Some Points to Consider
We know young children come to school with different
levels of pre-literacy awareness.
But why do they leave school with such different levels
of literacy awareness?
1. Design Flaws in school-based early reading programs
A design flaw occurs when an awareness that
is later in the learning
hierarchy is required to learn a skill that is earlier
in the hierarchy.
For example, a common design flaw is found in pre-literacy
activities
where sound-letter correspondence--a later skill--is
used
to develop the important--but prior--phonological
awareness skills.
2. Design Bias in School Classrooms
The design flaw in early reading programs becomes
design
bias in actual practice.
This happens because students who enter school with
high levels of preliteracy
awareness, e.g., awareness of sound-letter correspondence,
letter names, etc.,
are able to negotiate the flawed preliteracy activities.
But students who enter
school with lower levels of preliteracy awareness
are not able to negotiate
the design flaw--the pre-literacy activities presuppose
literacy
awareness that they don't yet have. In effect
most preschool, Head Start and
Kindergarten reading programs have a serious design
bias against those who enter
school with lower levels of pre-literacy awareness.
2a. A second level of design bias emerges from
the
fact that children who come to
preschool with higher levels of preliteracy awareness
and children who come
with lower levels of preliteracy awareness are in
the same class together.
As a result, students with the lower levels of preliteracy
awareness not only struggle
with the design-flawed literacy activities, they are
also subjected to the peculiar
experience that other students in the class--those
who come with higher levels of
preliteracy awareness--catch on more quickly and,
typically, are rewarded by
teachers and the system. (Imagine learning to use
chopsticks for the first time
when half the group, including the teacher--but not
you--are from Chinese or Japanese homes.)
Both forms of design bias in the classroom can be difficult
to focus.
Student reading "failure" is often explained by an
appeal to IQ scores or
learning difficulties rather than by analyzing school
reading programs for design flaw and
design bias. In addition, focus on the home--why children
come to school with different levels
of preliteracy awareness--appears to be preferred
to a focus on the school--
why children leave school with such radically different
levels of literacy skills.
3. A Proposal (submitted to the
Field-Initiatied Research competitions, Dept. of Ed., April 3, 2001)
Test a set of preliteracy activities that control
for design flaw and design bias.
The focus of the research would be the alphabetic
principle.
The following three aspects of the alphabetic principle
would be studied for
their possible success with young children who enter
school with low preliteracy
profiles: a) phonological activities that do
not require sound-letter correspondence awareness;
b) restricting letter name awareness ("reciting the
alphabet") until needed for spelling;
c) introducing consonants in conjunction with a vowel
sound, never alone, i.e.,
no artificially segmenting of sounds that are always
sounded together in actual reading.
If there is significantly better or unanticipated progress
toward reading
using the preliteracy activities controlled for design
bias, there will be
evidence that design bias may be a real factor and
one that needs to be
considered in assessing the failure of current reading
programs and in designing
alternatives.
Brief examples of some preliteracy activities controlled
for design flaw/bias are found in the
following lessons: Lesson
One
Text by Jim Green
Alliance Project for Tribal Colleges
Box 340
Wilmot, SD 57279
Send EMAIL to: jim@dailypost.com
Copyright 2001 Native Language Systems