What's News - Guest Speakers

Crafting a Mix: Programs and Packages
in Literacy Education

- Peter Freebody

At the risk of exponentiating the 'multipliers' that are around already, as educators interested in literacy, we are beginning to realise the multiplicities involved in literacy learning and teaching. This is so especially when we consider the kinds of civic, cultural and vocational communicational settings that our students will live in when they leave school and become adults. Literacy, at that time, will clearly be a term that refers to multi-symbolic materials, multi-technological communication arenas, multi-lingual classrooms and workplaces, and multi-cultural societies. It is arguable that our literacy education efforts are more directly and dramatically affected by these growing complexities than any other professional domain, because of the strong connection between literacy learning and students' languages, cultures and fluency with symbols.

Since all educational activity involves the productive intervention of one generation into the lives of the next, crucial questions for educators are: How great a strain does imagining this 'multi-literate' future place on the professional imagination of our generation? Is the generational lag simply too great? That is, are the differences between the ways in which we became literate and the materials and tasks we faced in that process, compared to what our students now need from us by way of literacy education experiences, so significant and so subtle that we cannot provide as effectively as previous generations of educators? So, in the present changing conditions, can we be as confident in our roles in preparing students to be literate citizens of the future as our teachers were all those years ago, in that print-literate galaxy so far away?

The one thing we know about the reading and writing demands that our current primary students will face, and the cultural, civic and vocational tasks of which those demands will form a part, is that things will not get simpler. One thing that seems evident from many early literacy intervention and assessment programs is that a lot of us wish they would, and that we are prepared to act on that wish.

Years ago, Patrick Shannon (1989) documented the growing belief among American primary school teachers in the ability of the packaged reading program to deliver, of itself, learning gains in genuine, purposeful, real-world reading. This growing belief, he argued, went hand in hand with the increasing production and acceptance of "teacher-proof" guide-books and classroom materials. Shannon termed this belief "reification" — the turning of a fluid, highly contextualised set of processes into a "thing", more specifically, a "thing in a box".

We see in many Australian states a trend toward the devolution of policy, curricular and budgeting responsibilities to individual schools. This means that schools can enter the extensive and growing market place of early-literacy packages and make selections, potentially different from those choices made by neighbouring schools and indeed from those implied in centrally-developed syllabus materials. Apart from anything else, this has had two consequences: first, a growing diversity of literacy-education practices within an educational jurisdiction; and second, an increasing and increasingly heated debate about the merits of such packages in general and the relative merits of each.

Without wading too deeply into this issue (dealt with more fully in Luke, Freebody & Land, in press) and without coming down on one side in these debates, it seems to me that there are four sets of considerations that need to be dealt with in the use of commercial early-literacy packages: First, many are based on a relatively narrow and, in some cases, reductionist view of reading and writing. Many focus on decoding and spelling, for instance, with little regard for purposeful comprehension. Clearly, in reading, the comprehension of a text - the ways in which the writer constructs networks of explicit and implicit meaning - is a critical aspect of any literacy education program. It has long been recognised (see, e.g. Goldman, 1985; Pearson & Johnson, 1978) that literal comprehension needs to be supplemented by two kinds of inferential understanding: inferences necessary for the comprehension of the text that are internally available in the text, and inferences imported from the background knowledge of the reader.

Enhancing students' abilities to draw both kinds of inferences calls for "explicit and guided instructional effort" (Goldman, 1985: 269; and see Pearson, 1999). So here again, a question that needs to be posed to any literacy program or package is: to what extent does the teaching program explicitly deal with these kinds of crucial comprehension processes? For a teacher to imagine that a code-cracking emphasis supplemented by some attention to literal comprehension can "bring with it" the growth of inferential understandings has been shown to have particularly deleterious effects on the reading development of non-mainstream and disadvantaged students (Stahl & Miller, 1989). Presumably, we aim in our literacy education programs for our students to become accurate readers and writers, to enhance the meaningfulness of their reading and writing, so that they can be purposeful and functional members of a literate society, and so that they can conduct themselves as deliberate and critical members of such a society.

A second issue is that some packages involve complex additional learning or ritual displays, requiring that students acquire skills such as hand-signing, diacritical marking, or whatever, while they are coming to grips with print and other visual literacy demands. The question here is 'do these additional learnings actually make the situation more difficult for some students and, even for the others, do these extra skills have any long-term value?'

Third, the package needs to be examined for its consistency with the classroom practices that students experience otherwise. One of the concerns often articulated is that 'the package becomes the literacy program', that it actually changes mainstream classroom practice for all students, and, in the process, limits the range of achievement that those students can experience in the classroom. Put simply, 'does the package enhance the students' capacity to learn even more from their later classroom activities, such that the intervention becomes generative and durable?'

The final point concerning these packages is that they are, for the most part, stand-alone, guided programs of instruction. In general, it is simply not clear how they can be responsible to the developing needs of the students in any given classroom, as a professional teacher may judge those needs. The serious question for educators is: 'can reading packages meet students' changing needs as they learn to operate in an increasingly diverse linguistic and cultural worlds?'

One of the intriguing, but not surprising conclusions of the massive review of early reading research and practice in the U.S., summarised in Snow, Burns and Griffin (1998), a decade after Shannon's complaint about the reification of literacy learning "in" teacher-proof packages, is this:

... no single reading instruction method works best for all children. If we have learned anything from this effort, it is that effective teachers are able to craft a special mix of instructional ingredients for every child they work with. But ... there is a common menu of materials, strategies, and environments from which effective teachers make choices. (Snow and others, 1998: quoted from the Executive Summary)

Once again, there seems a need to deal the "effective teacher" back into the game. When our students become adults and face, we hope, embrace, the complex communicational demands of the world they live in, they may not thank our generation if we have lacked the professionalism to address their needs with all the flexibility, intelligence and resoluteness that our imagination afford us.

References

Goldman, S.R. (1985) inferential reasoning in and about narrative texts. In A.C. Graesser & J.B. Black (Eds.) The psychology of questions. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Luke, A., Freebody, P. & Land, R. (in press) Literate futures: A literacy strategy for Queensland schools. Brisbane: Education Queensland.

Pearson, P.D. (1999) A historical based view of "Preventing reading difficulties in young children." Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 231-249.

Pearson, P.D. & Johnson, D.D. (1978) Teaching reading comprehension. NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Shannon, P. (1989) Broken promises: Reading instruction in twentieth century America. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.

Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S. & Griffin, P. (Eds. 1998) Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Stahl, S.A. & Miller, P.D. (1989) Whole language and language experience approaches for beginning reading: A quantitative research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 59, 87-116.

Peter Freebody is Director of the Centre for Literacy and Language Education Research at Griffith University,

This article is reprinted from Queensland Newsletter of the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, October 2000