Page 157 - Literacy in the New Media Age

146 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

Figure 9.3 ‘Early’ child writing in a pictographic writing culture

two children have ‘read’, in the full sense of the word, the script systems of their
culture. They have made their meaning of each script-system, a meaning which
appears in their outwardly made signs.
My next example, Figure 9.4 (overleaf), shows the process of reading as sign-
making, some three to four years later. The examples come from two different
primary schools; both the children were seven at the time they produced these
small texts.
The reading which preceded these two texts is of more diverse materials; it was
reading of a range of more complex text-materials as well as the ‘reading’ of
much talk by the teacher and of looking at illustrations. Indeed this is a ‘reading’
of a diversity of texts, spoken by the teacher, and shown in a book, or drawn on a
whiteboard, and so the complex signs that appear here are based on a multiplicity
of ‘readings’ at many levels, brought together – re-presented – here as a complex
new sign. I will not talk about the children’s acute hearing-as-‘reading’ of the
speech of their communities, as it is revealed in their phonetically precise
spellings. Instead I wish to explore the issue of the necessary prior resources –
which includes ‘principles’ – without which reading is not possible. My focus is
on the two children’s ‘reading’ of frog-spawn. The resources applied differ in the
two cases. The boy who wrote ‘frogs born’ focused on semantic resources, broadly
speaking, while the girl who wrote ‘frogs sporn’ relied more on syntactic
resources. I assume that in each case the children had met this word in speech,