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L110.2 Reese, L., Gallimore, R., & Goldenberg, G. (1999). Job-required Literacy, Home Literacy Environments, and School Reading: Early Literacy Experiences of Immigrant Latino Children. In J. G. Lipson & L. A. McSpadden (Eds.), Negotiating Power and Place at the Margins: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Vol VII, pp. 232-269. American Anthropological Association.
Literate parents are likely to "carry into" children's everyday routines two kinds of early literacy influences. First, whatever skills the job requires may directly or indirectly affect the kinds of experiences children have at home; for example, parents who read or prepare even simple documents on the job may generalize their skills to joint literacy activities with children at home. Second, it is likely that parents who use literacy as a subsistence tool will recognize its adaptive value, and therefore attend more systematically to their children's literacy development and experiences at home and school. Each of these is an example of "unpacking" group-level factors to identify the ecological/cultural sources of the specific processes through which children's development is affected (Weisner 1984).
We argue that ecocultural influences, including but not limited to the parents' job and job-related uses of literacy, shape and constrain families' daily routines, which in turn create the settings for children to learn developmentally significant functions. Specifically, we are interested in the development of literacy skills before and during the children's kindergarten school year.
In a study of 121 Latino children, job-required father literacy was the only ecocultural feature which correlated significantly with child test scores [r = .20, p < .05]. None of the following was significantly associated with test scores: parent education, occupational status, years living in the U.S., and family's use of religious texts.
In addition, job-required father literacy was significantly correlated with several other ecocultural and home environment variables (see Table 1 for values). These significant correlates included two ecocultural variables: father's job status and job-required literacy for the mother.
Job-required father literacy was also significantly associated with selected beliefs and aspirations for children. Fathers required to use literacy at work are from families which have higher hopes for their children's job status as adults, and they hold higher educational expectations. In addition, those same fathers are from families which expressed the belief that it is important to help children with homework and to review the schoolwork that children have done. These results suggest a relationship between father's work or subsistence activities and the home literacy environment.
However, there was no significant correlation of job-required father literacy with reported help provided the child at home. In other words, there is no evidence that subsistence-based use of literacy by father is transported to the home to affect the daily experiences of the child, at least in the activities which formed part of the interview protocol (i.e. reading to children, assisting with homework, teaching letters and words).
It should be noted that one limitation of the results reported above is that the origin of reports was, in 76% of the cases, the mother alone. Not only was the mother reporting on her perception of what the "family" did to assist children at home and what "parent" values were regarding education, she was also the source for whether fathers were required to use literacy at work. Bearing in mind this caveat, we see that the father's use of literacy in the workplace (as reported by either mother or father) emerges as a critical factor in predicting children's literacy performance at school. This finding is in line with ecocultural theory which predicts that parents' subsistence tools such as job-required literacy will have an influence on children's activities in the home environment. However, the data provide no clear indication of the manner or process through which that influence occurs. Thus we are left with two questions: (1) how does the father's workplace use of literacy make itself manifest in the home activity settings which mold children's literacy experiences, and (2) what is the roadway of indirect influences or effects of the father's workplace literacy on the home environment which ultimately play themselves out in the family's literacy activities?
To answer these questions, we relied on qualitative data from Study 2, with the case materials collected from a subset of 32 families drawn from the longitudinal survey of Study 1, and from Study 3, with observational data on ten families drawn from the same area.
In summary, the statistical finding that job-required literacy of the fathers is related to children's literacy scores is reflected in some of the cases in ways that seem consistent with ecocultural and activity setting theory. However, we have no clear explanation for the absence of significant correlations of test scores to mother variables such as education and job-related literacy. In fact, the case materials from Study 2 would suggest these ought to have appeared. It is possible that mothers' job-related literacy is not correlated with child outcomes because of the fact that the majority of the mothers do not work outside of the home. It is also reported by families that mothers are the ones who spend more time engaged in supervising schoolwork and assisting children with homework tasks. In some cases, when the child is experiencing difficulties in school, mothers redouble their efforts to assist the child. It is likely, therefore, that mothers' literacy use and activities are important in children's lives but not related to literacy performance in school in a simple or linear way, with more activity being associated with higher performance. Finally, the analyses in Study 1 suggested that it was not the use of literacy on the job by fathers per se that impacted children's literacy development, but rather it was the way in which job-related literacy impacted the home literacy environments where children's development was being fostered that made a difference. Mothers, clearly, are contributing to the home literacy environment in general as well as engaging their children in various types of literacy activities. Their contributions are not reflected in simple correlations with level of education or work status.
It is not yet clear what the "pathway" or "pathways" are through which father's work literacy impacts child literacy development. The statistical data suggest that they might include monitoring homework and schoolwork. The case data presented above suggest, however, that another pathway of influence of father's job-related literacy on home literacy activities may be a more indirect one, with the father orchestrating family members' interactions with the child, providing additional literacy materials to support academic progress, and modeling literate behavior as he completes job tasks or his own night school homework. Study 3's observational data can be utilized to shed more light on the pathways of effect.
Study 3 was designed to provide maximum information about ten families using an intensive case study method. The focus of the case studies was on the literacy experiences of the children at home and school.
Was there any evidence that parents' education or use of literacy in the workplace had an influence on children's home literacy experiences and subsequently on their academic performance? To examine this question, Reese et al. (1995) grouped children into higher, middle, and lower achievers based on their performance on their scores on a battery of early literacy measures at the end of the kindergarten year. The four children who fell into the lower level group all had parents who had not gone beyond elementary school, who reported no use of literacy on their jobs, and who therefore were not observed by their children engaging in work-related literacy activities. In fact, in only one of these homes was reading material of any sort, except that provided by the school, observed on more than three occasions over the course of the year.
By way of contrast, the families of children in the highest achieving group all had at least one adult in the home who had gone beyond an elementary school level of education. Their homes also appeared to contain more materials that children could incorporate into their own literacy activities. Furthermore, workplace or church, or both, impacted the literacy environment of all three of these homes by providing motives for literacy use and opportunities for children to see their parents model literate behaviors. These are the homes in which a father wrote reports on his maintenance jobs at home, a mother took telephone orders for cosmetics sales in the home, where women from the church met to read and discuss Bible lessons, and where children were read to from the Bible and encouraged to recite prayers and verses.
Families of children in the middle group exhibited some, but not all, characteristics of the higher group. Therefore, while no single characteristic could be used to predict a student's performance, the presence of a cluster of characteristics including parental levels of education and the impact of the church and the workplace were associated with higher levels of child achievement.
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