Literary texts are thus a necessary requirement for the development of literary readers.
They are not, though, a sufficient condition. In Meek’s formulation there are two
conditions, the second being the necessity of ‘sharing our readings with others’. The
benefits of sharing readings have been so widely discussed in the children’s literature field
they may appear to require no further analysis, but this is not so.
Since for children the two main sites for this sharing are families and schools, relations
between ways of sharing readings in these sites are crucial for development. Since
sharing is always by definition with socially situated others, whose locations in socio-
cultural practices vary, there is an important potential for different forms of interpretive
practice to develop in and around literary text. Therefore, how readings are shared in
classrooms, and how these classroom ways of saying relate to ways of meaning that
children have developed in their families, have a deep significance for literacy pedagogy
and are the focus of the next section. In the following discussion I will initially consider
changes to early school literacy pedagogy which are based on observations of family
reading practices, then raise some questions about the effects of the notion of a close
partnership between home and school in literacy education.
Story Reading and Early Literacy PedagogyFrom case studies of precocious readers (for example, Clark 1976; Durkin 1966), and
correlational studies of early development of schooled literacy (for example Wells et al.
1981; Wells 1985; 1987), there have been consistent findings of strong associations
between joint book reading in families and early success in school literacy. The findings
have been widely used in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the USA to
fashion literacy education in the early years of schooling. In Australia, joint book
reading has become one of the orthodoxies of the ‘whole language’ approach.
In classroom joint book reading, teachers have been encouraged to simulate family
interaction by reading ‘big book’ versions of children’s literature with whole classes of
young learners (Holdaway 1979). Interaction during school joint book reading usually
takes the form of an initial reading of a text and discussion of story features based on
children’s individual responses to it, then further readings in which children progressively
take more responsibility for reading the written language aloud.
However, the foregrounding of continuity in reading practices between home and
school, tending to universalise the practice of joint book reading in the home, comes at a
high price for some young learners. In contrast with the universalising tendency of much
of the pedagogical literature, a significant body of evidence points to the relativity of
literacy practices in different social locations, including ways in which caregivers read to
their children and hence the orientations which children develop to different ‘ways with
words’ (Heath 1983). Since only some of these practices are selected into school
discourse, even those children who are read to extensively at home may experience
significant discontinuity between home and school literacy practices.
In fact, even in the early correlational studies of early reading achievement, important
differences in family story-reading practices were evident. This was so in Wells’s Bristol
study (1985, 1987), and in a range of small-scale studies, for example Tizard and
Hughes (1984) and Teale (1986). Researchers such as Wells have been clear that certain
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