Literacy Learning: Dr. Louise Taylor shares her thoughts

Introduction

Literacy has always been a hot topic of discussion, particularly through changing Governments, with Wyse and Bradbury (2022) calling this “the great debate” (p. 3). I’ve been around long enough to know that these debates are not new and that despite the passion behind some approaches - there is ‘no silver bullet’.

My interest in literacy began in the 1970s when I majored in early literacy while training to be a primary school teacher. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, but the discussions are much the same.

Here are my thoughts on how we can ensure all citizens in Aotearoa New Zealand are literate.

Influences from my past

There have been two main influences on my thinking about literacy over the years. These are the work and theories of:

1. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian scholar and innovator whose influence on education is world-renowned (I discussed him more in my series on transformation),
2. Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a teacher in a small rural Māori community in the early 1930s, who became a world figure in the teaching of children.

What I learnt from Paulo Freire

Freire was born into poverty as a child, which had a profound influence on what he believed about learning and in particular literacy. Living among poor rural families and labourers, Freire gained first hand knowledge of the effects of socio-economics on education. He later became an activist for democracy and what he called emancipatory education where all people, regardless of their background or social status, could access equal educational opportunities. His work in the area of literacy was central to this.

Freire believed that everyone is capable of intelligent thought and that being literate is essential for liberation. He contended that access to information and knowledge, and critically engaging with this, leads to consciousness, choice, and the ability to change oppression. In this way, literacy becomes a means to life itself providing both access to the world, as well as a means of resistance.

The work of Freire (e.g. Freire, 1970; Freire & Shor, 1987), sits behind what I do, including my beliefs about literacy. He reminds me to think about the liberatory potential of being literate and not just to focus on word decoding skills and achievement scores. Without a purpose that inspires and connects to the everyday lives of learners, literacy learning can become a grind and something that learners may see no purpose for, and at worst, even hate. I learnt this from an adult student of mine.

One day, when I was running an alternative education and adult learning facility, a student came to my office to complain. He was in his late teens and had just been screened for the adult horticulture course we offered. He had been told he needed to go through the pre-literacy course before he would be able to enrol in the course. He was indignant that this was not necessary, telling me that he could spell and write - so I asked him to show me some of his work.

I proceeded to read a page of writing and yes he could definitely spell and fill the page and read it to me. What he couldn’t do was punctuate his work. I said to him “there are no full stops on this page”. He replied that they were not necessary. We then had a back and forth conversation about how without the punctuation I got no meaning from his words and that if he wanted to convey a message to someone he would need to ensure that they understood what he was saying. He had never before considered the purpose of his ability to read and write - he thought he was literate - until that moment.

I will never forget his return to my office a couple of months later when he asked me to read a letter that he had written to his mum. It was full of sentiment and very clearly conveyed a loving and heartfelt message. He told me it was the first time he had written with this kind of meaning. It brought me to tears. He went on to successfully complete the horticulture course.

Recalling this story reminds me that learning words and being able to read them is only one aspect of literacy. For me a far greater purpose is grasping the intent of being literate, that is, access to a world of knowledge and choices and the ability to express oneself freely. This should be the primary aim of all literacy learning, no matter the preferred approach. If the purpose is lost our learners may lose interest and disengage, which to me is the biggest literacy failure of all.

What I learnt from Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Sylvia Ashton-Warner published a book in 1963 called Teacher. The book was required reading when I trained to be a teacher and I reread it again about 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the book is peppered with some gendered and discriminatory descriptors (typical of the time it was written) which makes me feel uncomfortable about some of it. However, Sylvia’s accounts of what she learnt from working with Māori students in rural New Zealand and her unfolding respect for their culture is touching and timeless. Her theories on teaching literacy have had a huge impact on what I believe about literacy learning. 

As a young teaching graduate in the early 1930s Sylvia and her new husband began teaching in a two teacher rural school for Māori children. She worked in the junior class where one of her main roles was to teach literacy. She was supplied with the standard graded readers, the Janet and John series, and she soon realised that these texts were entirely irrelevant and therefore unsuitable for her context. Influenced by Tolstoy, she instead adopted an organic approach to teaching, being led by her learners and what was important to them.

She began with the child’s existing knowledge and the words that had meaning to them and built their learning from this. This meant that the conversations, reading and writing were all the words that were meaningful for the children. At the beginning of each day, when the children were fresh with experience from outside of the classroom, she would ask them what their word for the day was. These were what Sylvia termed the “self-chosen words’ and this is where she would begin.

• First words must have intense meaning for a child.
• First words must be already part of the dynamic life.
• First books must be made of the stuff of the child himself [themselves], whatever and wherever the child (p. 35).

This is how children learnt to read and write in her classroom and by age seven it was common for children to be writing a page of narrative. She nurtured their creativity and “the continuity of their thought” (p. 55), which enabled their literacy to grow organically within the context of children’s known worlds and everyday lives. Sylvia believed that a child should “master their own story first, then tackle someone else’s” (p. 61). For the teacher, it came down to helping children to find the story within.

From the teacher's end, it boils down to whether or not she is [they are] a good conversationalist; whether or not she has [they have] the gift or the wisdom to listen to another; the ability to draw out and preserve the others line of thought (p. 58)

For me, this book remains a constant reminder of the importance of context when teaching literacy. Tuning into the world and words of learners is where literacy learning is at its optimum. The current debates on literacy (for example structured versus whole language learning) are not, in my view, as important as how we ensure that literacy learning happens within the culture and experiences of learners.

Stories from my whānau | family

More recently, I have had the great pleasure of watching my grandchildren learn to communicate, read and write. This has renewed my interest in the fascinating process of becoming literate. Here are some examples of what they have reminded me about.

Literacy learning starts as a baby

I have a fabulous little video taken of my partner reading a story to one of our grandchildren when he was 10 months old. After every page that was read my grandson repeated what was said in his baby language using all of the intonation that my partner used and pointing to the pictures as he went. He was telling a story along with his grandpa and my partner waited while our grandson had his turn. This is a perfect example of foundational literacy; cuddling up with someone you love, enjoying the pleasure of a good story, and taking time to communicate together - even if that someone is 10 months old.

Literacy involves taking cues from images, known vocabulary, and lived experiences

As children move towards proficiency in literacy, they take their cues from the images and experiences that accompany language. It is no surprise that early books have a picture that is associated with a word, for example a picture of an apple with the word apple alongside it. This also happens with experiences, for example, an adult points out a dog and says to an infant “dog”. Language associations are strongest when images, and experiences align with the language being learnt. It is much harder for a child to learn language when these associations are missing. This is why context and conversations are critical to language development and later reading and writing.

As children move from learning to talk, to reading print, they use the same cues. I have seen my grandchildren reading and pausing to look at the pictures and you can almost hear the whirring of their brains as they put together the images, their known vocabulary, and their lived experience, to come up with an intelligent ‘guesstimate’. As they become more proficient, the decoding of letters, sounds and syllables, helps them to check their ‘guesstimate’. This self-correction process draws on the many skills they have learnt - all working together. These are best learnt within a fun, loving, language-rich, environment.

Learning literacy is supported by rhythm and rhyme

One of New Zealand’s most renowned children’s authors Dame Lynley Dodd (author of the Hairy Maclary series), believes that rhythm, rhyme, and repetition are important aspects of literacy. She talks about how important these are in a documentary on her life and work titled: Writing the pictures, painting the words; this video is well worth watching. Rhythm, rhyme and repetition build phonological awareness (recognising the sounds of letters and letter combinations), and knowledge of the flow and patterns of language. This helps with memory and prediction; the enjoyment gained by using these spans different cultural practices such as traditional poetry, chanting, waiata | song, and kapa haka.

In the documentary, Dodd also talks about the fun of nonsense words and how pleasurable it is to use these. I remember the pleasure I got from song and rhyme as a young child and later as a junior school teacher. I also recall the hiatus for me in the in-between years.

When I was about 8 years old at my New Zealand primary school one of our daily activities was SRA, a coded reading programme. This involved reading a graded text and completing a test straight afterwards. There was absolutely no pleasure in this for me as I read simply to get the answers correct. I grew to dread this part of the day and despite growing up in a home where I had loved books and rhymes and had parents who were avid readers - I developed a dislike of reading. This stayed with me right through the rest of my schooling. It was not until I specialised in literacy learning at Teachers Training College that I rediscovered the pleasure and purpose of reading through children’s literature. It was then that I finally fell in love with reading, and we have been best friends ever since.

Some concluding thoughts

Sadly, I lost the purpose and pleasure of reading when I was at school. Reading for me was constantly associated with assessment. This is why now, with my experience and people like Freire and Ashton-Warner cheering me on, I am convinced that literacy learning needs to happen within the context of lived experiences; that it needs to be purpose-driven and pleasurable. Those grappling with literacy need all the cues available to them so that they can move beyond looking at jumbled up words to enjoying the world that is opened up being able to read and express oneself.

To me being literate is expressed in the joy of a teenager who has written to his mum for the first time and knows she will be able to understand what he has written. It is the tears of a 40-year-old woman as she tells me she no longer needs a ‘reader’ to accompany her whenever she needs to read something. It is the giggles of my grandchildren as we share a funny book together, and it is the memories I have of each of my children writing for the first time, ‘I love mummy’.

References

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963). Teacher. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Penguin Group.

Freire, P. & Shor, I. (1987). A pedagogy of liberation. Dialogues on transforming education. New York: Bergin & Garvey.

Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers' practices for teaching phonics and reading. Review of Education, 10(1), e3314.