Designing Literacy Curriculum: Teaching Literacy as Response to Learning

We begin with a radical idea: The real problem in the teaching of reading and writing is the teaching of reading and writing. The solution is to stop teaching reading and writing. We are not saying that supporting children-all children-in becoming literateis not an important school objective; on the contrary, it is of central importance. In fact, language and literacy development should be part of all school learning, teaching and curriculum. But that means continuous attention to opportunities to use language in all its forms as young learners are immersed in literacy. When curriculum is built around the tenets we present in this chapter, our reclaiming work can be achieved. We argue in this chapter that (1) oral and written language are learned easilyby all children in natural contexts; (2) oral and written language curriculum has been, and continues to be, built on inaccurate assumptions about language learning; and (3) curriculum can be reclaimed by teaching early literacies as response to learning and designing it around perceiving, ideating, and presenting.Every human has the ability to learn one or more languages relatively easily, and that ability is equally available to learn alternate forms of those languages, such as written language or reading. Language is easy to learn because it corresponds to the way the brain works. The brain learns and stores what it learns by using a system of symbols. Language is easily learned, in spite of its complexity, when it is available, useful and functional. Most children learn one language. When surrounded by users of more than one language with whom they need to connect, children easily learn those languages too. African children often know several languages.They play with children whose languages are different than their own and soon know each other’s languages (Gilmore, 2015). Consider that without instruction, virtually all human infants become able touse one or more languages before they are three years old. They learn the grammar, the phonology, and the set of abstract combinations of sounds that their community uses to symbolically represent their world. Children with access to digital devices learn to read and write on them as easily as they learn to talk (see Wohlwend, Chapter 5). There is no reason why poor children in advanced societies, children in developing nations, or any child anywhere is less able to learn to read and write having already learned one or more oral languages. We’ve established that children learn language easily, but they don’t learnlanguage because it is innate. What is innate is our ability to think symbolically. We have the ability to represent everything we experience with systems of abstract, meaningless symbols. We are social beings that cannot survive without complex connections with others. We are intelligent beings with intelligent things to say. But our ability to think symbolically indicates something very important: if we are thinking symbolically that means that the brain itself stores memories, experiences and learning through systems of symbols. Connecting with the world through language is possible because we think symbolically. Language is both a personal and a social invention. Each of us invents language but the need to connect with others serves as a constraint on our inventions. The interactions of our personal inventions with the conventions of the language(s) that surround us cause the child’s language to move toward the language of family and community. But the creative process never ends-language is continuously evolving both to meet new needs but also as users are divided by time, space, class, culture, or experience. To use language successfully, a child must engage in conversations and discus-sions, follow instructions, ask questions, share in the culture of their community, and participate in the culture of childhood. Children demonstrate control over three levels of language as they engage in real language: the systems of sounds, the wording systems including word choice and grammar, and the semantics or meaning system. That’s a lot for little kids-but they do it. Though virtually all children become adequate language users well before they come to kindergarten, the paths they take to get there vary. Each of our great grandchildren showed us a different path in their learning.Our oldest, Ezrial, focused on intonation patterns. She communicated with great emotion and hand movements; she told stories, asked questions, and made demands, but the sounds of English weren’t there yet. Eventually the sound system appeared as Ezrial’s phrasing became more understandable. She still spoke dramatically at age six and by the age of seven, she was reading to her younger siblings on a regular basis and had her own e-mail address. Juliette showed a more typical progression. She had a few words and shortphrases and a few contrasting intonation patterns so you knew when she said“Daddy shoe,” she was commenting on the fact that it was his shoe. The same words said with different intonation meant, “Put on your shoe, Daddy.” At a certain point, over what seemed like a few days, her words and short phrases became conversational English. She used sentence order, mostly getting tenses right, and added the function words needed to produce comprehensible utterances. In her case it was easier to see her language developing. Madison took another direction. She gained control of grammar and wordingbefore she had full control of the speech sounds. She was having conversations, singing songs, and asking questions but her speech had the charm of misplaced sounds. “Twa wa wa wa wa wa wa” she sang lustily. Levi, little brother to Ezrial and Juliette, made his focus salient units. WhenLevi was two and a half years old, Grandpa Ken said to him at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, “Did you know, Levi, that this place is about science?” He responded, “I knew that.” He didn’t really know that-what he knew was that “I knew that” was the appropriate answer to “Did you know?” Bella, at a little over one year old, knew that language is social. At the dinnertable when everyone made noise at each other she made noise, too. And one evening Bella and Ken engaged in turn taking. She said mamama and Ken said mamama; she said dadada and Ken said dadada. This activity went on until Ken lost interest. Without instruction, virtually every human has the ability to learn one or morelanguages relatively easily and that ability is equally available to learn alternate forms of those languages as they become necessary and available. Language is easy to learn because it corresponds to the way the brain works. It learns and stores what it learns by using a system of symbols. This is the knowledge that needs to drive the nature of school curriculum and our efforts to reclaim it. Oral language, as useful and important as it is, has its limits. It developed forface-to-face, here-and-now purposes, and such purposes remain important throughout our lives. Written forms of language develop when there is a need to connect beyond the reach of the voice or as a means for storing language for later use. Written language preserves and transmits communication, and written language can be used to chat via digital formats. It is an extension of oral language and is every bit as much language as oral language is. Once again, any child who has learned to speak one or more languages with-out direct, formal instruction is fully capable of learning to read and write. If such children are not learning to read and write in school, it is because the instructional program is interfering with the normal development that should be taking place (Altwerger & Bird, 1982).