Early Literacy Project - Explorations and Reflections Part 1

Abstract

Recent literature on Early Literacy has highlighted a profound correlation between social background and literacy levels and the consequent implication of learners from some social contexts, in having greater difficulty in learning to read and write than others. Children are viewed as active participants in the process of learning. They learn the social rules of meaning at home and then extend these social rules to the texts encountered in school. It matters therefore whether the norms in the classroom discussion and transactions privilege single versus diverse and multiple interpretations, and whether they provide equal access to children from diverse social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The Early Literacy Project (ELP) interventions are reported in two parts. This first part introduces ELP and discusses the theoretical concerns on the basis of which the project has been designed, as an exploratory intervention which seeks to find suitable ways to strengthen the foundations for reading and writing in Hindi for diverse groups of young learners within mainstream government schools in Delhi, with a special focus on neo-literates. The project’s concerns include evolving active, facilitative, and equitable classroom learning environments and related teaching methods which honour learner diversity in the classroom. These include methodologies for phonological processing as well as for meaning construction that enable children to make deep connections with their lived experiences and inner worlds, and may, in fact, be considered the written forms of spoken language.