Literacy Backgrounds

Reading and literacy at this point in my life are expected of me. I am very much expected to be able to read textbooks for class, street signs and directions, cookbook instructions, and facebook updates, and tweets. That being said, for as much as I need and use my reading ability, I haven’t spent any particular amount of time considering how or when I learned to read. I do remember that for me, reading has always been a family affair. My parents and extended family read to my sister and me often, probably too often in our opinion at the time, and we were asked to practice our reading out loud at home. Because I am from a family that values reading, Amy Suzanne Johnson’s research on the literary history of the Jones family draws my attention to the reading process, both as I experienced it and as the women of the Jones family did in her article, “The Jones Family’s Culture of Literacy.” Johnson spent time interviewing the Jones family of Pinesville to uncover how reading and the process of learning to read occur in their household. In her research, she discovered that the Jones view literacy very highly, with one kindergarten teacher in the family and extended family who all take considerable time to read to the younger generations. While Pinesville may be a small southern rural town where African Americans have historically been discouraged from literacy, reading is emphasized as a necessary right and gift for this family. From writing letters to each other to reading the newspaper and from reading the Bible at church to reading story books at home, these women, Harriet, Sally, and Lola demonstrate to young KiKi that reading is a large part of their life, which influences KiKi’s attitude towards reading.

While the Jones family was creating an encouraging learning environment for KiKi to learn to read, not all families place importance on reading or display positive reading habits in their own lives for their children to observe and follow. I have never really considered the dramatic impact that a home environment can have on a child’s ability to read at such a young age. More eloquently, “The Social and cultural backgrounds of students have a huge and undeniable effect on their learning” (Graves et al. 2011, p.11). What kind of differences could arise from a difference in background? A positive reading background may mean parents or babysitters who read to the children from a young age, parents from higher socioeconomic statuses or with higher level jobs where children hear a more diverse vocabulary, or children who are encouraged to have and use their own library cards. A negative reading background could look more like a home where parents come home from long hours exhausted and turn on the television rather than read books, parents with limited vocabularies or who don’t speak English at home, or children who do not visit their public libraries. These differences could even be more subtle and certainly more varied, but either background is likely to have an effect on how the child learns and views reading.

The complication comes with how to teach students from all upbringings. Teaching two students with completely different childhoods regarding reading cannot yield the same results. These preexisting differences that children may not even know are present require teachers to take the time to learn about the literacy history of the families, even on a basic level, to better teach the children in their classes. My fear is that they aren’t. While it has been a while since I was undergoing the process of learning to read, I do not remember much differentiation based on preexisting differences. How can children living in New Mexico read and comprehend a story on a standardized test about building a snowman the same way a child from North Dakota? How can a child whose family only speaks Spanish at home be expected to know as many vocabulary or spelling words as a child from an English speaking family? How can a love a reading be instilled in a child who goes home to a family that never reads compared to KiKi from the Jones family, who reads every night? They’re tricky questions, but questions that need to be addressed regardless. Everyone deserves to learn to read, but not everyone is going to learn the same way or in the same timeframe, and that is the important thing to remember. Hopefully, as this semester continues, we will learn about how we can accommodate for these differences in our future students.

Graves, M. F., et al. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Johnson, A. S. (2010). The Jones Family's Culture of Literacy. The Reading Teacher, 33-44.