Is Literacy Enough?: Pathways to Academic Success for Adolescents - Softcover

Snow Ph.D., Dr. Catherine E.; Porche Ed.D., Michelle; Harris M.A., Stephanie

3.83

6 ratings by Goodreads

9781557669148: Is Literacy Enough?: Pathways to Academic Success for Adolescents

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557669147 ISBN 13: 9781557669148

Publisher: Brookes Publishing, 2007

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Q: Do strong early literacy skills guarantee later reading and academic success?

A: No. While early literacy skills are important, they�€™re not enough to ensure later school success.

Four literacy experts lay out the evidence in this compelling book, based on the well-known Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development that inspired the landmark resource Beginning Literacy with Language.

Following a group of children living in low-income families from preschool through high school, the authors charted the students�€™ outcomes using test data to reflect language and literacy skills, self-report data reflecting motivation and engagement in school, and interviews with students, teachers, and parents. Through the sobering discoveries made during this long-term study, readers will discover the critical importance of factors such as

ongoing reading support in middle school and high school, especially in the area of comprehension
academic and emotional support from teachers and parents
the intermediate steps needed to achieve long-term goals
risk factors such as attending multiple schools, family disruption, and social-emotional difficulties

Readers will also see how the specific risk factor of poverty relates to achievement, motivation, and school climate, and how elements of a special education model—more student/teacher interaction, smaller class size, and student directed learning—could enhance the quality of educational programs serving all adolescents.

With this enlightening, meticulously researched book, all education professionals will gain a better understanding of factors critical to school success—and learn how to develop programs that go beyond K�€“3 literacy to help adolescents reach their full potential.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1981, Patton O. Tabors was an elementary school teacher and a childbirth educator. During her doctoral studies she focused on first and second language acquisition in young children. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, described the developmental pathway of a group of young children learning English as a second language. She was able to use this information as the basis for the material in One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1997). Since 1987, Dr. Tabors has been the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development in collaboration with Catherine Snow and David Dickinson. During this time she has also directed research related to low-education and low-income mothers reading to their preschool-age children as part of the Manpower Development Research Corporation evaluations of two welfare-to-work projects, New Chance and JOBS, and for the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a subproject of the New England Research Center on Head Start Quality, directed by David Dickinson. Dr. Tabors's latest research, a longitudinal project that is following the language and literacy development of Spanish-speaking children from preschool to second grade, combines her interests in early language and literacy development and second language acquisition in young children.

Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Is Literacy Enough?: Pathways to Academic Success for Adolescents, by Catherine E. Snow, Ph.D., Michelle V. Porche, Ed.D., Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., & Stephanie Ross Harris, M.A.

In this book, we report analyses of the literacy and academic development of a group of children from low-income families. This study was originally undertaken to answer questions about the experiences during the preschool years that promoted success in reading in Grades 1–4. In particular, the goal was to evaluate the relative contributions of early experiences leading to good code–related skills (e.g., letter recognition, phonological awareness) versus those leading to rich language skills (e.g., vocabulary, listening comprehension, production of narratives and definitions) to fourth-grade reading outcomes. As in many longitudinal studies, the temptation to continue following the participants was irresistible, so we continued collecting data beyond Grade 4 and in areas that transcended our original focus on literacy.

The data we present here enable us to assess the degree to which early success in literacy does indeed predict later literacy and school achievement. More specifically, though, the data enable us to ask questions about 1) precisely what aspects of early literacy achievement predict robustly to later achievement, 2) what aspects of later achievement relate most strongly to early literacy success, and 3) what child characteristics and environmental factors influence those predictive relationships.

The subsequent chapters in this book report analyses of the achievement of the students we followed from kindergarten through high school. We have previously published an extensive analysis of the experiences in home and preschool classrooms that predicted these children's kindergarten literacy and language skills (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001); those findings are summarized in the following section as background to the new analyses. As will be documented in later chapters, considerable continuity can be found for this group of learners from kindergarten outcomes to later literacy outcomes. However, factors other than early literacy skills also have a great impact on where these students end up academically. In other words, although the Matthew effect (see Chapter 1) largely holds for this group, its effect is limited to literacy. Academic success or failure depends on more than just literacy skills, and thus, explaining it requires a much more complicated story.

CHILDREN FROM LOW–INCOME HOMES

The students reported on in this book have participated in a longitudinal study (referred to as the Home–School Study) that began in 1988 in the metropolitan Boston area when members of the first group were 3 years old. (A second group was added the following year, bringing the number of children in the study to 83.) The group consisted of children from low–income homes where English was the primary language.

Our major goal in first conceptualizing this work was to identify the experiences that led to the development of academic oral language skills during the preschool years. Our previous work with school-age children (e.g., Davidson, Kline, & Snow, 1986; Dickinson & Snow, 1987; Snow, 1990; Velasco, 1989) had suggested that good readers were distinguished by better control over certain kinds of oral discourse—what we now call academic language (previously referred to as decontextualized language or extended discourse). Oral discourse skills such as telling coherent stories, making convincing arguments, or providing succinct and communicatively effective definitions of words were correlated with literacy success in the middle grades. And this is not surprising, because the texts that middle-grade students need to comprehend are full of linguistic complexities characteristic of coherent stories, arguments, and definitions. Furthermore, our early work suggested that social class differences in these oral language skills were present at kindergarten (DeTemple, 2001; Snow & Dickinson, 1990, 1991); thus, such skills might well be implicated in explaining the poor literacy outcomes of children from low-income homes. At a time when literacy researchers were quite single-mindedly focused on phonological awareness and letter knowledge as predictors of literacy success and word reading as the major literacy outcome worthy of assessment, we felt it important to redress the balance by seeking evidence about the role of language skills and the predictors of reading comprehension.

A basic presumption of our work was that conversational and academic language stemmed from two different developmental origins (see Figure 2.1). We hoped to identify the precursors of academic language skill in familial and preschool interactions and to confirm the relationship of early academic language skill to later reading accomplishments. We assumed, along with most of our colleagues, that these oral language skills would relate to reading only in Grade 3 or later, after children had accomplished the task of learning how to decode. Thus, our original plan was to carry out a prospective longitudinal study through Grade 4. We chose to limit our participants to individuals from low-income families for a number of reasons: 1) we wanted to ensure a wide range of literacy outcomes, including sufficient numbers of children likely to have difficulties learning to read; 2) we did not want to spend our limited resources on replicating previous studies that had described interaction in middle–income families; and 3) we were less interested in a comparison of middle–income with working–class families than in a description of variation within a lower–income group.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HOME—SCHOOL STUDY PARTICIPANTS

Demographic information about the families whose children have participated in the Home–School Study was collected at the first home visit when the children were 3 years old. Table 2.1 displays the demographic characteristics culled from these interviews for the original participants and for the subsequent constellations of the group, reflecting attrition over the years.

At the beginning of the study, we had an equal number of boys and girls. Sixty–four percent of the children in the group were White,1 whereas the rest were of African descent (African American and Caribbean: 23%), Latino (7%), or mixed (6%) origins. Sixty-two percent of the mothers had graduated from high school, and an additional 17% had earned a General Equivalency Diploma (GED). Twenty–one percent of the mothers, however, had not attained a high school degree.

At the beginning of the study, approximately half (46%) of the households had an annual family income of less than $10,000. In most cases, these were the same parents (45%) whose main source of income came from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC; now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF). The remaining families reported annual incomes ranging from more than $10,000 to more than $25,000. In 21% of the families, the primary caregiver (the mother) was the primary source of income, and in 33% of the families, the mother's spouse or partner was the main source of income.

The children's mean length of utterance (MLU), indicating the complexity of their sentences when interacting with their mothers during a toy play session, averaged 2.96 (SD 0.66). The average age of the children at the first home visit was 46 months, placing the MLU of this group below the predicted range (3.21–4.97) at this age (Miller, 1981).

As shown in Table 2.1, there has been attrition from the group over the course of the longitudinal project, but the attrition has been unbiased, and the demographic characteristics of the group available for long–term longitudinal analysis remain much the same as those of the original group.

PRESCHOOL FINDINGS

Home visits were made to the children who were participating in the Home–School Study when they were 3, 4, and 5 years old, and classroom visits were made to the children who were in preschool classrooms at 3 years old and to all children at 4 years old. The purpose of these visits was to collect data about the language and literacy environments to which the children were being exposed. Findings from this data collection period, reported in the volume edited by Dickinson and Tabors (2001), are summarized briefly here to provide background information.

Home Language and Literacy Environment

Home visits were scheduled for three intervals (when the children were 3, 4, and 5 years old) so that we could observe and audiotape each mother and her child in a variety of activities. These activities included reading books and playing with a standard set of toys with the 3– and 4–year–olds and adding playing with a set of magnets when the children were 5 years old. In addition, an audiotape recorder was left with the mother to tape a family mealtime, which, like the other interactions, was subsequently transcribed and analyzed. Also, mothers were interviewed on topics related to family circumstances and literacy practices. After transcription and verification of the audiotapes, the mother–child interactions were coded for various types of extended discourse, including nonimmediate talk (DeTemple, 2001), fantasy talk (Katz, 2001), explanatory and narrative talk (Beals, 2001), and science process talk (Tabors, Roach, & Snow, 2001), as well as for the presence of rare words—words that would be unusual to find in the vocabulary of young children (Tabors, Beals, & Weizman, 2001). The mothers' interviews were coded for demographic information (as seen in Table 2.1), as well as family literacy practices (DeTemple, 2001). In order to reduce the number of variables for further analysis, three composites were constructed (Tabors, Roach & Snow, 2001; see Figure 2.2). The first composite, Maternal Extended Discourse, consists of the sum of the proportion of each of the following types of discourse in each mother's interactions with her child: nonimmediate talk during book reading, fantasy talk during toy play, explanatory and narrative talk during mealtime, and science process talk during magnet play. The second composite, Rare Word Density, consists of the sum of the proportion of rare words in the mothers' interactions during toy play and mealtimes. The third composite, Home Support for Literacy, summarizes answers from the first two interviews concerning frequency and variety of literacy practices in the home.

Preschool Language and Literacy Environment

During the preschool visits, teachers were audiotaped during group times, free play periods, and mealtimes, and they were videotaped during large–group book reading. The child participant was also audiorecorded during an extended free play period. Researchers observed the classroom curriculum and administered teacher questionnaires.

Teacher talk from the audio and video recordings was transcribed, verified, and coded (Cote, 2001; Smith, 2001). Child talk was coded directly from the audiotapes, and classroom observations and teacher questionnaires were also coded (Dickinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c). Only variables from the 4–year–old classroom visit were used in further analyses, as many of the children were not yet in classroom settings at age 3.

As shown in Figure 2.3, a selected group of variables were combined into composites representing Teacher Extended Discourse, Classroom Exposure to Rare Words, and Classroom Curriculum (Dickinson, 2001c).

Predicting Kindergarten Language and Literacy Skills from Home and Preschool Environments

When the children in the study were in kindergarten, we administered a battery of language and literacy tests that included an original, researcher–developed narrative production task (the Bear Story), an emergent literacy test (Mason & Stewart, 1989), and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised (PPVT-R; Dunn & Dunn, 1981; see Snow, Tabors, & Dickinson, 2001, pp. 10–12 for further description of these tests). The narrative production task was scored for both length of production and presence of story elements combined in a total score. The emergent literacy test involved subtests for writing concepts, letter recognition, story and print concepts, sounds in words, and environmental print, again combined in a total score. The normed score equivalent from the PPVT-R was used to indicate receptive vocabulary ability.

Regression analyses were performed to determine what aspects of the home and preschool environments could predict kindergarten outcomes on these three measures. The results of these regression analyses are presented in Table 2.2 as final models predicting narrative production, emergent literacy, and receptive vocabulary. These results, which are discussed at length in Tabors, Snow, and Dickinson (2001), led to the following conclusions:

Vocabulary development was most powerfully predicted by exposure to rare words in the home and exposure to rare words and teacher extended discourse in the preschool classroom.
No single home or preschool variable stood out as most powerful in predicting narrative development, although narrative skill was significantly associated with exposure to extended discourse and literacy experiences in the home and with teacher extended discourse and the presence of a curriculum in the preschool classroom.
Emergent literacy skills were best predicted by rare word density at home and by teacher extended discourse at preschool.
Both home and preschool variables were significantly related to all three outcomes, and both continued to make independent contributions when entered into the same regression model.
It was possible to explain more of the variance in outcomes for vocabulary and emergent literacy than for narrative skill, the developmental antecedents of which remain more obscure in these data.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.