Law at Tel Aviv University on issues of human rights
related to education. Her work has focused on equal opportunity for education for
the impoverished Bedouin population and on the humane portrayal of the gay–
lesbian community in educational television targeting youth. Her partner in this
work was the social activist and lawyer, Dori Spivak.
Not only an outstanding scientist who has maintained the highest standards for
research, Iris Levin is also an excellent and dedicated teacher who has nurtured
many students, teachers, and researchers. She is a model to many as a researcher
and as a human being. As her former students and her current colleagues, we are
honored to edit this book and to dedicate it to her.
About the Editors
Dr. Dorit Aram is an Associate Professor and head of the Special Education
Program in Tel Aviv University’s School of Education, Israel. Her research focuses
on parent–child literacy interactions and their implications for early literacy and
socioemotional development, in Hebrew and Arab communities. Addressing needs
in special populations, her work examines these interactions in parent–child dyads
of children with hearing loss, ADHD, and low socioeconomic background, and
among precocious readers. Dr. Aram has conducted early interventions aimed at
improving kindergarten and preschool teachers’ as well as parents’ mediation and
children’s early literacy. Dr. Aram has been a board member of the Israel Literacy
and Language Society from its inception and is now its president (in collaboration
with Dr. Ofra Korat).
Dr. Ofra Korat is an Associate Professor and the head of Early Childhood Program
in the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her research focuses on
early literacy experience in school and family, with special attention to the role of
parental beliefs on literacy development and education and parent–child interac-
tions in facilitating literacy development. She implements this line of studies
among diverse cultures in Israel, including Ethiopian and Arab families. She con-
ducts intervention studies to facilitate literacy development among children at risk
in language and literacy development. Her recent scholarly interests focus on the
relationship between technology and literacy. Dr. Korat has been a board member
of the Israel Literacy and Language Society from its inception and is now its presi-
dent (in collaboration with Dr. Dorit Aram).
vii
Preface
It has become increasingly clear that a country’s prosperity and cultural progress
largely depend on its level of literacy. Consequently, literacy enhancement has
become a public issue that interests readers across the world. Integrating innovative
insights from different perspectives, this book promotes cross-fertilization of ideas
and practices and explores how we might provide children with stable literacy
foundations.
For many years, the study of literacy development and enhancement was gener-
ally based on English language learners. This picture has changed dramatically in
the last two decades, and today we benefit from the intensive work of researchers
from different countries and languages. Worldwide research increasingly highlights
the role of early literacy in young children’s development and the increasing value
of literacy in general development. Moreover, massive immigration around the
world has increased the significance of studying bilingual literacy, acquisition of a
second language, and foreign language learning. Researchers from different coun-
tries and cultures have studied the relationships between their languages’ orthogra-
phies and the acquisition of literacy. In the 16 chapters included in this book, we
bring together studies and thoughts of researchers from eight countries across the
world, focusing on literacy acquisition and advancement in Cantonese, Catalan,
Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Kannada, Mandarin, Portuguese, and
Spanish. The studies presented in this book employ a variety of quantitative and
qualitative methodologies. Some of these are naturalistic, while others are experi-
mental. All of them aim to present a reliable picture of the state of the art in the
arena of literacy development and enhancement.
The chapters in this book are grouped into four parts: (1) Literacy Development,
(2) Promotion of Literacy at Home and in School, (3) Bilingualism – Acquiring a
Second Spoken and Written Language, and (4) Beyond Literacy.
Part 1 consists of five chapters focusing on Literacy Development. It includes
analyses of acquisition of phonological awareness, print awareness, letter knowl-
edge, spelling, and writing. The studies in this section refer to the significance of
these skills in different orthographies. In Chap. 1, Anna Both-de Vries and Adriana
Bus explore the role of name writing in children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowl-
edge. The chapter presents a series of studies on early spelling in Dutch. The
researchers assert that the first letter in their own name is the first letter that children
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x Preface
write phonetically. They conclude that name writing functions as the stepping-stone
to the alphabetic strategy. Chapter 2 by Sarah Robins and Rebecca Trieman also
refers to the significance of children’s own names in informal early literacy experi-
ences among English-speaking children. They investigate the informal learning of
surface features of writing (what letters and words look like) and deeper features of
written language (the fact that print symbolizes spoken language). They conclude
that informal learning about the surface and deep features of writing begins at an
early age, and it can help prepare children for the formal reading and writing
instruction at school. Chapter 3 by Cláudia Cardoso-Martins and Marcela Fulanete
Corrêa centers on the development of spelling skills among Brazilian Portuguese-
speaking children. It explores the similarities in which English-, Hebrew-, and
Portuguese-speaking children take advantage of their letter name knowledge to
connect print to speech. The researchers conclude that Portuguese-speaking chil-
dren rely on their letter names knowledge to spell words, and in this they resemble
Hebrew- and English-speaking children. Chapter 4 by Mary Ann Evans and Jean
Saint-Aubin focuses on the development of print awareness. Using eye tracking
methods, the researchers examine where children are looking during shared read-
ing. The results indicate that, during shared book reading, children engage in mini-
mal exploration of the print, and that their parents rarely draw their attention to it.
The researchers suggest that print awareness may be developed by activities in
which adults teach children to print letters and words and to learn letters and sounds
as they take part in shared book reading. Although Hebrew letter names have been
claimed to be less useful in supporting children’s literacy acquisition, in Chap. 5,
Iris Levin presents two studies that assessed the impact of the nature of Hebrew
letter names on children’s letter naming, letter writing, and first letter isolation.
Hebrew letter names (e.g., gimel for /g/) are longer than English letter names
(di for /d/), and, unlike English, they incorporate sounds that are not relevant to the
focal letter sound. Despite this, Levin found that they are highly effective cues in
helping children to report, spell, and sound out letters within a word. The author
concludes that letter names in Hebrew are more effective than in English. The fact
that Hebrew letter names are relatively long does not limit their usefulness in pro-
moting children’s early literacy acquisition. Levin suggests that these results can be
explained by the cacophonic nature of Hebrew letter names and the greater length
of full name cues in Hebrew.
Part 2, Promotion of Literacy at Home and in School, examines the sociocultural
context of literacy acquisition. This section includes studies of storybook reading,
parental beliefs about literacy practices, the influence of schooling practices, and
the efficiency of literacy interventions. First, in Chap. 6, Susan Sonnenschein,
Linda Baker, and Robert Serpell describe a 5-year longitudinal investigation of
children’s literacy development in a sociocultural context. They provide the readers
with an overview of cultural and environmental factors that are central to children’s
literacy development at home. This chapter studies parental beliefs, focusing on
low- and middle-income families. The authors conclude that parental beliefs and
children’s home experiences make a significant difference in children’s literacy
development. Although low- and middle-income children had different home