Record: Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison, “The Informal Acquisition and Development of Literacy” in International Perspectives on Home Education (2015): 57-73. [Table of Contents]
Summary: This article is part of a series of reviews on the book International Perspectives on Home Education. Thomas is a visiting fellow and Pattison is a research associate at at the Institute of Education, University of London. Here they investigate the informal development of literacy in the context of home education.Thomas and Pattison assert that formal schooling places great pressure on learning to read as soon as possible. Reading is treated as an intellectual pursuit that can be broken down into discrete skills. Children who lag behind are said to need special attention, as if they are abnormal. The attitude is much different with home educated children. In his 1998 study with 100 families in the UK and Australia, Thomas found that approximately 20% of his sample could be described as late readers. Many did not start reading until they were 8 years old or older. The parents felt the strength of social norms, but generally they followed a child-led approach to home education and avoided the detrimental effects of late-reading by supplementing the child’s learning with verbal, visual and hands-on activities that are scarce in school.
Thomas and Pattison continue on to discuss many different forms of learning to read. The traditional method involves mastering a set of rules. While children may be ‘successful’ and complete the program, children taught traditionally often have a weak grasp of the underlying concepts. The informal approaches to reading view children more holistically, and they vary greatly from child to child. Thomas and Pattison identify three principal types:
1. Self-directed learning works for children who want to learn to read because they are interested in reading itself. Self-directed learning may appear similar to what happens in traditional school, but the child has actively chosen to pursue reading.
2. Incidental learning occurs in children who are brought to reading through other interests. Some examples that they cite are song lyrics, comics and video games. The child had an interest in one of these things and learned to read in order to enjoy it more.
3. Finally, implicit learning happens for children who never develop any kind of motivation to learn to read. Even these children learn to read through encountering words around them in incidental settings such as computer prompts, instructions and labels. Parents were intentional to model literacy through everyday activities, and the children latently acquired it over time. Phonics, a main-stay in formal literacy education, seemed to play an insignificant role in many of the children who learned to read informally.
Many home educated children fiercely resisted their parents’ efforts to teach them through formal methods. The parents also felt that their attempts to teach literacy formally were ineffective. It was much more important that the parents built an environment in which children experienced literacy and felt supported to read when they were ready. Thomas and Pattison found that when children are allowed to develop reading at their own pace, they actually enjoy it. The children they studied who learned to read after age eight did not experience any adverse effects. They suggest that it is feasible for children to become literate simply through cultural immersion in a literate society.
Appraisal: This article is similar to their 2013 study on informal home education. Without more information on their sample, it is difficult to make generalizations since informal education depends entirely on the quality of the environment provided by the parents. The informal acquisition of literacy may happen if the parents are well-educated, thoughtful and financially sound, but children may face more obstacles if the parenting situation is less than ideal. If simply being engaged in a literate world full of words is enough to teach someone to read, how do some people manage to remain illiterate?
A final note: Thomas and Pattison’s recommendation here will resonate with readers familiar with the history of pedagogical theory, for it is the purest embodiment of what used to be called “progressive” or “child-centered” pedagogy. Dewey’s ideal was nearly exactly that of Thomas and Pattison, with the exception that he believed this child-centered learning needed to happen in a public institution so that children from various backgrounds could learn cooperatively. In both cases, however, the entire theory depends upon a near godlike teacher (or in this case parent) who is able to furnish an environment that maximizes the potential for self-directed growth in children. The vision is beautiful, but there is a reason that it never really took off in schools. What teacher can truly anticipate the needs of a room full of children and furnish an environment that will enable all of them to make connections between their experiences and build on these experiences with more experiences in the future? Perhaps a parent has a better chance of pulling this off given her more complete understanding of her children and the smaller population with which she has to work. In that sense the population of homseschoolers about which Thomas and Pattison have been writing for several years now are perhaps the most Deweyan educators currently practicing the craft.
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