Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom Literacy as a Social Practice Routledge Research in Literacy Series

This volume demonstrates how the ethnographic approach to research demanded by a ?Literacy as Social Practice? perspective can generate fresh insights into what happens when young children engage with schooled literacy tasks.

Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom argues that the lived experience of young children encountering formal schooled literacy curricula should be the foremost consideration in educational reforms intended to improve rates of literacy acquisition in schools. To make this argument, the author suspends traditional concerns with ?learning? and ?progress? to concentrate on ?practice? and ?meaning? in a careful analysis of key classroom incidents. The author concludes that such insights suggest a need for re-considering the assumptions upon which educational policy rests.

This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and libraries in the fields of Literacy Studies, Teacher Education, Education Policy and Applied Linguistics.

List of Abbreviations

List of transcription conventions

Foreword

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Introduction: Literacy, Schooling and Young Children

PART ONE: FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILIAR PHENOMENA

Chapter 1 Fresh Perspectives on Familiar Phenomena

• Introduction
• Section 1: Literacy in the social world
• Section 2: Literacy in the institution of schooling
• Section 3: Children’s interpretive reproduction of literacy in schools
• Conclusion

Chapter 2: Researching Young Children’s in-school literacy practices

Introduction

• Section 1: Policy priorities for researching early childhood literacy
• Section 2: Ethnographic principles for researching early childhood literacy in classrooms
• Section 3: Re-examining young children’s in-school literacy practices
• Conclusion

PART TWO: AMBER CLASS CHILDREN PRACTISE LITERACY

Chapter 3: Jessica practises literacy with Donna

• Introduction
• Section 1: Normalising expectations for young children’s literacy practices.
• Section 2: Interpretively reproducing literacy practices in the classroom.
• Section 3: Interpretively Reproducing literacy skills and knowledge
• Conclusion

Chapter 4: The importance of Amber Class’ children’s in-class peer culture

• Introduction
• Section 1: Producing peer culture literacy in social interaction
• Section 2: Managing peer culture priorities: Peer to peer copying
• Section 3: Managing peer culture and schooled literacy priorities
• Conclusion

Chapter 5 Amber Class Children’s encounter with being grouped for teaching

• Introduction
• Section 1: Schooled literacy manages relative literacy expertise
• Section 2: Peer culture interpretations of schooled groupings
• Section 3: Sharing literacy expertise in the peer culture
• Conclusion

PART THREE: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Discussion: Reflecting on young children, schooling and literacy

Conclusion

Appendix: My research project

REFERENCES

Lucy Henning is Senior Lecturer in primary English at Roehampton University, UK.