Heath's Guide to Literacy

How can literacy differ from one place to another? Literacy in general is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively with each other, and make sense of the world by choosing suitable words for every situation. Professor Shirley Brice Heath studied language development, and find multiple types of literacy which differ from one community to another.

This study aims at Heath’s study to know how each community have their own terms of what their children were learning about literacy, and how can they transfer such learning to their school context.

It first establishes the social Perspective on Literacy, and then discusses the different ways of introducing literacy in the home context. Moreover, how direct teaching differs in each of the communities besides their ways of negotiating meaning with school practices, and finally which community learners are more likely to succeed in the school context later.

Heath's Focus

She studied a classic ethnography to discover the differences in preschool literacy practices among three communities in America Piedmont Carolinas that she called Maintown, Roadville and Trackton.

Her focus was on any simple practice of literacy and when writing or reading is integral to the nature of the children's interactions and their interpretive process. Each one of the three communities has its own social practice, which would say that literacy is what people do with reading, writing, and texts in real.

The Communities

In the southeastern United States Maintown is a middle-class community, Roadville is a working-class white community, and Trackton is a working-class black community. Some communities have lived just on the cusp of disaster and economic wipe-out, while others have flourished. whereas others have little left in their lives that might be called family.

The patterns of literacy language and practice they use in their lives tell us much about changes in the values surrounding family literacy. Trackton and Roadville are as different from each other as either is from Maintown, and the differences in preschoolers' language use are reflected in three different patterns of adjustment to school.

Literacy in Maintown

A study by Heath (1982) found that children in Maintown, a middle-class community, lived in an environment filled with print and information inferred from print. these children listened and reacted to books and referred to book-related incidents in their intelligence. As they got older, Maintown children learnt certain rules around book perusing, such as the sorts of questions that can be inquired and the truth that interruptions are allowed.

Families from Maintown identify themselves as typical, middle-class, and the mother in each family was either teaching in local public schools or had taught in academic schools. Their children give attention to books and information derived from books. Their rooms contain bookcases and are decorated with murals, bedspreads, and stuffed animals which represent characters found in books.

So, from the age of six months, their acknowledge questions are about books and what they read and their parents expand nonverbal responses and vocalizations from infants into fully-formed grammatical sentences.

Literacy in Roadville

In Roadville, a white working-class community, books moreover played a central part in children's lives, and their rooms were full of letter set friezes, mobiles and more. Since childhood, they are brought home from the hospital to rooms decorated with colourful, mechanical, musical, and literacy-based stimuli. The walls are decorated with pictures based on nursery rhymes, and from an early age, children are held and prompted to see the wall decorations.

The items of the child's environment promote the exploration of colours, shapes, and textures. In each Roadville home, preschoolers first have books, featuring a single object on each page. They later acquire books which provide sounds, smells, and different textures or opportunities for practising small motor skills.

On weekends, fathers and mothers sometimes read with their children for brief periods of time, but they generally prefer to play games or play with the children's toys in their interactions.

Literacy in Trackton

While Children from Trackton, an African-American working-class community, did not involve the baby paraphernalia of mobiles, friezes and pop-up books. The wealthy language opportunities did not come from books but from adult conversation and oral stories. Reading in Trackton was not a private issue, it was highly social, a time for discussion and transaction of meaning. A letter, a set of information or a story can be translated, reshaped and reworked through a lot of talks.

When their children make cooing or babbling sounds, adults refer to this as noise, they never attempt that it is made to interpret these sounds as words or communicative attempts on the part of the baby.

Their adults believe they should not have to depend on their babies to ask them what they need or when they are uncomfortable. The children never request nor do they receive manipulative toys, such as puzzles, blocks, take-apart toys or literacy-based items, such as books or letter games.

The Communities' Differences in Literacy

In Heath's words, the three communities presented children with different ways of taking meaning from literacy occasions. Each of the communities entwined talks and writes in very diverse ways that challenge any basic oral-literate division.

For example, In Maintown homes, the development of knowledge within the earliest preschool years depends in huge part on labelling procedures and what-explanations They like to connect old and new information and reinforced it in narrative tales which fictionalize the teller's occasions or summarize a story from a book. So, for these children, the bedtime story is essentially an early connection in a long chain of interrelated patterns of taking meaning from the environment.

Roadville's Practices

Roadville moreover gives labels, features, and what-explanations, and endorses listening and performing behaviours for preschoolers. In any case, Roadville adults do not carry on or maintain in a persistently overlapping and interdependent fashion the connecting of ways of taking meaning from books to ways of relating that information to other aspects of the environment.

They want their children to learn to explore a particular moral in a series and to anticipate that story to fit their facts of reality expressly. So when they relate an occasion, they do the same, proceeding with the story of a real occasion according to coaching by adults who want to develop the story as they saw it.

Trackton's Practices

While Trackton is like not one or the other Maintown nor Roadville. There are no bedtime stories; in reality, there are few events for reading with children. unlike Maintown and Roadville, Trackton children have enveloped totally different kinds of social interactions. They are held, fed, talked to, and rewarded for nonverbal, and afterwards verbal, renderings of occasions they witness.

Their adult's esteem and react positively when their children appear they have assented to know how to use language to show correspondence in function, style, arrangement, and situated between two different things or circumstances.

References

Allington, Da & Mayor, Ba (eds) 2012, 'Communicating in English', Routledge, Canada.
Dunsmore Ka & Fisher Do (eds) 2010, 'Family Literacy or Community Learning? Some Critical Questions on Perspective', the International Reading Association, Canada.
Heath, SA (1982), 'Narrative Skills at Home and School', Language in Society, 11(1), pp. 64–65.
Tarbiyaa Salima, viewed 9 Ap(Link).