Scaffolding of Emergent Literacy Skills Article Critique

As the article states, "Observations indicated that Harry's print motivation during the parent-child interactions with environmental print and joint-writing activities was high" (p. 317).

This high enthusiasm and ability are assumed to be in direct relation to the scaffolding techniques employed by the mother throughout Harry's early development. Therefore the researchers achieved their goal of providing parents with techniques that they can use to enhance their child's emergent literacy in the home, without great expense. This is supposed to help the child be better prepared for entering the first grade and make the task of teaching him to read and write much easier once he is in school. This is of course only a single-subject case study and although it occurred over a long period of time with very meticulous note taking on the part of the mother, as the authors admit, more research is needed on a larger population to truly confirm the findings.

Nonetheless, there are numerous ways in which this research can have applications to classroom practice for English Language Learners. For example, it demonstrates that it is extremely important for children to start learning to read and write early. This is true for all children, but especially for ELL and special education students. There can be difficulties however even if the process is started early. For example dyslexia can cause children to reverse the letters, which can cause serious delays in learning to read and write properly. There could also be sight or hearing problems that make reading and writing difficult, and there can be attention deficit disorder problems that make it difficult to concentrate. I would need to adjust the scaffolding technique to meet these special needs by adjusting the lesson to fit the student's unique visual, spatial, auditory and cognitive functions.For example, the use of "private speech" could be incorporated for auditory learners who have trouble concentrating. According to Neuman et al. (2009):

"Private speech refers to a child providing their own audible instructions during a challenging task. In a study of 5-year-old kindergarten children, Bodrova and Leong used materialization by drawing lines to represent units of speech in written form. Private speech was also used by encouraging the child to reread aloud what had been written so that it prompted the next word the child had planned to write. Both techniques helped the children to move within their zone of proximal development."

Of course, healthy children with no impairments can experience difficulties in the learning process also, especially if they are learning English as a second language. For all of these children, it is important to be consistent, to reward them for doing well and to make reading and writing as fun an activity as possible.

Additionally, engagement with environmental media is an area of reading development that is becoming increasingly popular due to its ability to connect contextual elements with the developmental process. Therefore, after reading about the experiences of Harry, I feel confident that combining the use of environmental media with the strategy of scaffolding in my classroom could definitely produce the type of positive results that are described in the article.

References

Neumann, M.M., Hood, M. & Neumann, D.L. (2009) the scaffolding of emergent literacy skills in the home environment: A case study.….....