Effects of extending disadvantaged families’ teaching of emergent literacy
Effects of extending disadvantaged families’ teaching of emergent literacy
Cathy Nutbrown and Peter Hannon
School of Education, The University of Sheffield
Our recently published paper focuses on how families can be supported to enhance their young children’s early literacy development. Children’s skills in literacy and numeracy are currently a matter of intense policy focus from an early age — in England this is long before formal schooling begins. But literacy learning need not be a matter of following a formal and narrow literacy curriculum from an early age. A broader view of literacy learning in everyday contexts can be taken and parents are key, as teachers of aspects of early literacy using experiences in their own home, to create and use situations to teach their children new skills and knowledge as they acquire an ever deepening understanding of what it is to be a reader and a writer.
A key challenge for early literacy education is to find ways to facilitate access to school literacy for children from disadvantaged families whilst also valuing their preschool family literacy experiences and their families’ informal teaching of emergent literacy. In a paper published recently in Research Papers in Education, we reported a study of an intervention programme designed to enable early childhood educators to work with disadvantaged families to raise children’s literacy achievement at school entry.
Some are familiar with the ORIM Framework which builds on research in early literacy development and focuses on parents providing Opportunities to engage in literacy, showing Recognition of children’s early developmental steps in reading and writing, sharing Interaction around literacy and being Models of literacy users.
In the recent paper we introduce key terms and concepts relating to the programme — in particular the use of home visiting, literacy focussed group events, emergent literacy and the ORIM Framework. We review meta-analyses of evaluations of family-based literacy intervention programmes and identify four problems in the field: First, RCT studies have tended to focus on one or two strands of emergent literacy. Second, benefits to children’s preschool literacy may not be as great as hoped. Third, an under-discussed problem is whether families take up and engage with programmes. Fourth, many interventions have sought to enhance families’ instructional role, requiring parents to teach to specified learning objectives in planned curricula with structured activities for children, rather than their facilitative role which may be less deliberate, more opportunistic, context-dependent and more often embedded in real- life tasks.
The key research question was: Would the intervention programme produce measurable gains in children’s emergent literacy and, if so, would they persist? In addition, programme implementation, take-up, participation and drop-out were systematically recorded. The paper reports an evaluation of a co-produced programme involving early childhood educators and 176 families in an RCT (randomised controlled trial) which showed benefits for children most likely to be disadvantaged by under achievement in later schooling.
The programme, based on the ORIM conceptual framework, linking concepts of emergent literacy to concepts of families’ teaching, was multi-strand, emphasised families’ facilitative teaching, and secured high participation. There were literacy gains for children in the programme. Children further disadvantaged in terms of their mothers’ lower levels of education had greater, and longer lasting, gains. The rigour of the study design and execution means that, although further research is desirable, findings reported here can be acted upon with confidence by early childhood educators to enhance practice and by educational policymakers to create the conditions for them to do so.
The reference to the paper is:
Hannon,P., Nutbrown, C. and Morgan, A. (2019): Effects of extending disadvantaged families’ teaching of emergent literacy, Research Papers in Education, DOI: 10.1080/02671522.2019.1568531
You can download the whole paper for free by following this link: https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1568531
You can find out more about projects using the ORIM Framework and REAL Project approaches from our website :
