What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language in Society.http://www.jstor.org In a series of "reading cycles," mother and child alternate tums in a dialogue: the mother directs the child's attention to the book and/or asks what-questions and/or labels items on the page. The items to which the what-questions are directed and labels given are two-dimensional representations of threedimensional objects, so that the child has to resolve the conflict between perceiving these as two-dimensional objects and as representations of a threedimensional visual setting. The child does so "by assigning a privileged, autonomous status to pictures as visual objects" (1978: 5). The arbitrariness of the picture, its decontextualization, and its existence as something which cannot be grasped and manipulated like its "real" counterparts is learned through the routines of structured interactional dialogue in which mother and child take turns playing a labelling game. In a "scaffolding" dialogue (cf. Cazden 1979), the mother points and asks "What is x?" and the child vocalizes and/or gives a nonverbal signal of attention. The mother then provides verbal feedback and a label. Before the age of two, the child is socialized into the "'initiation-replyevaluation sequences" repeatedly described as the central structural feature of classroom lessons (e.g., Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Griffin and Humphry 1978; Mehan 1979). Teachers ask their students questions which have answers prespecified in the mind of the teacher. Students respond, and teachers provide

Concentrated Language Encounter Approach in Practice for Global Teaching of Literacy: Lighthouse Strategy Implementation

“…Routines in CLE programming imitated parent-child language development interaction of the kind described by Bruner (1983Bruner ( , 1986) and other researchers in child language development that were emerging at the time (Goldfield & Snow, 1984;Heath, 1982Heath, , 1983Nineo & Bruner, 1978;Snow, 1977Snow, , 1978Snow, , 1983aSnow, , 1983bSnow & Goldfield, 1982Wood, 1980;Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). In a routine, the same text was revisited repeatedly over time and both the scope of the context for the text production and the language resources used within the text itself were expanded and developed qualitatively.…”

The Home Literacy Environment and the English Narrative Development of Spanish–English Bilingual Children

“…Second, it must be acknowledged that examining narrative abilities in only one language may not portray the full extent of bilingual children's narrative abilities. Third, it is important to keep in mind that there may be variation in the home literacy practices that exist within different Spanish dialect groups (Harwood, Leyendecker, Carlson, Asencio, & Miller, 2002;L. Reese et al, 2008).…”

The effects of early home literacy environments on fourth-grade literacy achievement: an international comparison

“…Parent-child interactions (e.g., talk, shared reading), adult modelling of literacy behaviours, parental attitudes about literacy practices, and available resources (e.g., number of books in the home) have been found to be significantly associated with literacy skills of children (e.g., Baker et al, 1997;Beals et al, 1994;Collins and Michaels, 1980;Dickinson and Tabors, 2001;Hart and Risley, 1995;Lonigan, 2004;Heath, 1982;Huttenlocher et al, 2002;Miller and Moore, 1989;Phillips and Lonigan, 2005;Scarborough and Dobrich, 1994;Weizman and Snow, 2001;Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998). For example, when Payne et al (1994) studied the language ability of young American children and their caregivers, they found that a composite home-literacy measure (composed of the following: the frequency and duration of talk; frequency of shared book reading; reports of child's independent exploration of text; visits to the library; the time the caregiver spent reading alone; the number of books in the home) was strongly associated with child language skills (word knowledge, story telling, etc.).…”

“…The quality and amount of talk between caregivers and young children has been found to have a significant effect on language use and literacy development (Beals, 2001;Beals et al, 1994;Collins and Michaels, 1980;Davidson and Snow, 1995;DeTemple and Beals, 1991;Dickinson and Tabors, 2001;Dunn and Dunn, 1981;Hart and Risley, 1995;Hoff and Naigles, 2002;Huttenlocher et al, 2002;Dickinson and Tabors, 2001;Weizman and Snow, 2001), and may be related to within-culture differences in language tradition (e.g., Collins and Micheals, 1980;Heath, 1982). For example, Weizman and Snow (2001) found that the number of words in adult talk in adult-child dyads was positively associated with child vocabulary production and that the most sophisticated levels of talk (in terms of the vocabulary used) occurred during shared book reading, which has also been found to be a significant predictor of reading performance (e.g., Hart and Risley, 1995;Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002).…”

“…Many studies (conducted primarily in North America) have highlighted the importance of story telling, interactive book reading, availability of print materials in the home, and adult modelling of literate behaviour (e.g., Alexander et al, 1997;Beals, 2001;Dauber et al, 1996;Hart and Risley, 1995;Li and Rao, 2000;Lonigan, 2004;Miller and Moore, 1989;Pallas et al, 1987;Paratore et al, 2010;Phillips and Lonigan, 2005;Weizman and Snow, 2001;Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998). While some researchers have reported similar findings across countries (e.g., Aram, 2010;Aram and Aviram, 2009;Aram and Levin, 2001;Kalia and Reese, 2009;Manolitsis et al, 2009;Street, 1984), others have found that culture-specific beliefs and practices may have a mediating effect on language and literacy development (e.g., Chao, 2001;Heath, 1982;Reese and Gallimore, 2000;Strasser and Lissi, 2009;Yamamoto and Holloway, 2010;Bradley and Corwyn, 2005). Thus, the role of national differences in practices related to literacy development remains unclear.…”