Becoming Literate / Edition 1

by Marie Clay

Overview

Children are taught about stories, words, letters, and sounds in many different programs in their first years of literacy instruction. In this book Marie Clay argues that underlying the progress of successful children there is another level of competencies being learned. Successful readers show a gradual control over how readers or writers can work with print even though they learn in very different programs. This inner strategic control is what failing readers do not seem to build.

Successful readers begin very early to learn myriad of things which support their independent processing of texts. They do this learning in interaction with parents and teachers, but they gradually come to control ways of working on print which free them to learn independently from literacy encounters.

This concept helps us to understand how teachers can bring different children by different routes to similar outcomes. It allows for different children to start literacy learning in different ways. It is widely accepted that preschool children construct a control over oral language that enables them to produce sentences which they have never heard before, and extend their own language systems through conversation. When our observations of readers and writers show that they have developed effective strategies for monitoring their own ways of working on texts, we can be confident that this control will, at a later stage, allow them to work independently as silent readers of unseen texts.

The concept that only the child can construct this inner control develops Clay's earlier description of the complex behaviors which support literacy learning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780435085742
Publisher:	Heinemann
Publication date:	04/15/1991
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	372
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.86(d)
Age Range:	5 - 7 Years

About the Author

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon),Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies. Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems. Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.

Table of Contents

A Framework of Issues

A Framework of Issues

Transitions and Translations

Literacy Before Schooling

School Entry - A Transition

Oral Language Support for Early Literacy

Introducing Children to Print at School

Attention and the Twin Puzzles of Text Reading: Serial Order and Hierarchical Order

Attention to Concepts About Print

Interacting with Beginning Reading Books

Problem-Solving Using Information of More Than One Kind

Choosing Texts: Contrived Texts, Story Book Texts, and Transitional Texts

Progress on the First Reading Books

The Deep Structure of Success: Reading Strategies

Behaviors Signal a Developing Inner Control

Visual Perception Strategies: One Kind of Inner Control

The Development of Processing Strategies

Extending Inner Control