Recognizing Different Kinds of “Head Starts”

Defining Literacy

The first issue centers on the decision that the panelists made to focus on what they call “conventional literacy skills.” The authors acknowledge that this term is “not widely used in the field” (NELP, 2008, p. vii), a fact that begs for a clear definition of this foundational concept. But the one offered by the panel leaves the concept ambiguous: “such skills as decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, writing, and spelling” (p. vii). We found ourselves wondering, Why is a definitional list that is this important introduced with the phrase “such skills as” (p. vii)? Are we to presume that other “such” skills should be obvious to the reader? What things might not be appended to this list? Why are these five things considered “conventional,” and what does this suggest about what is not considered conventional? Are all forms of writing and reading comprehension “conventional”? Who decides what is and what is not?

Given that this term is not widely used in the field, might we not consider some ways of defining literacy that have been widely endorsed? The National Council of Teachers of English (2008) Executive Committee writes:

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

Luke, Freebody, and Land (2000) similarly emphasize flexibility and breadth of repertoires in their more succinct definition of literacy: “the flexible and sustainable mastery of a repertoire of practices with texts of traditional and new communications technologies via spoken language, print and multimedia” (p. 20).

Delineating Development

The second conceptual issue that we highlight shaped the entire thrust of the report: how the development of these “conventional” skills is conceived. The panelists’ aim is to identify “precursor, predictive, foundational, or emergent skills” (NELP, 2008, p. vii) to these later “conventional” skills. They suggest that the latter “can be thought of as being more sophisticated, mature, or later-developing manifestations of reading and writing,” aspects that are “clearly the focus of the reading, writing, and spelling instruction provided to elementary and secondary students” (p. vii), whereas the former are “those earlier-developing precursor skills that may not themselves be used within literacy practice but that may presage the development of conventional literacy skills” (p. vii). But just what does a precursor skill that is not itself used in literacy practice look like, and why is it assumed to be a literacy skill if it is not used for literacy? What is the imagined relationship between these “earlier-developing” skills and the “more sophisticated, mature, or later-developing manifestations?”

The authors state this key finding: “Conventional reading and writing skills that are developed in the years from birth to age 5 have a clear and consistently strong relationship with later conventional literacy skills” (NELP, 2008, p. vii). The panel’s meta-analysis revealed 11 variables representing early literacy skills or precursor skills. The panel suggests that “these 11 variables consistently predicted later literacy achievement for both preschoolers and kindergartners. Not surprisingly, these measures were usually more predictive of literacy achievement at the end of kindergarten or beginning of first grade than of later literacy growth” (p. viii). Thus these “later” conventional literacy skills are measured in the literacy achievement of preschoolers and kindergarteners. But doesn’t this basically indicate that a head start on particular skills will likely mean being in the lead further out in the race, on measures of those same kinds of skills, given continued experience with and tests of those skills in preschool and kindergarten? Is it really any surprise that the more reductive kinds of preschool language practice, such as alphabet knowledge and rapid automatic naming of letters or digits, are correlated with “later” school literacy success, if the measure of school literacy involves the reductive language practices that abound in most public schools? Isn’t this argument essentially tautological?

What underlies this conception of literacy skills acquisition is a belief in a preestablished, normative developmental model in which early skills serve as building blocks for the next set of skills to be acquired. We want to be very clear here. We are not saying that reading comprehension as defined by reading tests is not important, and we recognize that proficiency in discrete, “conventional” skills may be an important building block for later kinds of engagements with written texts in school. But we are arguing that these are not the only building blocks that can be used for literacy development, and moreover, that they are focused on preparing youth for a particular kind of orientation to print. By identifying only a narrow set of precursor skills, we authorize a one-size-fits-all approach that may doom to failure students who are lacking in those skills—but who have other important skills that could be built upon—skills that may in fact be better suited to the demands of new 21st-century literacies. In this we echo Bruce Fuller’s (2007) critiques of the call for universal preschool education and argue that we need to begin by taking seriously cultural variations in development trajectories.

Alternative Conceptions of Literacy

Sociocultural researchers have long argued that reductive definitions of literacy miss the richness of real-world literacy practices. They have built an extensive body of ethnographic studies documenting variations in the ways in which young children are socialized in and through language (see Razfar & Gutiérrez, 2003, for a summary of this literature in relation to early childhood). The wide range of linguistic and literate skills that children display in diverse communities as they participate in family storytelling practices (Fung, Miller, & Ling, 2004; Kyratzis, 2005; Melzi & Capse, 2005; Michaels, 1991; Miller & Mehler, 1994), dances and ceremonies (Baquedano-López, 2008; Minks, 2002), writing names and labels (Dyson, 2003; Lynch, 2008), language brokering (Orellana, 2009b), and other engagements around everyday texts (Baquedano-López & Kattan, 2008; Compton-Lilly, 2008; Gregory et al., 2004; Heath, 1983; Luke, 1993, 2005; Melzi, 2000; Purcell-Gates, 1996) are given virtually no consideration by NELP. Nor does the panel address the disconnect between skills displayed in these practices and those that are typically valued and measured in school. This is so despite an impressive body of literature by linguistic anthropologists and education researchers documenting both continuities and discontinuities between home and school “ways with words” (Au, 1980; Delgado Gaitan, 1992; Gregory, 1994; Hull & Schultz, 2002; Heath, 1983; Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003; Rodríguez-Brown, 2001; Rogers, 2001; Teale, 1986) and proposing ways of building on continuities and expanding students’ repertoires of linguistic practice (Anderson, Purcell-Gates, Gagne, & Jang, 2009; Gallimore & Goldenberg, 2001; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Lee, 2008; Martínez, Orellana, Pacheco, & Carbone, 2008; Zentella, 1997). Purcell-Gates, Melzi, Najafi, and Orellana (2010) argue for models of early childhood education that take seriously cultural variations in everyday literacy practices and that build on these practices in school.

Although this literature is given little attention in studies seeking “scientific” evidence for literacy development in the United States, this is not so in other nations. In Australia, Allan Luke’s (personal communication, September 27, 2009) incisive critiques of what Street (2003) refers to as the “autonomous” model of literacy—a model that conceives of literacy as a set of unidirectional cognitive skills—have had considerable influence on school literacy policy and practice. In the late 1980s and 1990s Australian language and literacy policy legislated for a national-level research program focused on child literacy, and these projects addressed diverse aspects of school-age children’s literacy (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, p. 9). Current Australian literacy policy and curriculum places clear emphasis on a core set of skills and strategies, but many state syllabi acknowledge a social view of literacy, one that can consider “that individuals acquire a ‘repertoire of practices’ that can be combined and recombined or reformed for different social contexts and used with different technologies” (Anstey & Bull, 2004, p. 11). The Australian model attends to literacy development on multiple dimensions: decoding, semantics, pragmatics, and critical analysis. Educators are called on to modulate and blend these elements in various balances in order to respond optimally to the diverse resources that children bring to school. The curriculum is not based on “skills” as much as on helping students to engage with different kinds of texts in different ways. There is considerable agreement that schools should engage in authentic literacy practices that involve incorporating home literacy practices into school programs, with emphasis on how meaning is constructed through the interactions between readers and texts (Anstey & Bull, 2004; Purcell-Gates et al., 2010).

The Australian perspective is consistent with the sociocultural argument that performance on isolated skills (including reading comprehension) does not necessarily add up to the ability to use reading and writing in meaningful ways in the social world—just as practicing pedaling, maneuvering handlebars, and stepping on brakes does not necessarily help one learn to navigate a bicycle through a busy thoroughfare. Most literacy researchers acknowledge the complexity of literacy practices and agree that the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Yet most “scientific” studies in the United States continue to break reading down into components and measure the skills in isolation.

Beyond Ideological Battles

Our intention, however, is not to center our argument on old debates between a psycholinguistic and a sociocultural approach to studying literacy. Nor is it simply to critique the focus on reductive literacy practices in “scientific” literacy research in the United States. We accept that there is value in knowing the relationship between discrete skills such as phonemic awareness in preschool and letter–sound correspondence skills in first grade (a central focus of many studies examined by the panel), given that critical decisions are made about students’ literacy abilities based on those early skills. It is certainly important to prepare children for what they will encounter in elementary school so as not to disadvantage children who start out behind on the race to “conventional” skills. And these skills can be foundations for more complex kinds of literacy engagements. Where we see the danger is that this kind of relationship is addressed to the exclusion of many other dimensions of literacy and given so much importance that when a child is lacking in these skills it becomes very hard to see other kinds of foundational skills that the child may bring to the schoolhouse door.

Stepping outside the box of the status quo, we want to consider what is missed when we use current, school-defined literacy measures as our only indices of literacy success. What other kinds of “head starts” might be made visible if we expanded beyond such a narrow notion of “conventional” literacy skills? Whose talents go unseen when we measure children from nondominant groups on dominant-culture yardsticks, and what are the implications for those children’s developmental pathways? What skills are being lost because we are not nurturing them? In asking these questions we take up Lee’s (2008) call for integrating a deep understanding of culture into assessments of learning and for seeing changing demographics not as a problem to be solved but as a generative resource for theorizing about learning and development—a perspective that is notably absent in most of the studies that were analyzed by the panel because this perspective is so lacking in the field.

“Unconventional” Skills and “Unconventional” Pathways to Conventional Skills

In the remainder of our response we want to suggest some of the things that are not seen when we focus only on “conventional” literacies and “conventional” measures of success. We build on but go beyond an argument for the importance of divergent pathways to success. That is, we are not just saying that we need to identify culturally relevant routes to conventional success. We are arguing that there may be skills that we are not seeing or studying that could be used to build alternative pathways to new literacies—ones that will be increasingly important in the 21st century.

Further, although efforts to identify and build on the cultural practices of particular groups of children from nondominant social groups are valuable, we argue that we should be looking at the skills that are demanded and developed through the very experience of being members of nondominant social groups, not through particular practices per se. Children with experiences crossing linguistic and cultural borders, and especially those who actively negotiate border crossing for others, may, in fact, have a head start on the acquisition of new literacies. This includes bilingual youth as well as most children from nondominant communities who speak nonstandard forms of English and who negotiate between their everyday language practices and those expected of them in school. These youth may also have a head start on new and previously undervalued skills that will be particularly useful for engaging in an increasingly globalized, multilingual, multimodal, and rapidly changing literacy world. Rather than a singular focus on narrow standards of literacy excellence—such as the ability to spell conventionally, give “correct” responses to predetermined comprehension questions, and distinguish discrete sounds in isolated words, we might examine the breadth and flexibility of linguistic expertise: the ability to adapt how one speaks, reads, and writes in different contexts and relationships and for different purposes, as well as the critical language awareness that may come from grappling with this kind of decision making. These kinds of “transcultural” skills (Orellana, 2009a), cultivated in what Mary Pratt (1991) calls “contact zones”—social spaces where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (p. 33)—involve dispositions and abilities that are rarely noticed, much less measured, in “conventional” research.

In our work with children who served as language brokers for their families (Orellana, 2009b), we saw much evidence of this kind of versatility. Elementary school–age children used their knowledge of two languages for a wide range of literacy tasks, tailoring their interpretations of both oral and written language to their audiences; attending to contextual cues; parsing texts in different ways; and drawing on background experiences, cultural knowledge, and linguistic and literate skills in two languages (such as their knowledge of cognates) as they deciphered complex text. They made subtle phonological adjustments as they moved back and forth between English and Spanish. They enjoyed creating bilingual plays on words. These young people also attended to subtle social cues indicating who needed assistance and when to step in and offer it.

But many of these same children struggled in school. Students spoke convincingly of what a text “told them,” summarizing the key information they had gleaned, much as they paraphrased written texts at home for their parents—but then failed at producing school-acceptable paraphrases or at providing standardized answers to preformulated comprehension questions (Orellana & Reynolds, 2008). These students displayed great competence in some contexts and in relation to some activities, even as they “achieved failure” (McDermott, 1987) in other ways. Some language brokers performed well on standardized tests of language and literacy in school, but others did not. At the same time, it is important to note that language-brokering experiences were correlated with higher results on standardized tests of both reading and math (Dorner et al., 2007). This is an example of an apparently nonconventional path to conventional literacies.

Precursors to Transcultural Literacy Skills

The skills that these youths display in their everyday lives are literacy skills. They are hardly “conventional” ones, but are they any less valuable for that? Arguably, transcultural dexterity and linguistic flexibility will grow in importance in an increasingly intercultural and globalized world (Suárez-Orozco, 2005), and multimodal virtuosity is the literacy skill par excellence of the future (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001).

If we valued transcultural dispositions, what precursors might we look for in their preschool years? And how might we cultivate them in preschool education? We want to suggest a few possibilities.

First we might not look at children’s skills in English and their home language separately, as is typically done now. We might develop measures of the breadth of their linguistic and literate repertoires (e.g., their ability to speak English, their home language, and dialectical varieties of each and to shift appropriately for different audiences, contexts, and purposes). Rather than ranking children separately on their English and home language scores, we might categorize children according to their overall “language flexibility” and then identify ways to build greater versatility and deeper expertise in each language form. We might see how children display their knowledge of different codes and consider their ability to recognize and/or name differences across languages (at the phonemic, graphemic, semantic, or pragmatic levels, as well as in terms of literate conventions) as a “precursor” to later transcultural skills. Indeed, we might find that children who do well on some skills (e.g., phonemic awareness) do not do so well on others (such as metalinguistic awareness—what Mertz & Yovel, 2003, describe as awareness of language and how it functions to create, structure, and form ongoing communication). This might allow us to develop literacy programs that are truly balanced in that they build on the various kinds of skills that children bring to the table and expand the repertoires of all.

Alternatives to the Search for “Precursors”

But this brings us back to the second conceptual problem we named above. Does it really make sense to start with a set of skills that are developed in a particular practice (be that translation work or school literacies) and then look backward for precursors to those skills? Isn’t that a bit like starting with the skill of riding a bike and looking backward to see what skills are evident in early childhood that will lead to being an excellent bicyclist in the future? Can we really make such predictions based on skills that are divorced from the practice of bicycling itself?

Rather, if we want to understand what experiences in early childhood will facilitate success later in life, why don’t we create opportunities to engage in the practices that we value, in developmentally appropriate, scaffolded, and practice-embedded ways? To extend our analogy, why not give people actual experiences with bicycling, but with supports, such as training wheels? Then we could study what kinds of training wheels are most effective for ultimate success not just in peddling, or steering, or even riding on a set course but for riding through diverse terrains. To be sure, the panel did review studies of the effectiveness of different program models, a kind of meta-analysis that is very important for informing policy and practice. But we can’t study “what works” without asking “what works for what”? And if our main measure involves “conventional” literacy skills we may miss identifying what works for other outcomes, such as transcultural dispositions—or how best to cultivate both conventional and transcultural literacy abilities in children who have different kinds of head starts in each game.

In short, we are raising critical questions about the larger conceptual issues that go unaddressed not just by the panel but by the field. The panel, after all, cannot be faulted for not surveying research that has not been done. But we can ask about the implications of making definitive recommendations for practice that are based on an inadequate or limited research base. A serious consideration of the complexities of literacy processes demands that we expand what we notice, measure, and study. And when we find no such studies in the field, we need to name critical gaps before we draw implications for practice.

Thus we call on the field of literacy researchers—not just the panelists—to learn from the experiences of children from nondominant groups and to use this to build a more comprehensive model of literacy development. Sociocultural researchers have long argued that all children arrive at school ready to learn but that they do not bring the same literacy experiences and approaches to learning. Some students have had social and cultural experiences that are more aligned with the dominant culture and activities of school; others bring a different set of skills to the door—including ones that are conceivably better aligned with the broad, transcultural, and flexible literacy skills that will be demanded in their futures. A focus on a core set of prerequisite “conventional” skills ignores these other kinds of head starts and leaves these children behind in a race where they could be leading the pack.