Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom
Literacy as a Social Practice
Preview
Book Description
This volume demonstrates how the ethnographic approach to research demanded by a ‘Literacy as Social Practice’ perspective can generate fresh insights into what happens when young children engage with schooled literacy tasks.
Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom argues that the lived experience of young children encountering formal schooled literacy curricula should be the foremost consideration in educational reforms intended to improve rates of literacy acquisition in schools. To make this argument, the author suspends traditional concerns with ‘learning’ and ‘progress’ to concentrate on ‘practice’ and ‘meaning’ in a careful analysis of key classroom incidents. The author concludes that such insights suggest a need for re-considering the assumptions upon which educational policy rests.
This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and libraries in the fields of Literacy Studies, Teacher Education, Education Policy and Applied Linguistics.
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of transcription conventions
Foreword
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction: Literacy, Schooling and Young Children
PART ONE: FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILIAR PHENOMENA
Chapter 1 Fresh Perspectives on Familiar Phenomena
- Introduction
- Section 1: Literacy in the social world
- Section 2: Literacy in the institution of schooling
- Section 3: Children’s interpretive reproduction of literacy in schools
- Conclusion
Chapter 2: Researching Young Children’s in-school literacy practices
Introduction
- Section 1: Policy priorities for researching early childhood literacy
- Section 2: Ethnographic principles for researching early childhood literacy in classrooms
- Section 3: Re-examining young children’s in-school literacy practices
- Conclusion
PART TWO: AMBER CLASS CHILDREN PRACTISE LITERACY
Chapter 3: Jessica practises literacy with Donna
- Introduction
- Section 1: Normalising expectations for young children’s literacy practices.
- Section 2: Interpretively reproducing literacy practices in the classroom.
- Section 3: Interpretively Reproducing literacy skills and knowledge
- Conclusion
Chapter 4: The importance of Amber Class’ children’s in-class peer culture
- Introduction
- Section 1: Producing peer culture literacy in social interaction
- Section 2: Managing peer culture priorities: Peer to peer copying
- Section 3: Managing peer culture and schooled literacy priorities
- Conclusion
Chapter 5 Amber Class Children’s encounter with being grouped for teaching
- Introduction
- Section 1: Schooled literacy manages relative literacy expertise
- Section 2: Peer culture interpretations of schooled groupings
- Section 3: Sharing literacy expertise in the peer culture
- Conclusion
PART THREE: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Discussion: Reflecting on young children, schooling and literacy
Conclusion
Appendix: My research project
REFERENCES
Author(s)
Biography
Lucy Henning is Senior Lecturer in primary English at Roehampton University, UK.