Childrens Literature and Literacy

Sulzby (1989) Defines emergent literacy “as the reading and writing behaviors that precede and develop into conventional literacy.”

For most children so much of our literacy learning, especially the precursors of emergent literacy. happens before preschool and elementary school (Dickinson & McCabe, 2001; Watkins & Bunce, 1996).

Much of this early research considered the role of the storybook in elementary school and drew on perspectives from Rosenblatt of transactional theory which placed meaning making as a transaction between the reader and the text rather than a discrete set of developmental skills.

Other studies using the work of Vygotsky (1978) began to stress the connection between dialogue and literacy and examined the speech patterns between student and teacher during storybook reading, time. Vygotsky believed cognition to derive from internalized social interactions.

Emergent literacy helped to move the definition of writing in primary grades from letter formation and handwriting (Simner, 1981) to oral and written language relations (Dyson, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1988; Sulzby, 1987).

We began to look at students as composers of writing and their writing environments (Dyson, 1982. From invented spelling (Read, 1975), eliciting stories through dictation (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1983).

Piagtean perspectives of development also influenced further studies in invented spelling. Marie Clay in 1975 published a book “What Did I write?” where we published children's scribbles and inferred what they were trying to spell or say. This lead to numerous theories of children's developmental stages of writing.

Researchers also took on perspectives from anthropology and began to examine the influence of the “home” on emergent literacy. Researchers stressed the idea of literacy a s a deeply embedded set of cultural practices and not a set of skills taught in isolation (Taylor, 1983, Kirkland, 2016).

Scholars from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition in San Diego took activity theory, developed by Leont'ev and other Soviet psychologists based on the work of Vygotsky and applied it to early literacy.. These studies by examining families of marginalized communities found literacy as an act mediated by everyday life and only when the focus was literacy instruction did the dialogue stress learning. The key understanding was that literacy is linguistically bound to acquiring culture and the way literacy gets taught reflects and reinforces the culture through the act of learning.