Blog Entry #15 Research Article: The role of environmental print in emergent literacy

Neumann, M.M., Hood, M., Ford, R.M., and Neumann, D.L. (2012). The role of environmental print in emergent literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2012 12: 231.

This article debates the importance of the role of environmental print for children emergent literacy development. It is suggested that the three categories of the environmental print, including Child Logos, Community Logos, and Household Logos are very likely to foster children’s literacy skills and promote literacy development later on. The article points out that interactions with environmental print in the child’s sociocultural context will develop their logographic reading skills, then it will lead to promotion in emergent literacy skills, and ultimately conventional reading skills.

After reading the article, I am very interested in how the environmental print can be established and what kind of material teachers or parents can place at school or home that could possibly facilitate emergent literacy learning for young children. Since logographic skills can help children to make grapheme-phoneme correspondences as well as support their letter name and sound knowledge, I am also interested in teachers and parents using scaffolding to guide children’s literacy learning with the existing environmental print. Because the reading the environmental print is fun and contextualized, emergent readers are more likely to pay attention to it. The challenge is how we set up the environment that is rich of print for children to learn, and that the methods to effectively lead the learner to interact with the logos, letters, phonemes, in order to prepare them to move to the next step of emergent literacy learning.

As a future educator, I like the idea that children learn from everyday life, and the sociocultural experiences that they are familiar with. I would keep researching on this issue and try to incorporate the environmental print into my future classroom.

Blog Entry#14 Research article: Ants, apples and the ABCs: the use of commercial phonics programmes in prior-to-school children’s services

Campbell, S., Torr, J., & Cologon, K. (2012) Ants, apples and the ABCs: The use of commercial phonics programmes in prior-to-school children's services. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2012 12: 367

This article researched on the use of commercial phonics programs (CPP) in prior-to-school children’s services (serve children under five years old) in Sydney area, Australia. The research found that about 36% of the early childhood settings surveys were using commercial phonics programs. Additionally, the CPP are more likely to be used in long-day care, for-profit centers with less qualified and less experienced staff.

I became very interested in this topic because the uses of commercial phonics programs are very hot and very controversial these days, especially when being with emergent English language learners. I learned that generally, the CPP have to different approaches: systematic explicit approach and synthetic phonics approach. Systematic Explicit Approach includes teaching how to make grapheme-phoneme correspondences, phonemic awareness, phonics rules, and spelling &sound relationships (for older children). These methods are commonly used in US preschool classrooms, but no evidence shows the percentage that the CPP is used in US schools. The other approach is Synthetic Phonics Approach, which includes isolated phonemic, phonological skills, and alphabetic skills.  From the above information we can see the reason why the CPPs are widely used in Australia: the approaches includes teaching methods, materials and everything a new teachers need to know about teaching emergent literacy; additionally, the CPPs are likely to prvide a “uniform” one-fits-all approach, which make teacher training and practice easier and more effective for teachers and the children service center.

I sense the authors of this article are object to the wide use of CPPs, because, again, most of them provide a one-fits-all approach, instead of the traditional teaching which stress the individual differences while teaching. But we have to admit that the CPPs is a good resource for the inexperienced teachers start with, because of the consistency of the curriculum make it much easier to follow than to teach without CPPs. Last year, when I attend the NAEYC’s annual conference and exhibition, I received dozens of the flyers of the commercial literacy programs (including commercial Phonics Programs), and some curriculum about emergent reading and writing looks really good and systemized, and the demonstrations clearly shows how the programs work to build on the school and parent’s confidence. This also reminds me of the situation of English language education in China: a lot of early childhood education institutions are now adopting the “imported” commercial phonic programs and use it as advanced teaching method. I think that the qualified educators should closely examine the appropriateness of the programs when use in China (or any other countries) and decide whether the programs fit second language learners in a foreign context. Also, if have to adopt the CPPs, teachers should probably select only the parts that would fit the learner’s needs and personalized the other parts, which would make the whole literacy program more individualized and effective.

BLOG ENTRY #13 Literacy Playshop: The Puppet Show

With the highly developed technology, we are now able to easily incorporate the new media with everyday teaching. With the help of all kinds of media, literacy learning for young children becomes more fun and effective.

For the literacy playshop, I collaborated with a 5 year-old preschooler and made a little movie together. He was very interested when I told him that we are going to make a little movie together with ipad, and puppets of his own choice. I took a basket of different puppet toys, and encouraged him to choose a few characters so we can make up a little story among them. When he picked out the puppets, I asked him to name them if he liked, and guided him to think about what kind of stories and conversations we can make to make the show interesting and fun by asking him a sequence of questions, such as, “what do you think of their relationship”, “what do you think they will do together”, or “what would they say in this situation”.

We actually tried out a couple set of different toys and settings before he finally decided to use the giraffe, cow and Winnie the Pooh. I was curious about how would he use this three unrelated characters, but he quickly decided that Winnie the Pooh would be the “bad guy” who tried to eat the little cow, and giraffe would come to save the girl as a good friend. I am very pleased by and interested in his plot, since normally not many people would consider the “cute, friendly” Pooh as a “bad guy” who wants to eat other animals. That’s new! I appreciate this child can break the (sort of) stereotype and be creative in his own way! Since he only got the main plot, we had to make more plots to make the story complete and rational, and of course, try to add a little humor in it. I began to ask him all kinds of questions, like an interview, and while he was answering, I gave suggestions as well. Finally we decided that Pooh was sleeping in his cave and the cow bumped into him when wandering around, so Pooh was angry and wanted to eat her up. Then giraffe came to save cow upon hearing her yelling for help. They became best friends forever. In the movie shooting, we worked on the lines together,such as 

Cow: Thank you for saving my life

Giraffe: That’s what friends do (I proposed)

Cow: Maybe I can save your life sometimes (we discussed a little, and he decided to go with this while shooting)

Giraffe: That’s a good idea!

The whole process of using new media to emphasize literacy learning was very successful. During making the movie, children can contribute ideas and get a sense of ownership of the movie; they also feel the responsibility to act well and make the movie looks good. After the shooting is done, my student was very excited at the movie and asked me to show another teacher our work. I feel he is tired after the playshop but also very proud of himself. Self-esteem could be built within the playshop.

I would definitely recommend elementary teachers to incorporate new media into literacy learning, maybe in different ways. I feel it is a great opportunity for children to improvise, be creative, be a critical thinker, and to acutally enjoy the learning process.

BLOG ENTRY #12, Resarch article: Exposing preschoolers to the printed word: A case study of preschool teachers in Mauritius

Owodally,A.M.A.(2013). Exposing preschoolers to the printed word: A case study of preschool teachers in Mauritius. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 13: 52

This article is about the emergent English language education in preschools in Mauritius. The unique language context of teaching is very interesting: in Mauritius, people all speak Mauritian Creole, but English and French are the main print languages for education.

The curriculum and teacher manuals in Mauritius suggests that the teacher should just provide a print-rich environment (books, letters, signs, etc.) and do not need to teach letters, or words or other literacy skills, however, the teacher should be focusing on the meaning-making process of books, and enlighten children with the pictures in the books. I think it is interesting because most of the above is what I would agree with when teaching emergent literacy to young children: which is to fully immerse children in a print word, and many things and skills will kick in when the children are ready. But the writer doesn’t agree with that idea because he has considered the unique multicultural context of teaching English. He thinks that in such multilingual context, the teachers should be trained to teach letters, words, sounds and decoding. Studies showed that children at the very initial stages of English acquisition could learn both linguistic comprehension and decoding-related components of early literacy from explicit group instruction’ (Roberts and Neal, 2004, p. 283)

After reading this I have two major thoughts.

First, based on my field experience in preschool and what I learned and read about emergent literacy, I changed my mind from “just provide the literacy environment and occasionally meaning-making reading lessons and wait for everything to kick in” to “it would be beneficial and even necessary to do direct instruction on print/decoding skills (consist of print knowledge, the alphabetic principle, phonological/phonemic awareness) with children who are emergent language learners”.

Second, when the author worries about the lack of picture books in Mauritian Creole would do bad to children’s literacy learning process in the special context, it occurs to me to think about the language immersion programs both in the US and China. Because many second language educators believe that the “immersion” is the best way for children to learn “authentic language”. For example, in a Chinese immersion program starts from preschool, Chinese is the only language could be used by students, both written and spoken, and all the reading materials are in Chinese as well. Vice Versa, In a English learning center in China, English is the only language to use, and all the teachers are native speakers of English. This kind of programs are very common around the world, however, after reading and thinking, I start to question the necessity of using young children’s native language to read and to learn at some point, even though it is immersion program. I found myself confused with this: in Chinese culture context, should we teach literacy like letters and sound first before we get to the meaning-making process with picture books?I guess the answer should lie in future practices.