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Conceptualization of the writing system and knowing how to use a children’s book at preschool age as predictors of reading and writing acquisition in the first year of primary school: A comparative study between France and Germany
Abstract
The aim of this study is to validate (in a socio-constructivist perspective) the relevance of preschool internal predictors regarding reading and writing acquisition in the first year of primary school. This longitudinal study is also a comparative study between the educational systems in France and Germany.
Information for the study was collected among 170 children of preschool age. 110 of these children were interviewed a second time in their first year at primary school. Half of these children were French and the other half German. The two groups were matched according to social background, sex and the teaching method used in primary school. The children in both age groups were interviewed individually to assess their reading and writing abilities.
The results show a definite interindividual heterogeneity in reading and writing skills as from preschool age. The difference in levels is even more marked in the first year of primary school. This development in a child’s knowledge of reading and writing is closely related to the educational context in which he or she grows up.
... Extending current findings to other linguistic groups allows for tests of whether the Home Literacy Model generalizes to other cultures. The limited evidence suggests that parent beliefs and expectations about academic skills vary across linguistic groups (Louvet-Schmauss & Prêteur, 1993;Stevenson et al., 1990), as do the frequency and type of parent-child literacy activities (Bruck, Genesee, & Caravolas, 1997;LeFevre, Clarke, & Stringer, 2002). This study was conducted with French Canadian families. ...
This study examines the longitudinal relations among early literacy experiences at home and children's kindergarten literacy skills, Grade 1 word reading and spelling skills, and Grade 4 reading comprehension, fluency, spelling, and reading for plea-sure. Ninety French-speaking children were tested at the end of kindergarten and Grade 1, and 65 were followed until the end of Grade 4. Parents reported in kinder-garten that storybook reading occurred frequently and that they sometimes taught their child to read words. The results of hierarchical regression analyses that con-trolled for parent education as well as concurrent and longitudinal relations among literacy behaviors reveal that parent teaching about literacy in kindergarten directly predicted kindergarten alphabet knowledge and Grade 4 reading fluency, whereas storybook exposure directly predicted kindergarten vocabulary and the frequency with which children reported reading for pleasure in Grade 4. Moreover, storybook exposure predicted Grade 4 reading comprehension indirectly. These findings extend the Home Literacy Model proposed by Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002). Powerful prescriptions for social policy require that models of reading acquisition be as comprehensive and accurate as possible. If the societal goal is to ensure that children quickly become able to read and understand texts fluently, then models of reading should include precise descriptions of the teaching methods that optimize learning, precise descriptions of the components that allow children to read flu-ently, and precise descriptions of the preparatory experiences and resources that SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING, 10(1), 59–87 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
... These studies share in common the use of tasks that specifically require children to write their names or write letters rather than using a more general writing task, such as having children write a word, sentence, or story, all of which have been used with preschool and kindergarten children (Bloodgood, 1999;Bus et al., 2001;Levin et al., 2005;Louvet-Schmauss & Preteur, 1993). However, the use of writing tasks, such as writing letters or words on demand, that explicitly require children to attend to the relation between the sounds of letters and letter combinations in writing graphic representations of what they heard come closer to reflecting the critical association between writing skills and alphabetic knowledge than do tasks, including name writing tasks, that may only engage copying or rote memory skills. ...
The writing skills of 286 children (157 female and 129 male) were studied by comparing name writing and letter writing scores
from preschool to kindergarten with letter and word reading scores over the same time period. Two rubrics for scoring writing
were compared to determine if scores based on multiple components (i.e., letter formation, orientation on the vertical axis,
left–right orientation, and correct letter sequencing) would better reflect differences in children’s writing knowledge in
preschool and kindergarten than rubrics composed of one component (i.e., letter formation only). While developmental changes
in writing scores were found, little additional information was provided by multiple component scoring rubrics compared to
the single component rubric. Letter writing scores were more strongly related to letter and word reading scores than name
writing scores but neither writing score was predictive of growth. Implications of the findings for intentional/systematic
writing instruction in preschool curricula are discussed.
KeywordsLetter and word identification skills–Letter writing–Name writing–Rubrics for scoring writing
A comparison was made between 80 South African and 80 British children in their interpretations of six pictures. Half the children were in their second, and half in their third year of schooling. Results suggest substantial differences in the way pictures were interpreted, and increased schooling was associated with different patterns of change for the two cultural groups. The children were not only interpreting pictures in different ways, but also seemed to be showing different developmental trajectories.
In a previous study by the author, it was reported that South African children in Grades 2 and 3 used very different picture interpretation skills than did a group of British children and showed different patterns of change as they progressed through school. The present study replicates the South African results but uses a larger sample and investigates the picture interpretation skills of South African children more fully in their own right. Results replicated those of the previous study in every detail. In addition, the effects of schooling were more notable than were those of age, and achievement in home language held significant predictive power with regard to all of the categories examined. However, these effects were generally in the opposite direction from those reported for children in the developed world, consolidating and extending the view that children from different cultures may use pictures in rather different ways.
The article describes the concept of a language experience approach in West Germany based on stage models of reading and writing development and structured by a "didactic map" with eight areas of learning activities.
Despite the instructor's skills, the collective learning pattern is responsible for the scanty results achieved by teaching. The revolutionary didactics present here cover the teaching of reading skills, i.e. the acquisition of the procedures whereby language is transcribed, but they can be extended to apply to all subjects and at all levels :
— from the methodological standpoint, every beginning reader — all the way from the gifted youngster to the illiterate adult — is enabled to equilibrate his cognitive tools and, on the basis of selected writings, to discover and use the « phoneme- grapheme constants » that are the nerve centers of cognition leading to reading ability ;
— from the strategic standpoint, each individual constructs his reading ability at his own time and at his own pace, with no one prompting anyone.
As for the teacher, since he already has a personalized didactic equipment, he can at last preside over the continuously ongoing, full utilization of the potentialities of each of his pupils, whether precocious or retarded, rapid or slow. Liberated from the frontal and expositive situation, he is no longer assigned to an impossible mission.
Family Literacy focuses on the effect a family's educative style has on the development of children's literacy. For five years, from 1977 to 1982, Taylor observed six middle-class, suburban American families, each with children who were learning successfully to read and write, in an attempt to discover what parents did to foster literacy.
Taylor's own educational background began in the elementary classrooms of London's East End during the late sixties, where at one point she found herself trying to teach forty-one five, six, and seven year olds with only twenty reading texts. Soon she found herself making many of her own reading materials, but her greatest resource was the children's families, who, she began to realize, knew more about the children and their learning than she did. Thus her later philosophy—that literacy was closely connected to the activities of everyday life, and for the young child this meant the everyday life of the home—was rooted in these early teaching experiences.
Teachers, parents, researchers, anyone concerned with understanding the context of children's earliest entry into literacy, will find illuminating Taylor's carefully documented ethnographic study—ethnography defined here by the author as neither theory nor method but description providing insights into the lives of others (here, into the ways that children, in a particular social setting, imitate, absorb, and synthesize the educative influence of their environment).
Much of the book describes how parents in these six families encouraged and participated in their children's actual reading and writing experiences, and how in each case the need to read or write elicited reading and writing. Functional literacy as it occurred here in the home setting involved parents listening to children read school texts as well as other printed matter, playing word games with them, reading aloud, pointing out words in signs, and reading and talking about instructions for games and activities, as well as parents and children communicating through written messages such as notes, letters, signs, lists, memos, and charts.
Those involved with the study of children's literature will find especially informative those aspects of the book directly related to the influence of literature upon literacy. Taylor discovered that parents' memories of particular books loved as children and were often triggered as they read aloud to their own children. In reading to children, some of the parents were preserving patterns of the past, while others were attempting to change (or provide for their children more experiences with literature than they themselves had had); but in either case, transmission of literature to children was highly dependent on the parent's experiences. First born children were especially influenced by these experiences, younger children being more influenced by older children.
Taylor also learned that reading aloud to children was an integral part of each family's life. Through story sharing, parents introduced the art of reading by helping children see strategies for decoding as well as comprehending print. Young children experimented with reading, initiating the reading behavior of adults and older siblings, and they told stories about their books after "reading the pictures." Parents talked about pictures, played guessing games with pictures and text, interchanged words for humorous effect, related events of story to the everyday lives of the child to reinforce social and cultural expectations, re-read favorite stories to help engage the child in the reading process, and continued to read aloud to older children who had not become avid readers, in order to keep the literature experience alive.
The importance of research such as Taylor's is not to build a pedagogy nor advocate a particular method or practice, but rather to raise additional questions about how children become literate, questions that can help others who are attempting to devise pedagogies. Taylor asks,
How can we seriously expect children who have never experienced or have limited experience of reading and writing as complex cultural activities to successfully learn to read and write from the narrowly defined pedagogical practices of our schools . . . the workbook pages of impractical notions where teachers and children meet.
The study gives particular credibility to one multifunctional literary approach advocated by Don Holdaway in The Foundations of Literacy...
As a continuation of research carried out by E. Ferreiro, we adopted a socio-constructivist approach to the question of how young children of 5–6 years of age conceptualize the writing system taking into account both their social background and their preschool system of education.
Our sample was made up of 308 children of preschool level; 225 French children and 83 German children were asked to write a series of words without the help of a model. p The results we obtained confirmed our hypotheses: the pedagogical activities used in the French infant schools did not help the children to conceptualize the writing system better than the game activities (which had nothing to do with writing) used in the German kindergartens.
Furthermore, we found that the socio-cultural background played an important role in both countries.
The influence of the prevailing ideas about teaching and learning how to write, based on maturationism and empirism-associationism, are discussed with reference to the constructivist model.
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