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L100 Gallimore, R. & Goldenberg, C. (1993). Activity settings of early literacy: Home and school factors in children's emergent literacy. In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C.A. Stone (Eds.). Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children's Development (pp. 315-335). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Children's activity settings are the architecture of their everyday life and the context of their development. Activity settings are shaped and sustained by ecological and cultural features of the family niche. What activities children engage in as an ordinary part of their daily lives will have a profound impact on the cognitive and communicative functions they will develop. To study these activities is to identify the cognitive and communicative opportunities of culture (Nerlove & Snipper, 1981). We have been part of an effort to operationalize cultural activities in way that can guide empirical research. This effort has used five "activity setting" variables: (1) personnel present during an activity, (2) salient cultural values, (3) the operations and task demands of the activity itself, (4) the scripts for conduct that govern the participants' actions, and (5) the purposes or motives of the participants. The activity setting concept is derivative of Soviet activity theory (Leont'ev, 1981) and the behavior setting concept of the Whitings (Whiting & Whiting, 1975), mixed with the influence of Cole (1985), Rogoff (1982), Wertsch, Minick, and Arns (1984), and our own investigations (Gallimore, Weisner, Kaufman, & Bernheimer, 1989; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Weisner, 1984; Weisner & Gallimore, 1985; Weisner, Gallimore, & Jordan, 1988). For two of the five activity setting components--personnel and cultural values--the necessary conditions for emergent literacy events were present in Latino families observed as part of a longitudinal study. Despite generally low educational levels among parents, they value schooling, are available to the children, and are interested in and capable of providing literacy-enhancing experiences. Actual literacy tasks--the third component of activity settings--were more frequent than some stereotypes of low income Spanish-speaking families suggest, but they are not optimal for literacy development. In terms of the fourth and fifth activity components (scripts and purposes), what we observed was also not optimal. When children attempted to use or create "texts," parents did not seem to consider what the children were doing to be an important step in "emerging literacy." They did not use such events as occasions for "talk" about texts, reading, and the like. Opportunities for meaningful oral interchanges about texts were present, but they were not exploited. Beyond the mere existence of at least some literacy tasks, the single most critical component in most emergent literacy activities is the personnel present. Someone has to be available and capable of assisting a child if we are to see "literacy-promoting" interactions. Given the personnel and at least some literacy tasks, what aspect of an activity setting is likely to have the greatest impact on a child's experience? Probably, it is the purpose that the more capable individuals see in the task they are jointly performing with the emerging literate. On the surface, a task may seem the same and the personnel may appear similar but depending upon the purpose in the minds of the participants a child's experience can vary greatly. In other words, what the participants "think" they are doing will affect how they go about it and that will determine how the event contributes to emerging literacy skills. With this perspective, consider the literacy activities observed in the Spanish-speaking homes of our study community. Literacy events are relatively infrequent. When they do occur, parents do not treat them as opportunities to talk about, encourage, support, and reinforce child literacy experiences. But they could, and they occasionally do. They just don't do it often enough or take full advantage when they do. Given the families' values, we wondered what would happen if teachers regularly sent home "little books" and asked parents to let the child read to them? It is possible that the mere addition of a supply of "literacy tasks" plus a "purpose" suggested by a high status individual (teachers) might produce a substantially different picture than our observations and interviews have revealed. Would the books lead parents to imbue "reading together" with a purpose that leads to "scripts" associated with emergent literacy opportunities? Would a teacher-prompted "read together" activity increase the kind of "talk" said to be optimal for literacy development? In a recently completed study (Goldenberg, 1989), we examined the effects of two quite different activity settings on children's home literacy experiences. Each activity setting was prompted by a different type of literacy material teachers sent to the homes of their Spanish-speaking kindergartners. Our hypothesis was that differences in one activity component (task demand) would lead to differences in another--language-use, or the "scripts" used by parents and their children. We expected that the differences in task demands of the two activity settings would lead parents to infer a different purpose for engaging their children in early literacy interactions. We found that the use of the "libritos" (simple, short Spanish language story books) greatly increased language use during home literacy activities relative to conventional kindergarten worksheets. While the two types of materials yielded episodes almost identical in length, parents spoke with their children much more during book reading,than did the parents whose children received more conventional copying and letter-learning activities. More specifically, parents gave children more positive feedback, asked more questions, and made more modeling statements (Goldenberg, 1989). In other words, the meaningful texts led to increasingly elaborate verbal scripts during literacy episodes. However, these changes in amount of language were only true for parents. The texts produced no increase in spontaneous child language production relative to the conventional materials group. In the book reading interactions, parents asked their children far more questions than those doing more conventional kindergarten "reading readiness" homework. This is an important effect, given previous findings that young Latino children experience fewer opportunities to answer parents' question during learning episodes (Laosa op. cit.). However, the "libritos" produced relatively few interactions focusing on the meaning of the text. Under both home literacy conditions, parents' overwhelming emphasis was on children's correct performance of the given task at the most superficial level--either writing or naming letters correctly or reading a text accurately. Utterances focusing on "surface associations" (letter-, word-, or phrase-recognition with no reference to meaning) constituted by far the majority of the utterances--over 90%. Despite the fact that the simple books we had sent home contained stories and various meaningful elements, and parents were explicitly encouraged to focus on these elements, they did not prompt more meaning-oriented interactions between parents and children. While there might be several reasons parents attended almost exclusively to the surface features of the texts, our activity setting model suggests one explanation lies in the of participants' immediate purposes and motives. Purposes and motives--together with broader cultural values and goals--will influence how tasks are carried out, that is, what scripts participants use. The parents attended to surface features of the text because doing so is consistent with their conception of how children learn to read--through repetitious and accurate practice of letters, syllables, or words (Goldenberg, 1988; Reese et al., op. cit.) This conception of the purpose of the early literacy activity--correct and precise word- and letter-recognition at the most literal and concrete level--is consistent with their own experiences. Spanish reading is taught in the U.S.A. and elsewhere as a matter of "code-breaking." Virtually without exception, Spanish-speakers are taught to read in formal school settings where learning the phonetic rules is the primary focus. From what we know of the parents in our cohort, this is how they learned to read (Reese et al., op. cit.) and that is what they presume to be the purpose of their children's homework, whether it is ditto sheets or little books. Their preoccupation with surface features of even meaningful texts is therefore entirely reasonable. Furthermore, given the importance these parents attach to their children's academic achievement, and specifically their learning to read (i.e., the broader cultural values and goals previously discussed), they treat materials or "homework" sent by the teacher as highly consequential. These activities are to be completed correctly and precisely, in accordance with their view of how children learn to read. Parents attend conscientiously to what they see as the main purpose of the activity, and they give children very little latitude for incorrect responses. At the level of immediate purposes and motives--the fifth facet of the activity setting--parents are therefore likely to construe the tasks sent home by teachers in a way that leads them to focus on what they view as critical for learning to read. |
