The Sound of Silence: Emergent Technoliteracies and the Early Learning Goals
Jackie Marsh, University of Sheffield
Paper presented at BERA, University of Exeter, September 2002
Abstract
Recent developments in curriculum guidance for the Foundation Stage reflect an acceptance of the key principles of ‘emergent literacy’ (Clay, 1966). However, there is little acknowledgement of children’s engagement in media literacy practices. This paper discusses findings from a survey undertaken in a working class community in Sheffield which aimed to identify the ‘emergent techno-literacy’ practices of a group of 44 children aged between 2 ½ and 4 years of age. It is argued that the multi-modal textual competencies and semiotic choices of these ‘toddler netizens’ (Luke, 2000) are not given sufficient space within current curriculum frameworks for the early years.
Introduction
Emergent literacy is now an established part of early childhood discourse. Since Marie Clay introduced the term in 1966, the subsequent four decades have led to a richer understanding of the way in which children’s engagement in print literacies from birth are an integral part of their literacy development. Whitehurst and Lonigan (2001) suggest that:
…an emergent literacy perspective views literacy-related behaviours occurring in the preschool period as legitimate and important aspects of the developmental continuum of literacy.
(Whitehurst and Lonigan, 2001)
This philosophy is now well-embedded in curriculum documentation. The Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA, 2000) acknowledges that experiences prior to nursery are important stages in the acquisition of literacy. Teachers recognise the way in which early experiences contribute to children’s literacy development, even if they do not always build sufficiently well on these experiences. However, many of the influential studies on children’s emergent literacy experiences were focused almost entirely on print literacy (Teale and Sulzby, 1986; Hall, 1987). There has been less extensive research on children’s emergent literacy practices in relation to wider definitions of literacy which incorporate technology and multi-modal ways of making meaning (Kress, 1998). Throughout this paper, I use the term ‘techno-literacy’ to refer to those literacy practices and events which are mediated by new technologies (Bigum and Green, 1992; Lankshear, 1997) in addition to those which are embedded within older technologies which are constantly updated to include new technologies, such as television.
The literacy curriculum in the early years
The literacy practices undertaken in early years settings generally reflect established principles which have been developed since the introduction of the ‘emergent literacy’ discourse in the latter part of the twentieth-century (Neuman and Dickinson, 2001). The emergent literacy perspective was based on the principle that children begin to develop as literate beings from birth (Clay, 1966; Teale and Sulzby, 1986; Hall, 1987) and that early years settings should recognise children’s expertise and prior experiences with literacy. Nevertheless, I would argue that the attention to children’s prior experience has impacted on early years pedagogy much more strongly than on the curriculum. Thus, children’s prior knowledge is built upon as they are introduced to new skills and knowledge and no longer do teachers wait until children reach a stage of ‘readiness’ (Neuman and Dickinson, 2001). However, the socio-cultural literacy experiences in which children are engaged from birth in the home and community are less well-embedded into curriculum frameworks (Luke and Luke, 2001).
In England, the literacy curricula of nurseries and early years settings reflect the requirements of the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA, 2000). This guidance is based on traditional early years practice and has, generally, been considered to offer an improvement upon previous curriculum documentation (Miller, 2001). Certainly, the title represents a more inclusive label than the earlier emphasis on language and literacy, with a recognition that children’s meaning-making utilises a range of forms of communication (Kress, 1997; Pahl, 1999). No longer can a primary focus on written text be the foundational principle of literacy education; there needs to be recognition of the way in which oral, visual and corporeal ways of making meaning impact on the curriculum (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000). A close examination of the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage reveals that it does encompass ways of making meaning that move beyond a focus on the written language. In the explanatory text which precedes the outline of the curriculum, the authors emphasise the importance of non-verbal communication and, throughout the document, attention is paid to corporeal means of communicating (although sometimes as a means of developing gross and fine motor skills, with a focus on the move to writing). However, although some attention is made to the place of the body in early literacy development, little mention is made of visual literacy, despite the growing attention being paid to that elsewhere (Millard and Marsh, 2001; Bearne and Kress, 2001). In addition, there are no references to media or televisual literacy practices in this policy document, regardless of evidence that young children engage with such texts regularly within the home (Browne, 1999; Marsh and Thompson, 2001). Nevertheless, the attention to wider modes of communication than the written and spoken word is a welcome development from previous curricular frameworks for the early years and provides opportunities for practitioners to widen the scope further.
Young children and techno-literacies
Although there have been a number of studies which have provided information about the out-of-school techno-literacy practices of older children (Sanger et al, 1997; Livingstone and Bovill, 1999), there have been fewer studies which have indicated how younger children engage with a range of technologies such as television, film, computer games and mobile phones.
In Marsh and Thompson’s (2001) study in the UK, eighteen families in a white, working-class community in the north of England were asked to keep literacy diaries for a period of four weeks. These literacy diaries documented the number and titles of texts which three- and four-year-old children read over that four-week period, including televisual texts. Key findings were that, as is the case with older children (Livingstone and Bovill, 1999), televisual texts were a primary source of narrative satisfaction, with children watching television and films far more than they engaged in any other type of literacy activity. However, embedded within children’s literacy practices in the home were a range of popular cultural texts such as computer (mainly console) games, comics, books based on television characters and environmental print linked to media texts (stickers, labels, video labels, computer game boxes and so on). The role of television in pre-school children’s meaning-making in the home was also a pattern noted by Rodriguez (1999) in her study of three Dominican pre-school children aged two-and-a half to five years, living in New York City. The children were observed in the home over a period of nine months. Rodriquez reported that children engaged with a wide range of texts within the home, but were particularly drawn to television and were highly attentive to the print which appeared on the screen. In addition, they were not passive viewers, but were constantly asking questions and talking about what they were watching, demonstrating meaning-making practices that have been noted in relation to older children (Palmer, 1986; Robinson, 1997).
In many countries, popular cultural and media texts often form the majority of young children’s first encounters with spoken and written English. In a number of studies, children’s engagement with popular culture in the home has been linked to the development of English as an additional language. Xu (1999) documented the home literacy practices of six Chinese-American children aged between five and six. She found that all of the children watched television for at least one hour per day. For the children in Xu’s study, popular culture was an important means of developing an understanding and use of English as an additional language. Orrellana (1994) also found, in an analysis of three Spanish-speaking children’s superhero play, that watching popular television programmes helped to develop the children’s American-English. Televisual texts may also provide opportunities for bilingual children to engage in activities which involve their community language. Kenner’s (2000) study outlined the literacy practices of three bilingual children in their London homes. Three year-old Billy’s favourite literacy item, his mother noted, was a Thai karaoke video that displayed the words of the songs in Thai script across the screen, which Billy enjoyed watching and singing along with.
In order to build on this literature, a study was conducted in a community in the north of England which aimed to determine a group of young children’s techno-literacy practices and to use this data to inform further work on children’s media literacy within the community.
Methodology
The survey was undertaken within a community which is the focus of a Sure Start initiative. Sure Start is a government initiative in which there will eventually be up to 500 intervention programmes focused on families with children aged 0-4 in defined areas of need across England. The aims of the programme are to enhance the health, education and well-being of children in the area before school-entry. The community in this Sure Start initiative is primarily white and working-class, housed in council-owned property. An analysis of ward data indicates that this area is one of poverty and higher-than average unemployment. The names and addresses of 260 families with children aged 2½ to 3years 11 months were randomly selected from the Sure Start database and a questionnaire sent out to them. The questionnaire explored children’s media use and parental attitudes towards this media use. Only 44 questionnaires were returned, despite the strategy of a prize draw being used to encourage responses. Even thought this 17% return rate was very low, no reminders were sent out. Because this was a Sure Start community, there were a number of initiatives taking place and I was wary of bombarding families with more unwanted material about initiatives in which they may have had little interest. In addition, I was not seeking a representative sample; the aim of the research study was not to produce generalisable data but to explore a group of pre-school children’s media literacy practices in order to inform work in this community. The average age of children in the families who returned the questionnaires was 2 years, 8 months.
The questionnaires invited respondents to volunteer to be interviewed in the home about their children’s media use. 26 families responded to this invitation and so the parents of 13 boys and 13 girls were interviewed. This balance in gender was not planned. Questionnaire data was analysed quantitatively using Access. Interview transcripts were analysed for emergent patterns and themes. Field notes were completed during home visits, notes which focused on the use of space in the living room with regard to children’s artefacts and technological items and the actions and responses of children during the visit. Selections from across this range of data have been chosen in order to provide indicative examples of these children’s multi-modal meaning-making practices in relation to technology. There are three aspects of children’s multi-media worlds which are focused upon in this paper: television (which includes film), computer games and mobile phones.
Television
The findings from the survey indicate that television is the primary source of textual pleasure for the young children in this study. All of the families reported that children watched television regularly. Livingstone and Bovill (1999) surveyed 1303 children aged 6 – 17 years to determine their uses of new media and found that they watched, on average, 2 and a half hours of television per day. In Figure 1, it can be seen that 45% of the children in this study watched more hours of television per day than that. This may be a result of the more limited options available to younger children for engaging in other leisure activities.
Figure 1: Hours of TV watched per day
There has been a range of work which has indicated that children are not passive viewers, but active meaning-makers with regard to television (Buckingham, 1993; Robinson, 1997). In this study, parents were asked what their children did as they watched television. Only one parent responded that their child sat quietly and did not engage in other activities. Data from the other 43 families all suggested that children sat quietly at times, but they also took part in a whole range of other actions:
Figure 2: What children do when they watch television
When watching television, therefore, these young children are both audience and co-performers. The data from the interviews and field notes indicated that many children acted out aspects of the programme along with the characters and imitated screen behaviour. Far from being ‘couch potatoes’ they were, indeed, an extremely ‘lively audience’ (Palmer, 1986) who produced hybridised texts which reflected a range of elements of their experience and seamlessly integrated media narratives into seminal acts of meaning-making (Hicks, 1999; Dyson, 2001a, 2001b).
The use of space in the living rooms of the 26 families visited also indicated that the television was a primary text within the home. In many of the homes visited, the space around the television appeared to be demarcated as a space for celebrating and extending children’s relationship with the screen. Often, children’s dressing-up clothes, toys or books which were associated with television characters were situated there, ready to be taken up by children when necessary. Parents were supportive of their children’s playful responses to television. For example, Keiran, aged 3 years and 7 months, loved to wear his grandmother’s high heel shoes as he watched 101 Dalmations. The shoes were always kept next to the television. His mother stated:
He re-enacts it. That’s why we’ve got my mum’s shoes over there. [To child] Cruella Deville, aren’t you? You are Cruella Deville, aren’t you? [To interviewer]And he re-enacts everything that he watches in 101 and 102 all the time…and then we’ll re-enact it but we’ll re-enact it for about two weeks. Honestly, if he’s really found it funny or something he can talk and talk and talk and talk. And he talks about the same thing over and over again.
As in Browne’s (1999) study with children aged 5 and above, the very young children in this study were engaged in play in which they physically re-enacted narratives viewed on television. The links between language, literacy and play are well established (see Barrs, 1988) and parents in this study generally provided implicit support for this through their unquestioning acceptance of, and involvement in, these responses to televisual narratives.
Computer games
Of the 44 families surveyed, 72% stated that they owned either a computer or a console games machine, or both. 43% of this number owned only a console games machine and not a PC. The figure for computer or console games ownership was 83% in the sample of families interviewed. Of the 26 children whose parents were interviewed, 14 regularly played Playstation games and half of these were girls. In this under-4 age group, therefore, there was little evidence that boys were more likely to play console games, although there is evidence that boys do dominate use in older age groups (Livingstone and Bovill, 1999). However, gendered patterns were noticeable. In six of these seven families, it was the older males in the family who played with the young female child on the console games. A number of the 14 families who stated that their children played console games described how men in the family had inducted young children into the genre:
Well, he’s always – his dad always had a Playstation so he’s also like had it from being a baby. His Dad would have him in his lap and Dan liked to sit and play, thinking he were playing it.
The learning opportunities provided by popular, console-based computer games have often been overlooked by educators (Sanger et al., 1997; Marsh, 2002a), but they can develop a range of skills including hand-eye co-ordination, parallel processing, spatial and problem-solving skills (Loftus and Loftus, 1983; Greenfield, 1984; Gagnon, 1985). In addition, they are embedded within the intertextual media universe (Kinder, 1991) of young children’s lives and so they are texts that have multiple connections with others. Children do not see a neat dichotomy between print and televisual texts as they move seamlessly from one mode to another in their quest for meaning-making (Neuman, 1995). Engagement with such games, therefore, may motivate children to read across categories. In an earlier study of children’s media literacy practices, three- and four-year-old children were engaged in reading computer games covers and magazines, for example (Marsh and Thompson, 2001).