The Literacy Potential of Popular Media Items

Children love to write about what they know. Spend any amount of time with children and it will become obvious that many of them are veritable experts on the toys and characters in popular children's media. When children want to write about popular media themes such as toys or characters from films and television, many teachers tend to react negatively. They may fear that the children will simply be recreating familiar story lines with little creativity on their part. Dr. Karen Wohlwend's research on this topic may alleviate these fears.

Wohlwend found that popular toys and media themes serve as ways to get children writing about things that they are personally interested and invest in. Popular media items can ultimately serve as a useful tool in literacy development. While children may sometimes be reenacting story lines, they are often doing so in a flexible and innovative way, adapting and appropriating them into their own stories. Popular media is an important piece of children's literary repertoires and it may be a mistake to prevent them from using it creatively.

There is certainly room to criticize how toys and other popular media items serve to perpetuate stereotypes of race, class, and gender and the effects these stereotypes may have on children. As Wohlwend suggests, if teachers ban these popular media items from the classroom they have effectively removed themselves the conversation.

Learning Literacy Through Play

With the increasing focus on testing and preparing for tests, children are given less and less time to play. As Dr. Karen Wohlwend suggests in Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom, given the high-stakes nature of standardized testing, many teachers "opt for the defensible approach and focus on discrete skills instruction that closely matches test content." It may be hard to blame them. While play may be increasingly viewed as "frivolous,"  Dr. Wohlwend argues that these kinds of activities are a vital part of children's learning.

Through play, children model activities, take on the roles of more experienced readers, and cooperate in literacy activities that are important for their learning. As Dr. Wohlwend puts it, "Through play, children can mediate print texts for themselves and others by pretending to be more experienced readers who use more complex literacy practices, allowing them to play the expert within the classroom community."

Another point that stands out is that play can aid children in developing skills that are necessary in navigating the increasingly diverse nature of modern literacies. As Dr. Wohlwend discussed in a 2009 Voice of Literacy podcast, "We have lots of different ways that children and adults are communicating that don't involve these traditional interactions with the page." In other words, "The definition of literacy is evolving." It is very important that young students are prepared to use modern forms of communication and be able respond to the inevitable changes that will occur in numerous forms of literacy. By allowing children to experiment and work together through play, we can ensure that they develop the literacy skills that they will need.

The Importance of Prosody in Reading Assessment

In a recent Voice of Literacy podcast, Dr. Paula Schwanenflugel discussed the importance of assessing young readers' comprehension with a focus on prosody in addition to accuracy and rate. While the most common forms of assessing reading fluency are measuring the speed at which a child reads and the number of correctly spoken words, these alone may not give us a complete picture of how well the child is comprehending what she is reading. Giving attention to prosody, or the ability to read aloud with natural sounding inflection, intonation, and pacing, and the appropriate use of pauses, may provide a much better measure of comprehension. In other words, if a child can approximate the sounds of natural speech while she  is reading aloud, she probably understands what she is reading.

Dr. Schwanenflugel describes the rubric that she uses in this type of assessment known as the Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale. This rubric addresses accuracy, rate, and prosody. An interesting element in this form of assessment is the use of spectrographs, or visual representations based on measurements of speech sounds including pitch, pausing, and amplitude. These spectrographs provide a good picture of the child's ability to read aloud naturally and expressively, which Dr. Schwanenflugel says is a strong predictor for comprehension.

Dr. Schwanenflugel makes the important point in  Becoming a Fluent Reader: Reading Skill and Prosodic Features in the Oral Reading of Young Readers,that "prosodic features in spoken language itself may be under development to some extent at the age when most children are learning to read prosodically." In fact, it may not be until the age of 9 or 10 that children fully develop the ability to understand some of the subtler variances in speech. This is certainly worth keeping in mind when pursuing these types of assessments.

In some ways, this approach to assessment seems to almost be common sense to me. In my own experiences working with children, I have found that those who can read aloud in a natural sounding voice are those most likely to understand what they have read. Those children who read aloud in a stilted, monotonous voice may be able to read quickly and even accurately, but they often are not able to demonstrate any understanding of what they had just read. In my opinion, there is a strong argument for including a measurement of prosody in the assessment of children's reading fluency.

The Stakes Are Too High in Standardized Tests

Standardized testing has been a part of public education for a long time, but it is only fairly recently that these tests have become a significant source of problems for both students and teachers. In the past, standardized tests were just one of many ways that teachers could assess the performance of their students. Beginning with the implementation of President Bush's No Child Left Behind and continuing with President Obama's Race to the Top, standardized tests have become a disproportionate factor in determining the futures of students and teachers alike. As Dr. Caitlin Dooley discussed in a 2010 Voice of Literacy podcast, students can be retained based on their score on a single test and teachers are being hired and fired by the test scores of their students. Beyond this, the trends have shown that as schools increasingly emphasize testing, the general level of instruction goes down. Students are being taught how to take tests at the expense of any real learning.

As Dr. Dooley suggests, these high-stakes testing policies will not change until teachers and parents make it clear to legislators that the laws need to change. Perhaps we are now witnessing a tipping point in this highly debated issue. Beginning with the recent testing boycott involving teachers and students in Seattle, the sentiments of which have spread to a number of other states, it may now be a time that we begin to reassess the current focus on standardized tests.