Emergent storybook reading revisited (Research Note)

Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423Volume 22, Issue 3, 1999, pp 293±298

Emergent storybook reading revisited(Research Note)Jim AndersonDepartment of Language Education, University of British Columbia, Canada

Rose MatthewsHope Elementary School, British Columbia, Canada

ABSTRACT

Fifteen children from working-class homes attending two kindergarten classes in oneschool in a small town in Canada were asked to select their favourite book in Octoberand June to read to a researcher. The storybook re-enactments were tape recordedand transcribed, and then coded according to a developmental scheme developed bySulzby (1985) and Barnhart (1991). The results were compared with the results ofSulzby's (1985) study with 24 children from middle-class homes. The mean score ofthe children in the Sulzby study was found to be significantly higher in October thanthe mean score of the children in the present study. Furthermore, the differencebetween the mean scores of the two groups had increased significantly by June.Further analysis revealed that the children in the present study did not show the samedevelopmental progression as the children in the Sulzby study and, in fact, 11 of the15 children did not progress at all along the developmental continuum. The resultsare discussed in relation to concepts of emergent literacy and socio-economic factorsin early reading development.

INTRODUCTION

This study focused on the role of storybook reading in children's early literacydevelopment. It has been realised for some time that children who have learned toread prior to formal instruction have usually been read to regularly by parents orsignificant others (e.g. Durkin, 1966). Such children typically score higher on testsof print awareness and other reading readiness tests (Wells and Raban, 1978).More recently, the ideas of Sulzby (1985; Sulzby and Teale, 1991) have been fairlyinfluential in this field.

Sulzby (1985) argues that acquiring literacy necessitates that the child reconcep-tualises language. and that `the acquisition of literacy can be said to involve atransition from oral language to written language' (p. 460). Sulzby has hypothesiseddevelopmental patterns of children's emergent storybook reading from `picturegoverned attempts' (i.e. oral-language-like labelling and commenting on pictures) to

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ìndependent reading' or decoding print. Working with middle-class kindergartenchildren, Sulzby (1985) was able to document and categorise this developmentalscheme and show that children progressed though various developmental levels orcategories over the course of the kindergarten year.Sulzby's scheme is framed within the theory of èmergent literacy' (Clay, 1966).

According to this theory, children acquire considerable knowledge of print beforeformal instruction by being immersed in literacy events in their daily lives. Sulzbyand Teale (1991) argue that from within an emergent literacy perspective, the child isviewed as `. . .constructor of his or her own literacy' (p.729).Recently concerns have been raised about the generalisability of some of the

research in emergent literacy (e.g. Adams, 1991). Much of the research in thisarea has involved middle-class children whose early literacy experiences typicallydiffer from the literacy experiences of children not from `the mainstream culture'(Pellegrini, 1991). Indeed, storybook reading is often seen as the way through whichchildren acquire literacy (Pellegrini, 1991), despite the fact that storybook reading toyoung children is virtually nonexistent within some cultural groups (Mason, 1992).Furthermore, storybook reading experiences for children differ according to thesocio-economic status (SES) of the parents and many of the potential benefitsidentified by Mason (1992) have been extrapolated from the research with middle-class parents.Despite these concerns, educators have developed pedagogy based in large part on

the literacy experiences typical of those documented in case studies of middle-classfamilies. For example, Holdaway (1979) developed `big book' experiences designedto emulate the bedtime story, a feature of middle-class life which children from lowSES environments (Heath, 1982) and other cultures (Mason, 1992) do not necessarilyexperience.The purpose of this study was to extend that carried out by Sulzby (1985) but using

children from working-class homes. The following research question guided thestudy: will similar developmental patterns of story book reading emerge in childrenfrom working-class homes as in children from middle-class homes in the Sulzby(1985) study?

METHOD

Participants

The participants consisted of 15 kindergarten children from working-class homesselected from two kindergarten classes in one school in a rural area of Canada.Initially, 18 students were selected to participate in the study. However, in thissomewhat transient population, three of the children and their families had movedby the end of the school year. At the commencement of the study, the children rangedin age from 4 years 9 months to 5 years 8 months, while the mean age was 5 years6 months. Nine girls and six boys participated in the study. With the exception of onechild of First Nations ethnicity, all of the children were Caucasian. All of the childrencame from families with an income below the poverty level. Five of the children hadattended pre-school or a play group prior to entry to kindergarten.The school that the children attended is in a small town of 5,000 inhabitants, where

logging and other resource-based industries are the principal occupations. The

# United Kingdom Reading Association 1999

294 ANDERSON AND MATTHEWS

parents of the children selected for this study were seasonal workers or worked in lowpaying service jobs; some of the parents were receiving social assistance.Both kindergarten teachers embraced a holistic approach to literacy acquisition.

For example, while the kindergarten teachers taught the letters of the alphabet andsymbol-sound relationships, storybook reading was emphasised in the kindergartenclasses. The children were read to as a group at least twice a day during a scheduledstorybook reading of 15±20 minutes duration. Interviews with the teachers indicatedthat storybook reading in their classroom was interactive and that the kinds ofinteractions engaged in were similar to that described in the literature (e.g. Cochran-Smith, 1984). One of the researchers, who has a masters degree in early childhoodeducation and has taught primary grade children for more than twenty years, visitedthe classrooms to observe the children in the study. She described the shared readingsessions as `highly interactive'. The children were encouraged to select books to`read' or to share with another child during their free time and books were alwaysaccessible in the class library. In addition, the children took home books from theschool library at least once a week (often more frequently) and the teachers encour-aged the parents to read to their children regularly. A brochure emphasising theimportance of reading regularly to children was sent home in September. Thismessage was reiterated through regular school newsletters, teacher-parent confer-ences and meetings at the school.

Procedure

In October, early in the kindergarten year, each child was asked to select a favouritebook from the classroom collection and to accompany the researcher to an interviewsite where the child was asked `Please read me your book'. The researcher hadpreviously taught kindergarten children for several years but at the time was teachingchildren in grade three The storybook re-enactment was recorded on audiotape in itsentirety and the researcher made notes of the child's behaviour during the session.Some eight months later, in June of that kindergarten year, this procedure wasrepeated. Only two children chose the same book in June as October and bothremained in the same category. The audiotapes from the October and June sessionswere then transcribed and the transcriptions were coded and scored on an 11 pointscale developed by Barnhart (1991), based on Sulzby's categorisation scheme.

RESULTS

As shown in Table 1, the mean scores for the initial (October) retellings were higherin the Sulzby study than they were in the present study. T tests revealed significantdifferences between the groups (p50.05). The scores in the Sulzby study were moreevenly distributed while in the present study the scores clustered in the lowercategories. While approximately half the scores in the Sulzby study were in the `printgoverned' and `written language like' categories, all of the children in the presentstudy scored in the òral language like' or `picture governed ± story not formed'categories. Four of the children in the Sulzby study refused to attempt a retellingwhile none of the children did here although the same prompts were used. Whetherthis was attributable to the degree to which the children were familiar with the


EMERGENT STORYBOOK READING 295

interviewers can only be speculated. The interviewer in the present study was aregular teacher in the school, whereas the interviewers in the Sulzby study `hadvisited the kindergarten from the beginning of the school year for observations in theclassroom' (p. 463).

The gap between the mean scores for both groups at the end of the kindergartenyear (June) had increased dramatically (see Table 1). T tests revealed a statisticallysignificant difference between the two groups (p50.001). While the mean scores inthe Sulzby study increased substantially from October to June (i.e. 4.33±6.38), therewas no increase in mean scores in the present study (3.2±3.2). Also noteworthy isthe observation that the end of year mean score in the present study was still lowerthan the mean score for the children in the Sulzby study at the beginning of the year.None of the children in the current study advanced to the print governed categories:all were still at the oral language like categories, whereas 17 of the 24 children in theSulzby study were in the written language like or print governed categories by theyear's end.When the reading attempts of individual children are compared for October and

June, three patterns emerge. Seven children remained in the same category, four wereclassified higher, and four were classified lower.

Table 1. Categorisation of children's story re-telling at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year:

comparison of the results of the present study with those of Sulzby (1985).

Sulzby's study Current study

N=24 N=15

Beginning End Beginning End

Print governed 5 10 0 0

Reading independently (1) (3) (0) (0)

Reading with strategies imbalanced (1) (2) (0) (0)

Reading aspectually (1) (5) (0) (0)

Refusal based on print awareness (2) (0) (0) (0)

Picture governed ± stories formed

Written Language Like 6 7 0 0

Reading verbatim (1) (0) (0) (0)

Reading similar to original (3) (2) (0) (0)

Reading and storytelling mixed (2) (5) (0) (0)

Oral Language Like 5 5 10 9

Monologic storytelling (2) (3) (9) (9)

Dialogic storytelling (3) (2) (1) (0)

Picture governed ± stories not formed 4 0 5 6

Following the action (2) (0) (4) (6)

Labelling and commenting (2) (0) (1) (0)

Refusals 4 2 0 0

Mean scores 4.3 5.7 3.2 3.2



DISCUSSION

As with the Sulzby (1985) study, the lack of randomisation in sample selection andthe relatively small sample size preclude generalising to other populations. Therefore,these results need to be interpreted cautiously. The results of this study contrast withthe results of the Sulzby study in several ways. First, the retellings of the children inthe present study were at a lower level at the beginning of the year than the childrenin the Sulzby study. The finding from the present study, however, is consistent withthat of Elster (1994), who also worked with children from working-class homes.Elster suggests that the differences between the results of his study and the resultsobtained by Sulzby might have been attributable to the fact that the children in hisstudy `. . .were from low socio-economic backgrounds so they are less likely to havehad experiences with book reading at home' (p. 415), while the children in the Sulzbystudy came from middle-class homes.An underlying assumption of emergent literacy (and Sulzby's classification

scheme) is that children's literacy proceeds along a developmental continuum.Therefore we would expect to find that children's storybook re-enactments would beat different points along this continuum influenced by the amount of book readingexperience they have had. However, only four of the children in this study showedprogress during their kindergarten year; the others either remained at the same pointor regressed. Some researchers (e.g. Katt, 1995) have suggested that while the theoryof emergent literacy describes the literacy development of children from middle-classhomes, it might not hold for children from non-mainstream groups. It is conceivablethat Sulzby's classification scheme might be inappropriate in terms of describing theliteracy development of children from non-mainstream families such as the childrenin the present study.Given time, it is possible that the children in the present study would have made

the same progression as the children in the Sulzby study. In other words, as thechildren gained more experiences with book reading during the grade one year, theymay have progressed to the `print governed' stages that most of the children inSulzby's study had attained by the end of the kindergarten year. A follow-up study iscurrently in progress with a group of children from working-class homes to see if thisoccurs. In this follow-up, the children's storybook re-enactments will be recordedand analysed over the course of the kindergarten and grade one years to see if theyshow similar developmental patterns as the children in Sulzby's study, but over alonger time period.Critics of a òne size fits all' approach to literacy acquisition argue that many

educators, while attempting to help all children acquire literacy, have adoptedethnocentric views of literacy development which reflect a western, middle-class bias(e.g. see Reyes, 1992). The results of the present study suggest that we need toexamine some of the assumptions that have been made in this regard. Katt (1995)maintains that the applicability and appropriateness of the concept of emergentliteracy across sociocultural contexts require re-examination. It was most notablethat the literacy development of most of the children in this study was not èmerging'like that of their middle-class counterparts in the earlier study by Sulzby. Given thesocial, cultural and linguistic diversity of our society, perhaps it is incumbent on alleducators to rethink the notion that there are generic approaches that are suitable forthe literacy development of all children regardless of their background.


EMERGENT STORYBOOK READING 297

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DURKIN, D. (1966) Children who read early. New York: Teachers College Press.

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MASON, J. (1992) Reading stories to preliterate children: a proposed connection to reading. In P. Gough, L.

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Council. Bristol, UK: University of Bristol.

Address for correspondence: DR JIM ANDERSON, Department of Language Education,University of British Columbia, 2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia,Canada, V6T 1Z4. E-mail: [email protected]



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Emergent storybook reading revisited (Research Note)