Chapter 3: The Acquisition of Literacy: Reframing Definitions, Paradigms, Ideologies, and Practices

In classrooms and other settings for learning throughout the world, young children arrive at school with different interests, abilities, experiences, and systems of support. Contemporary children, born into the Information Age, live in a world where demands for ever-escalating levels of literacy pertain. From the earliest days of life, they find themselves “awash in a cosmic soup of language, numbers, images, music, and drama” from “television, radio, movies, billboards, print media, electronic media, packaging, grocery stores, malls, and restaurants” (Berghoff, 1997, p. 316). The young child’s ability to become an informed consumer and user of multiple symbol systems is an important marker of diversity, whether it is a 2-year-old from Los Angeles whose vocabulary in English and Spanish is at the upper end of the 50–550 word range reported by parents (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994) or a recently immigrated school age child from Kenya who is fluent in her tribal language, Kiswahili, and English. Young children typically develop language at a furious pace, learning six to ten new words per day, beginning at about age three (Spodek & Saracho, 1993). Research on the human brain suggests that there are periods of development during which the mind is more receptive and responsive to certain types of input (Rushton & Larkin, 2001) and the early childhood years are undeniably “prime time” where the development of language is concerned (Jalongo, 2001). Furthermore, children’s early efforts to learn language reverberate across developmental domains with profound and enduring consequences for cognitive, social, emotional, and creative growth; young children who learn to speak and interact successfully with others tend to develop not only more sophisticated literacy skills but also more effective learning strategies and more satisfying interpersonal relationships (Howard, Shaughnessy, Sanger, & Hux, 1998). Learning language presents a double challenge because children are expected not only expected to learn about language, but also to learn through language (EganRobertson & Bloome, 1998); that challenge escalates when the dominant power group speaks a language different from the child’s native language or languages.