characteristics of linguistic interaction during the reading of text are related to school
literacy development. He comments:
it is not the reading of stories on its own that leads children towards the reflective,
disembedded thinking that is so necessary for success in school, but the total
interaction in which the story is embedded. At first they need a competent adult to
mediate, as reader and writer, between themselves and the text; but even when
they can perform the decoding and encoding for themselves, they continue to need
help in interpreting the stories they hear and read and in shaping those that they
create for themselves. The manner in which the adult—first parent and later
teacher—fulfils this latter role is almost as important as the story itself.
Wells 1985:253Despite the strength of these assertions, repeated frequently in both research reports
and pedagogic handbooks, only rarely has linguistic interaction during joint book reading
been a topic of intensive analysis. Among such detailed studies, Heath’s ethnographic
comparison of literacy events in three communities in the south-east of the USA is the
most widely known. With respect to joint book reading specifically, Heath found crucial
variation in interaction between caregivers and children in the white fundamentalist
Christian community of ‘Roadville’ and the ‘maintown’ middle-class social location of
‘Gateway’. (The practice was found to be virtually non-existent in the third community,
‘Trackton’.) The Gateway variant was the only one which approximated school practices.
Heath argues that the variants signify different historico-cultural literacy traditions in
these communities.
Additional to Heath’s study of ‘inter-cultural’ variation, intra-cultural variation by
social class locations was considered by Williams (1995). Many hours of interaction
between mothers and 4-year-old children, and between teachers and kindergarten
classes in the first two months of schooling, were audiorecorded. Semantic features of
each clause of this interaction were analysed to describe typical semantic patterning
during talk about books. Findings from the study confirm the sensitivity of literacy
practices to social location and, additionally, indicate that it is aspects of the practices
of only one social class group which are projected into school pedagogy.
The sensitivity of joint book reading practices to social location represents a radical
challenge to the image of naturalness in interaction around children’s literature which
strongly typifies teaching handbooks. In these environments children become, in
Bernstein’s phrase, the ‘imaginary subjects’ of instruction (Bernstein 1990) and the
account of the complexity of what they have to learn for success in school literacy is
significantly reduced.
One of the most important current challenges for early literacy educators is to find
ways of talking about books which can be made genuinely inclusive of children, or at
least genuinely clear to them. Another is to avoid impressions that literacy differences
are simply educational differences in another guise, and therefore successfully ‘treated’
by parent education strategies. Both challenges will have to be addressed through
greater knowledge about both the subtlety and effects of meaning variations in relation
to different socio-cultural locations.
570 APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE