Literacy in the Early Years - Teachers' Role

Regarding the role of teachers in supporting early literacy, I pay tribute to Margaret Carr's concept of learning dispositions, which mean that learners are being able, ready and willing to learn. So, in the context of literacy, it is about getting the young learner ready and willing to write, as well as knowing how to write.

Look at this scenario:
We baked at the kindergarten, Nina, who is gluten intolerant, was keen to confirm that she would be allowed to eat the cake we made. Despite the reassurance that we had checked all the ingredients, Nina insisted to call her Mum, just to be sure. As we said only the teachers were allowed to use the phone, she wrote down her question for the teacher to read to her Mum. Nina asked me to spell out the words, and she referred to the alphabet chart when writing. What an amazing writer! Not only does she has literacy skills and knowledge, she was also able to recognize the occasion to apply her skills; and she was willing to do it even the task involved lots of effort.

 To support literacy in the early years, I believe, teachers need to maintain a dual focus on the literacy skills and the learning dispositions. I have introduced McLachlan's work on teaching literacy skills to young children in an earlier post from my children's songs, rhymes and game blog , now I'm going to focus on dispositions in this post.

When a child has learned a literacy skill, for example, how to identify ABCs, he is able to do something he couldn't do before. But he may not be spontaneously make use of that ability when a relevant situation arises, if he doesn't realize its relevance. Try to ask a child who knows the alphabet to read out the letters of words from a book, he may say he doesn't know how.  It is not much about being able, he is not ready to make use of the ability he possesses. Also, he may still need a degree of support and encouragement, which involves his desire to try when there is a certain degree of difficulty. It's about being willing.

To support a disposition to write, the teacher needs to model purposeful literacy.  At kindergarten, teachers who jot down notes about children's voice/ ideas and learning episodes are providing role models for emergent writers. Children observe when teachers write. The teachers are modeling an interest in writing, in particular, when they are keen to talk about and share what they have noted down, they are modeling a passion for expressing and recording ideas, feelings and thoughts in print/ written language.

Guy Claxton writes in 2009, in a forward to the book entitled Learning Power Heroes from the Building Learning Power programme in England, that teachers are learning heroes. He suggests that children learn in the way their parents, carers and teachers learn. So, if they are around people who love to write,  they will pick up the habits and rules of writing, as well as develop a passion for writing. This is especially true with teachers, as they are important people/ heroes to young learners in the kindergarten.

In short, early childhood teachers must support young children to develop not only literacy skills but also positive dispositions to use the skill willingly when the situation is relevant.