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Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:18:31 GMT

This unit examines the importance of the relationship between the family and literacy. You will examine how families and schools work together to establish the links that underpin childhood literacy development and the ways in which educational institutions respond to the diversity of needs amongst students.

This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Difficulties in literacy development (E801).

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Learning outcomes

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After studying this unit you should have:

an enhanced understanding of models for involving parents and carers in children's literacy acquisition.

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1 The family and literacy

The Open University — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:18:31 GMT

It is important that we acknowledge the relationship between family and literacy in our teaching practices and in the school context. We would now like to examine two issues related to this theme. First we focus on how families and schools can work together to establish home–school links to support the learning of students who experience difficulties in literacy development in ways which take account of:

a diversity of family and cultural backgrounds;
broad notions of what constitutes literacy;
a clear understanding of the models of reading reflected in different approaches.

We then look at ways in which educational institutions can respond to the diversity of needs of students from a wide range of family and cultural backgrounds in order to take an inclusive approach to meeting the needs of all students, in particular those who experience difficulties in literacy development.

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2 Involving parents and carers in students' literacy learning

The Open University — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:18:31 GMT

Activity 1

Before you begin to read this section reflect on the following questions:

How do you feel parents and carers might or should be involved in supporting their children's literacy development once those children have entered the formal education system?
What experiences have you had of involving parents in programmes designed to support the literacy development of students who experience difficulties and what significant issues were raised by those experiences?
How, in your view, do the partnership arrangements that currently exist between parents/carers and your school have the potential to constrain or facilitate the literacy development of those students who experience difficulties?

In a wide-ranging review of the literature on parent–professional partnerships, Dale (1996) identified five common partnership arrangements between schools and parents/carers:

The expert model represents the traditional way of working. It is like the doctor–patient relationship. The professional uses his or her expertise to make judgements and take control of what needs to be done. The involvement of the parent is not of primary importance and is limited to providing information.
In the transplant model, parents are seen as an untapped resource for helping in the teaching of the child. The role of professionals is to share their expertise – in other words, to transplant their skills to the parents to help the parents to become teachers, like the Portage programme. The professional still has the ultimate responsibility for decision making.
The consumer model involves more of a partnership between parents and professionals. In this model, there is a shift of power from the professional to the parent. This model uses ideas from the marketplace. The parent and the child with a disability are seen as consumers of services. They are acknowledged as having expertise about the child's needs. As consumers they have control over decision making because they draw on their expertise in deciding what services they need and want for their child. Many recent educational reforms in industrialised western countries have incorporated this model of parent–professional partnership. A clear example of it is in countries where legislation gives parents the right to choose which school their child attends.
A more recent model of parent–professional partnership is the empowerment model. Here the right of the parent to choose as a consumer is combined with a professional recognition of the family as a social system. As a social system, the family is made up of interdependent relationships which have an important effect on how a family is able to cope and the type of support they will need. Research suggests that parents rely as much or more on informal networks of support – neighbours, other family members, friends, their church, than on the formal network that exists between the professional and the parent. Under the empowerment model the job of the professional is to help empower the family to meet its own needs rather than to make judgements and decisions about those needs.
The final model is the negotiating model. The idea of this model is that both the parent and the professional have separate and valuable contributions to offer and that negotiating about these differences in perspective is the key to developing partnerships that lead to the best decisions for children. This model proposes how parents and professionals might negotiate to reach a decision.

(Dale, 1996, Chapter 1; summarised in The Open University, 2001b, pp. 96–7)

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3 Identifying theoretical models of parent–school partnerships

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Activity 2

Which, if any, of the five models of parent–professional partnerships identified by Dale above is reflected in the way in which your school works with parents?

Read Wragg et al.'s (1998) summary below of the manner in which parents were involved in the reading development of their children in the schools surveyed during the Leverhulme Primary Improvement Project. Identify ways in which it reflects the same issues of power and assumptions of expert knowledge identified by Dale.

Involving parents and carers in children's reading
When schools were asked what new initiatives they were taking, or hoped to introduce in the future, the greater involvement of parents was the most frequently cited. This may be the result of the belief expressed by many teachers in interview that learning begins in the home. Sending home books, spellings, reading and writing assignments that were to be monitored by parents and entered in the home/school diary were regular occurrences in almost all the schools studied. No school expressed disregard for parents, and this was hardly surprising, given the pressure applied through school inspections and in the mass media to involve them in their children's learning. Most children in the 5 to 7 age group read to someone at home, and at least half of older primary pupils do so as well; home/school diaries are countersigned by many parents; spellings are checked; the general attitude of teachers towards parents is, in the main, extremely positive. On the surface, therefore, all appears to be well: schools do engage parents, and this is regarded ipso facto as a good thing.
[However], beneath the surface, the processes were not quite as unproblematic as might appear. The difficulties sometimes arose when parents tried to act in a manner regarded as professional, rather than amateur. In several schools the influence was largely in one direction, from school to home. When parents expressed reservations about what was happening, teachers saw it as their duty to explain what the school was trying to achieve, to persuade them about the rightness of existing practice, rather than change it: ‘Some of these parents really don't understand what we're trying to do and how we go about it’, as one teacher put it.
A common clash of ideologies occurred over hearing children read, for some parents the only method of teaching reading they remembered from their own school days. Another was about the different interpretations of what constituted ‘reading’, since some parents found it difficult to accept that looking at a picture book could constitute ‘reading’ as they understood the term. There were a number of exceptions to the ‘one-way persuasion’ solution to comment or dissent, like the school that received complaints from parents about children not being heard reading and so instituted a guaranteed weekly reading interview.
Many parents interviewed expressed ignorance about the methods used to teach reading, even in schools that had held parents’ evenings. Their responses often began with ‘I assume …’, or ‘I presume …’, rather than with some degree of certainty. Yet successful evenings involving parents were very much appreciated, explaining, for example, how children might recognise, at quite an early stage, longer and more complex-looking words, such as ‘elephant’, a revelation which one parent described as an ‘eye opener’.
Some parents seemed eager to play a more professional role, rather than the well-intentioned amateur role that teachers expected. Teachers tended to stress that reading at home was for ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment’, avoiding any suggestion of drudgery, coercion, or indeed systematic teaching. Parents too were anxious to prevent reading at home becoming a chore, but several did want to be able to work more positively with their children, sounding out words, actually ‘teaching’ reading, rather than just hearing it. In a number of families there was tension and frustration when parents tried to push children on, expecting performance beyond what the child was achieving, or employed methods and approaches that were in contrast to what the child did at school. This frustration was summed up by [a] 6 year old boy … who said: ‘I think I'm a good reader at school. I'm not a good reader at home. … I can't read my books at home.’ What he meant was that his parents were asking him to read books that were beyond his level of competence. Not surprisingly, at that early age, he gauged his ability relative to the texts he was reading, rather than to other sources of reference.
Parent helpers in the classroom also performed a modest role. Few were given any instruction on what to do, unlike classroom assistants. As a result, classroom assistants often heard reading in a systematic way, did group reading, or carried out some carefully planned and structured activities, whereas parents usually operated in an informal, unstructured and ad hoc manner. Even in Birmingham, where most schools made parents a central part of their agenda for improvement, there were schools where the head too readily assumed that certain parents might not even be literate in their mother tongue, compared with schools in similar areas that had higher expectations from them.
What was also noticeable was the prominent role played by mothers, compared with fathers … [It] was more likely that mothers would hear their child read at home, complete the home/school diary, or help out in the classroom. It was extremely rare to see any kind of volunteer male presence in classrooms, especially in infant schools. Given the relatively poor performance of boys in reading in the early years and beyond, this raises the question of the need for more male role models …
The generally positive reaction of schools to the involvement of parents is a strong foundation stone on which to build, but there should be no doubt about the gaps, misunderstandings and lack of knowledge that exist, even in schools as effective generally as the ones studied in this research. Despite the efforts on their behalf, many parents still know little about how reading is taught, or about the specifics of what they can do to help at home, beyond exuding goodwill. Relatively few fathers become closely involved in their children's reading or are available to help in the classroom. Unwittingly perhaps, some schools may patronise their children's parents by glossing over their concerns, assuming that they are capable of very little beyond the most rudimentary, or, in the case of ethnic minorities, assuming too readily that they may not be equipped to help. In the many schools with a positive attitude, there are still steps that can be taken to strengthen the role of parents, even if this challenges some of the traditional assumptions about the limited role that parents can play in their children's education.
(Wragg et al, 1998, pp. 269–70)

Until comparatively recently there has been an assumption that the homes of poor working-class and ethnic minority-culture families are less good literacy-learning environments than those of dominant culture, middle-class families. A number of studies carried out in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that achievement on standardised tests of reading is strongly related to social class. For example, the National Child Development Study (Davie, Butler and Goldstein, 1972) followed all the children born in one week in 1958 through from birth. Tests of reading attainment were carried out when they were 7 years old. These tests showed relatively poor achievement among 30 per cent of the children. A number of home factors were found to correlate with poor achievement, among which was social class. Children whose fathers were semi-skilled manual workers were more than twice as likely to be poor readers as those children whose fathers held professional or technical posts. Hannon and McNally's (1986) study found a 27-point difference in mean reading test scores between middle-class and working-class 7-year-olds. Research by Wells (1985), Adams (1994) and McCormick and Mason (1986), among others, suggests a number of factors that might predispose to this apparent difference in reading achievement: the number of books to which children had access at home, the number of stories read to children by parents, and the overall number of reading interactions between parent and child.

The assumptions that we make about family life are very important in conceptualising ways in which those families might support the literacy development of their children. For example, the work on ‘family literacy’ in recent years has represented an interesting diversity of views on the ability of some families to support their children's literacy development where those families have little tradition of literacy.

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4 Family literacy

The Open University — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:18:31 GMT

Reading activity 1

Please visit the Taylor and Francis Ltd website to read ‘Rhetoric and research in family literacy’ by Peter Hannon, British Educational Research Journal, Volume 26, Issue 1 January 2000 , pp. 121–138.

The Hannon article discusses the rhetoric surrounding ‘restricted’ family literacy programmes, that is programmes which insist that parents or carers must participate in initiatives designed to raise the level of their literacy level simultaneously with that of their children.

Reflect on the extent to which you agree with the author's views on:

reasons for the ‘uneasiness’ of the relationship between ‘restricted’ family literacy programmes and family literacy research;
factors which predispose to parental willingness to participate in literacy programmes for themselves or for their offspring.

Hannon points out that ‘restricted’ family literacy programmes are premised on the ‘literacy-deficient’ notion of some families. Programmes that ignore preexisting literacy in families are prescriptive and interventionist and may not recognise possibilities for drawing on existing patterns of family literacy to inform children's learning. In addition, the assumption of a necessarily reciprocal relationship between low levels of parental literacy and the poor literacy development of their offspring is not fully supported by research findings. One of the problematic areas in the evaluation of restricted literacy programmes is that there is insufficient evidence that programmes which involve both parents/carers and children in literacy development achieve greater and longer lasting effects than ‘stand-alone’ programmes. Hannon argues that, rather than targeting a few families for restricted literacy programmes, it may be more profitable to provide universal, literacy-rich, early childhood education. This should seek to identify children's difficulties and develop appropriate interventions at an early stage, involve parents in their children's literacy development and offer opportunities for parents and carers to enhance their own literacy if they wish to.

Hannon identified a number of issues crucial to the discussion of parental willingness to participate in literacy programmes which all those intending to implement such initiatives might do well to address:

how families are invited to participate;
the substance of what they have to do;
the extent to which the programme can respond to family circumstances – for example, home-based programmes have achieved higher mean take-up and retention rates than centre-based programmes.

There are a number of inherent difficulties in the deficit perspective on some pupils’ families for those conceptualising appropriate ways in which to support the improvement of children's literacy:

the school is absolved from responsibility for addressing the literacy difficulties of those students from ‘literacy-deficient’ families;
the families themselves cannot be viewed as a source of positive support for the student's developing literacy until and unless their deficiency in literacy in addressed.

Despite these rather negative views on the ability of families with little history of literacy to support their children's literacy development, Blackledge (2000) cites a number of studies which refute the deficiency model of poor working-class and ethnic minority-culture families. For example, Anderson and Stokes (1984) found in studies of African-American, Mexican-American and Anglo-American families wide-ranging language learning unrelated to school studies. Delgado-Gaitan (1990) found regular use of texts in Spanish and English in poor Mexican-American families. Auerbach (1989) and Ada (1988) found that poor minority-culture immigrant families often value and support their children's literacy development as one key to social mobility.

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5 Supporting the literacy acquisition of travellers' children

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Reading activity 2

Click 'View document' to open the reading Partnership approaches: New futures for Travellers by Elizabeth Jordan (PDF, 0.1 MB, 11 pages).

View document

As you read ‘Partnership approaches: new futures for travellers’, by Elizabeth Jordan, reflect on the issues Jordan raises that relate to literacy acquisition and family background. In what ways are the issues she raises relevant to your own working situation? What strategies might you use to address the concerns she raises?

In the past studies have shown that parents from every social class are often very keen to help their children with reading at home (Newson and Newson, 1977). In the UK, as Wragg et al. (1998) note:

The deterministic view that home background was the only important factor affecting children's attainment had been replaced in the 1970s by a belief that schools could make a difference. The Plowden Report (1967) on primary education devoted a whole chapter to the role that could be played by parents. Young and McGeeney (1968) experimented in London schools by involving parents in attending school functions, hearing their children read, and various other forms of participation. They found some improvements in reading performance compared with control schools where there was no such participation. Many studies of parents simply record the implementation of specific projects, while others report the teachers’ and parents’ attitudes to such studies. A few studies have been conducted on parents coming into school to help, but the majority are on parents helping at home.
(Wragg et al., 1996, p. 33)

Hewison and Tizard's (1980) study of the reading attainment of 7-year-old working-class children in Dagenham showed that many working-class children do become competent readers. None of the parents had been encouraged by the school to hear their children read but half regularly did this. Following this study a number of research studies were set up to investigate the hypothesis that parental support at home for school-related literacy had a significant effect on improvement of children's reading.

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6 Collaboration between teachers and parents

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Reading activity 3

Click 'View document' to open the reading Collaboration between teachers and parents in assisting children's reading by J. Tizard, W. N. Schofield and Jenny Hewison (PDF, 0.1 MB, 19 pages).

View document

As you read ‘Collaboration between teachers and parents in assisting children's reading’, by Tizard, Schofield and Hewison, reflect on the following questions:

Which approach to children's reading is reflected in this piece of research?
What would you identify as the most significant factors that contributed to the success of this project?
How far would a project of this sort be appropriate in your own school context? What would you have to do to support such a project in your school?

The Haringey Project (Hewison and Tizard, 1980) is an example of an initiative which combines a whole-book approach with an assumption that parents are the first educators of their children and, as such, should be in control of any parent-child home-based reading project. Reflecting on what she felt was the crucial factor in the success of the Haringey Project Hewison (1988) speculates that it may have been the motivational context of the home itself in which the opportunity for extra reading practice occurred.

Building on the apparent success of the Haringey Project a number of replications were carried out. Among these the Belfield Project (Hannon, 1987) was conducted over five years in a school in a largely white, working-class social priority area in the north of England. In terms of gains in standardised reading tests the results indicated only a slight positive impact on performance in reading. Almost all parents, however, reported that they welcomed the chance of involvement in their children's reading development. One explanation for the relative success of the Haringey Project in comparison with Belfield was that a home-reading programme has a greater impact on minority language families who can be excluded by schools.

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References

The Open University — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:18:31 GMT

Adams, M. J. (1994) Beginning to Read: thinking and learning about print, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Ada, F. (1988) ‘The Pajaro Valley experience: working with Spanish-speaking parents to develop children’s reading and writing skills in the home through the use of children’s literature’, in Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Cummins, J. (eds) Minority Education: from shame to struggle, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.

Anderson, A. B. and Stokes, S. J. (1984) ‘Social and institutional influences on the development and practice of literacy’, in Gelman, H., Oberg, A. and Smith, F. (eds) Awakening to Literacy, London, Heinemann.

Auerbach, E. R. (1989) ‘Towards a socio-cultural approach to family literacy’, Harvard Educational Review, 59, pp. 165–81.

Blackledge, A. (2000) Literacy, Power and Social Justice, Stoke on Trent, Trentham.

Dale, N. (1996) Working with Families of Children with Special Needs: partnership and practice, London, Routledge.

Davie, C. E., Butler, N. and Goldstein, H. (1972) From Birth to Seven: a report of the National Child Development Study, London, Longman/National Children’s Bureau.

Delgado-Gaitan, C. (1990) Literacy for Empowerment, London, Falmer.

Hannon, P. (1987) ‘A study of the effects of parental involvement in the teaching of reading on children’s reading test performance’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 16, pp. 28–37.

Hewison, J. (1988) ‘The long-term effectiveness of parental involvement in reading. A follow-up to the Haringey Reading Project’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58, pp. 184–90.

Hewison, J. and Tizard, J. (1980) ‘Parental involvement and reading attainment’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 50, pp. 209–15.

Mccormick, C. E. and Mason, J. M. (1986) ‘Intervention procedures for increasing preschool children’s interest in and knowledge about reading’, in Teale, W. and Sulzby, E. (eds) Emergent Literacy: writing and reading, Norwood, NJ, Ablex.

Wells, G. (1985) Language Development in the Pre-School Years, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Wragg, E. C., Wragg, C. M., Haynes, G. S. and Chamberlain, R. P. (1998) Improving Literacy in the Primary School, London, Routledge.

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Acknowledgements

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Study Guide Acknowledgements

The extracts taken from this Study Guide are from a course (Difficulties in Literacy Development) which was jointly developed by the Open University and the University of Edinburgh. Permission granted from University of Edinburgh to use extracts from Study Guide. Copyright in Study Guide: The Open University and The University of Edinburgh. First published 2002. Second edition 2006.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:

Appendix D: Rose, J (2006) Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, Final Report, March, Department for Education and Skills/HMSO (accessed at http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/ rosereview/ finalreport). Crown copyright material is produced under Class Licence Number C01W0000065 with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland.

Reader Acknowledgements

The chapters included in Open Learn are from: ‘Addressing Difficulties in Literacy Development – Responses at Family, School, Pupil and Teacher Levels (eds) Janice Wearmouth, Janet Soler and Gavin Read. Published by Routledge and Falmer 2002. Copyright © Compilation, original and editorial matter, The Open University.

This Reader constitutes part of a course jointly developed by The Open University and the University of Edinburgh. The Open University course is E801 Addressing Difficulties in Literacy Development (E801). The University of Edinburgh’s course is the Postgraduate Certificate in Difficulites in Literacy Development.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:

Chapter 3 Tizard, J., Schofield, W.N. and Hewison, J. (1982) ‘Collaboration between teachers and parents in assisting children’s reading’, in ‘Addressing Difficulties in Literacy Development – Responses at Family, School, Pupil and Teacher Levels (2002) (eds) Janice Wearmouth, Janet Soler and Gavin Read, published by Routledge Falmer 2002. Originally published in Journal of Educational Psychology, 52 pp.1-5. Reproduced by permission of the British Journal of Educational Psychology © The British Psychological Society

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