Joining Together in Literacy Learning: Teenage Mothers and Children

Abstract

L iteracy learning is a process that has its roots in the home, beginning in infancy with the child's exposure to oral and written language (Goodman, 1986; Hiebert, 1988; Teale, 1986). Through numerous demonstrations and interactions with parents and caregivers, children begin to construct knowledge about and strategies for using print. Case studies attest to the profound role that extended parent-child interactions around print play in children's literacy development (Baghban, 1984; Clark, 1984; Lass, 1982). Such interactions seldom involve direct, formal instruction; rather, through jointly constructed experiences, children master a set of sustained patterns which serve as a basis for their subsequent acquisition of written language (Heath, 1983; Snow & Goldfield, 1982). In Vygotsky's (1978) notion of the zone of proximal development, children are seen as internalizing the processes practiced through participation with adults to advance their individual skills. For Vygotsky, the fundamental vehicle of social transaction provides children with opportunities to participate beyond their own abilities in a shared thinking process, appropriating what they contribute in these experiences for later use. Studies exploring the nature of parent-child interactions in literacy learning have focused, to a large extent, on storybook-reading activity in the home (Edwards & Panofsky, 1989; Ninio & Bruner, 1978; Snow & Goldfield, 1982; Yaden, Smolkin, & Conlon, 1989). Such studies describe how parents may assist children's learning by inventing routines that help to control children's focus of attention, match tasks to their abilities, and arrange the environment so that the children can solve problems that are a little bit beyond what they could do on their own. While storybook reading is posited as a central vehicle for literacy development, children and their parents also engage in a range of other activities which are literacy embedded. Print mediates many family activities, such as shopping for groceries or paying bills (Anderson & Stokes, 1984). Though such activities are not staged for children's benefit or adjusted to their level of expertise, parents tacitly guide their children's participation in these socially assembled (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1983), initiating them in the standing rules for behavior in a wide variety of social and print-related settings. Thus, a family's influence in children's literacy learning involves far more than the provision of books or leisure-time reading; it also involves the development through shared activities of ways to handle day-to-day print events which work concurrently to enhance children's learning about written language. This process of guiding children's participation (Rogoff, 1990) presumes intersubjectivity-a sharing of focus and a mutual understanding between people. And it is here that parents seem particularly well placed to play an important teaching role. Sharing the child's world, the parent can facilitate linking new situations to more familiar ones and drawing connections from the familiar to the novel-tasks viewed as essential for cog-