Concepts About Print

Concepts About Print
photo by: trekbody
By C. Temple|J. Makinster|L. Buchhmann|J. Logue|G. Mrvova|M. Gearan
Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

When teachers face a group of young kindergarten learners in a reading lesson, they make certain assumptions about what the children already know. As the New Zealand researcher Marie Clay demonstrates in the following piece, sometimes those assumptions are wrong:

Suppose the teacher has placed an attractive picture on the wall and has asked her children for a story, which she will record under it. They offer the text, "Mother is cooking," which the teacher alters slightly to introduce some features she wishes to teach. She writes:

Mother said, "I am baking."

If she says, "Now look at our story, 30% of the new entrant group [children who are just beginning reading instruction] will attend to the picture. If she says, "Look at the words and find some that you know," between 50 and 90% will be looking for letters. If she says, "Can you see Mother, most will agree that they can, but some see her in the picture, some can locate M, and others will locate the word Mother.

Perhaps the children read in unison, "Mother is..." and the teacher tries to sort this out. Pointing to said, she asks, "Does this say is?" Half agree that it does because it has s in it. "What letter does it start with?" Now the teacher is really in trouble. She assumes that the children will know that a word is built out of letters, but 50% of the children still confuse the verbal labels word and letter after six months of instruction. She also assumes that the children know that the left- hand letter following a space is the "start" of a word. Often they do not. (Clay, 1975, pp. 3-4)

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