BiblioVault - Books about Literacy

Early Literacy

Joan Brooks McLane and Gillian Dowley McNamee

Harvard University Press, 1990

Four-year-old Joshua challenges his father to a game: Can he come downstairs before Joshua writes the word to? Rachel, two and a half, makes a series of wavy lines on a piece of paper and calls it a “thank-you letter to Grandma.” In Early Literacy Joan McLane and Gillian McNamee explore the ways young children like Joshua and Rachel begin to learn about written language. Becoming literate requires mastering a complex set of skills, behaviors, and attitudes that makes it possible to receive and communicate meaning through the written word. McLane and McNamee provide a fresh examination of this process in light of recent research.

The authors look closely at what young children do with writing and reading. As children play with making marks on paper and listen to stories being read aloud, they begin to discover uses and purposes for written language. They learn that they can use writing to communicate with people they care about and that reading story books opens up new ideas and experiences. As children experiment with writing and reading in their talking, drawing, and pretend play, they can build “bridges to literacy.”

The authors emphasize the importance of children's relationships with significant adults and peers for growth in literacy. They also devote chapters to early literacy development at home and in the neighborhood, and in preschool and kindergarten settings. In one daycare center for inner-city children, for example, where a favorite activity is dictating and acting out stories, children become active participants in a community of readers and writers—a literate culture.

Through its clear and concise discussion of young children's growth toward literacy, and its examples of the contexts that encourage and enrich that growth, Early Literacy will serve as a valuable resource for parents, teachers, and others who work or play with young children.

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Early Native Literacies in New England

A Documentary and Critical Anthology

Kristina Bross

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Designed as a corrective to colonial literary histories that have excluded Native voices, this anthology brings together a variety of primary texts produced by the Algonquian peoples of New England during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. Included among these written materials and objects are letters, signatures, journals, baskets, pictographs, confessions, wills, and petitions, each of which represents a form of authorship. Together they demonstrate the continuing use of traditional forms of memory and communication and the lively engagement of Native peoples with alphabetic literacy during the colonial period. Each primary text is accompanied by an essay that places it in context and explores its significance. Written by leading scholars in the field, these readings draw on recent trends in literary analysis, history, and anthropology to provide an excellent overview of the field of early Native studies. They are also intended to provoke discussion and open avenues for further exploration by students and other interested readers. Above all, the texts and commentaries gathered in this volume provide an opportunity to see Native American literature as a continuity of expression that reflects choices made long before contact and colonization, rather than as a nineteenth—or even twentieth-century invention.Contributors include Heidi Bohaker, Heather Bouwman, Joanna Brooks, Kristina Bross, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Sandra Gustafson, Laura Arnold Leibman, Kevin McBride, David Murray, Laura Murray, Jean O'Brien, Ann Marie Plane, Philip Round, Jodi Schorb, David Silverman, and Hilary E. Wyss.

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Ears, Eyes, and Hands

Reflections on Language, Literacy, and Linguistics

Deborah L. Wolter

Gallaudet University Press, 2018

Ears, Eyes, and Hands presents the author’s reflections on language, literacy, and linguistics that have been shaped by her deafness and by her work as an educator. In short, engaging narratives, Deborah L. Wolter exposes deeply entrenched attitudes and stereotypes regarding language, bringing to bear her own experiences as a deaf person as well as her interactions with children from varying backgrounds.
Wolter reveals and rectifies the impact of deficit mindsets in the educational system regarding race, ethnicity, economic status, gender, and disability. As a literacy specialist, she works with students who fall through the cracks in a system that strives to embrace the diverse backgrounds and abilities found in the classroom. Her passion for engaging students and cultivating literacy shines in the stories she tells, which serve as parables that allow readers to evaluate their own attitudes and assumptions. Educators, parents, and community members will benefit from Wolter’s examination of sociolinguistics and language privilege as she identifies how ethnocentrism and ableism are contributing to negative educational outcomes for some students. With humor and warmth, she offers a path toward approaching language and listening as a gateway to connection and understanding, both inside the classroom and beyond.

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Eastern Figures

Orient and Empire in British Writing

Douglas Kerr

Hong Kong University Press, 2008

Eastern Figures is a literary history with a difference. It examines British writing about the East – centred on India but radiating as far as Egypt and the Pacific – in the colonial and postcolonial period. It takes as its subject “the East” that was real to the British imagination, largely the creation of writers who described and told stories about it, descriptions and stories coloured by the experience of empire and its aftermath. It is bold in its scope, with a centre of gravity in the work of writers like Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covering less well-known literary authors, and including Anglo-Indian romance writing, the reports and memoirs of administrators, and travel writing from Auden and Isherwood in China to Redmond O’Hanlon in Borneo. Eastern Figures produces a history of this writing by looking at a series of “figures” or tropes of representation through which successive writers sought to represent the East and the British experience of it – tropes such as exploring the hinterland, going native, and the figure of rule itself. Eastern Figures is accessible to anyone interested in the literary and cultural history of empire and its aftermath. It will be of especial interest to students and scholars of colonial and postcolonial writing, as it raises issues of identity and representation, power and knowledge, and centrally the question of how to represent other people. It has original ideas and approaches to offer specialists in literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural historians, and researchers in colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, and Asian area studies and history. It is also aimed at students in courses in literature and empire, culture and imperialism, and cross-cultural studies.

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Embodied Literacies

Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching

Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching is a response to calls to enlarge the purview of literacy to include imagery in its many modalities and various facets. Kristie S. Fleckenstein asserts that all meaning, linguistic or otherwise, is a result of the transaction between image and word. She implements the concept of imageword—a mutually constitutive fusion of image and word—to reassess language arts education and promote a double vision of reading and writing. Utilizing an accessible fourfold structure, she then applies the concept to the classroom, reconfiguring what teachers do when they teach, how they teach, what they teach with, and how they teach ethically.

Fleckenstein does not discount the importance of text in the quest for literacy. Instead, she places the language arts classroom and teacher at the juncture of image and word to examine the ways imagery enables and disables the teaching of and the act of reading and writing. Learning results from the double play of language and image, she argues. Helping teachers and students dissolve the boundaries between text and image, the volume outlines how to see reading and writing as something more than words and language and to disestablish our definitions of literacy as wholly linguistic.

Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching comes at a critical time in our cultural history. Echoing the opinion that postmodernity is a product of imagery rather than textuality, Fleckenstein argues that we must evolve new literacies when we live in a culture saturated by images on computer screens, televisions, even billboards. Decisively and clearly, she demonstrates the importance of incorporating imagery—which is inextricably linked to our psychological, social, and textual lives—into our epistemologies and literacy teaching.

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The Essential Lapsit Guide

A Multimedia How-To-Do-It Manual and Programming Guide for Stimulating Literacy Development from 12 to 24 Months

Linda L. Ernst

American Library Association, 2015

Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures

Lessons in School Reform from the United States and Great Britain

Sarah W. Freedman

Harvard University Press, 1994

What can teachers in British and American inner-city schools learn from each other about literacy training? To explore this question, Sarah Warshauer Freedman and her British colleagues set up a writing exchange that matched classes from four middle and high schools in the San Francisco Bay area with their London equivalents.

Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures offers concrete lessons to school reformers, policymakers, and classroom teachers about the value and effectiveness of different approaches to teaching writing. Freedman goes beyond the specific subject matter of this study, looking anew at Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories of social interaction and addressing the larger questions of the relationship between culture and education.

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