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This paper provides an analysis of findings related to the intergenerational transfer of literacy, in particular familial attitudes, behavior, and characteristics that seem to promote literacy achievement in children. The issue motivating this analysis is a search for mechanisms that explain why children from some families arrive at school better prepared for literacy achievement than others--and how some families continue to support their children's literacy achievement, after they are in school. It is clear that, in general, more literate and highly educated parents have children who perform better in school. Our problem is not so much the difficulty of seeking a reason for this fact, but rather the challenge of selecting from among a multitude of possible explanations. We take as our task in this paper, therefore, to assess the many, disparate explanations of parental effects on children's literacy in an attempt to understand the most powerful influences, and to recommend how such mechanisms for learning might be integrated into potentially successful family literacy programs.
A starting point for much of the previous work on familial influences on literacy has been the evidence associated with social class differences in reading achievement. Thirty years ago, public attention was alerted to evidence that socio-economic status was related to differences in school achievement (Coleman et al., 1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity revealed that the educational deficit of children from low-income families was present at school entry and increased with each year they stayed in school. These findings of social class differences in school achievement have been confirmed dozens of times since, in comparisons within and across school systems and in every National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report. The 1981 report from the NAEP, for example, indicated that the reading achievement of children in affluent suburban schools was significantly and consistently higher than that of children in "disadvantaged" urban schools, and the 1985 NAEP report on reading found that low-income 17-year-olds could read only on an elementary school level (a level achieved by advantaged students at age 13). Not surprisingly, conventional wisdom has held that any factor present in middle-class homes is likely to be positive for school learning, whereas factors present in working-class homes work against achievement.
In fact, though, it is difficult to isolate the factors that may produce a given effect simply by comparing middle-class to working-class children. Social class is a "package variable"--a summary label for an intricate complex of related variables including parental education, occupational status, income, housing conditions, time allocation, attitudes toward school and schooling, experiences with school, expectations for future educational and occupational success, nature of the family's social network, style of parent-child interaction, and many more elements. Replicating findings of social class differences in school achievement brings us no closer to understanding the mechanisms by which those differences develop because it is rarely possible to sort out the separate effects of the wide array of factors packaged together as "working class" or "middle class."
A further difficulty in sorting out the mechanisms that explain familial effects on child literacy is the nature of literacy itself. Literacy is not a single skill that simply gets better with age or instruction. We contend that being literate means different things to the skilled first-grader, or fourth-grader, or high school student or adult. Just as the effects of school experiences can be quite different at different points in a child's development (see, for example, Alexander & Entwistle, 1988), so also can the effects of certain familial practices related to literacy development.
The actual problem is to decide when we would like to assess or characterize the familial effects on child literacy. Much of the research in this area has focused on early effects, to explain differences observable in children on school entry. Social class differences, however, increase in magnitude as children continue in school--suggesting that familial effects account for more than just differences in emergent literacy skill. A discussion of the mechanisms of family effects, then, must distinguish familial influences in terms of what aspect of literacy they influence as well as how that influence is exerted.
During the last 25 years, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed to improve familial effects on child literacy. In this section of the paper, we will review research supporting each of these candidate mechanisms, prior to assessing them as possible explanations for family effects on children's acquisition of literacy.
Much research in the field of literacy development documents straightforward transfer effects (i.e., parental literacy skills and behaviors are transmitted directly to children through activities like picture book reading and writing shopping lists). It is worth noting, however, that most of these effects have been documented during the preschool and kindergarten period (i.e., effects on emergent literacy skills rather than on sophisticated reading). Dyadic book-reading, for example, has been identified as a source of knowledge about print (Clay, 1979), letters (Burgess, 1982), and the characteristics of written registers (Feitelson, Bracha & Goldstein, 1986; Purcell-Gates, 1988). Belief in the efficacy of book-reading as a site for direct transfer of print-related knowledge has been a source of intervention programs (e.g., ?little books? sent home to Spanish-speaking families in California (Goldenberg, Reese & Gallimore, 1992), and Feitelson's classroom library movement (Shimron, 1994) in Israel). The presence of refrigerator letters, posters, paper for making lists, newspapers, and books in the home, and parental efforts to direct children's attention to environmental print have similarly been assumed to promote child literacy, through a direct transfer mechanism (Toomey & Sloan, 1994; Goodman, 1984; Harste, Woodward & Burke, 1984).
Transfer explanations account nicely for social class differences, particularly in the skills of kindergarten children. Social class differences in child performance do not disappear with the supplementation of parental transfer of print knowledge through interventions like Sesame Street and Head Start. Nowadays, most children, even those from families where the parents have little or no education, arrive at kindergarten able to sing the alphabet song and to recognize letters--but the long-term literacy achievement of children from poor families has not improved.
A major criticism of the simple transfer view is that literacy consists of much more than the print skills that can be transferred during book-reading, attention to ambient print, or collaborations on early writing tasks. Furthermore, many children who will go on to be successful readers have, in fact, not learned anything about letters or their shapes, names, or sounds, during their preschool years. In Scandinavia, for example, where adult literacy rates are the highest in the world, parents are discouraged from teaching their children anything about print before they enter school at age 7, suggesting that the powerful effects of collaboration go far beyond the transfer of specific bits and pieces of literacy knowledge.
One alternative view of parental effects defines literacy as social practice, thus emphasizing the parental role in generating a set of literate practices in which children can participate. Literacy is seen as a natural reaction to certain societal needs, an easy reinvention by children in order to solve problems they encounter (Goodman, 1986). According to this view, one major parental role, then, is to model literacy as a practice useful in solving problems, and to establish social literacy practices that children can participate in as a critical part of their lives, rather than simply transmitting or transferring literacy.
Those who emphasize literacy as social practice tend also to believe that literacy is relatively ubiquitous and argue that even very uneducated families engage regularly in the use of literacy (Leichter, 1974; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988), though the specific purposes for which literacy is used may differ from family to family. If literacy is, indeed, a cultural practice more than a psycholinguistic skill, then children for whom the purposes and rules of school literacy are unfamiliar and obscure might well be expected to fail through unfamiliarity. It could be argued, though, that the various uses of literacy differ in level as well as in type--that families who use literacy only to make lists, recite from the Bible, or fill in forms are displaying lower-level, as well as socially and culturally distinct, literacy skills.
Some have criticized the social practice theorists by pointing out that there are many families, even in the United States, in which literacy practices are essentially absent, and the ubiquitous print of the larger environment is invisible to family members. Purcell-Gates (1995), for example, studied an urban Appalachian family in which both parents were illitrate, and practices such as using street signs to find directions, using food labels in shopping, or noting the arrival of mail were totally unfamiliar. Needless to say, the children in this family encountered enormous problems at school, among which their ignorance of the possible uses of literacy was as great as their unfamiliarity with letters and written words.
The social practice view of literacy tends to go hand-in-hand with a view of literacy as relatively easily acquired and more or less universal--a view in which the mechanism of parental effect is clearly specified, but in which it is very hard to extract an explanation for the fact that some children raised in literate homes fail to become good readers. Indeed, the only possible explanation for failure in the acquisition of literacy at school is that the literacy practices a child knows from home are not valued at school (i.e., that there is a home-school mismatch).
Noting enormous individual differences in skills of children from similarly literate backgrounds (differences even among children from the same family), other researchers have sought mechanisms of parental effects that can explain variation in outcomes. One group emphasizes the value of establishing positive affect around literacy activities as a route to the child's development of active engagement in literacy tasks. Those who hold this view would argue, for example, that the positive effects of dyadic book-reading on child literacy derive primarily from the enjoyment that is associated with books and the linking of literacy with one-on-one parental attention and affection. Successful parental intervention programs emphasize making book-reading fun and enjoyable (e.g., selecting books of interest to the child and responding to child interests) (Svensson, 1995). Children, it is assumed, learn from their parents that literacy is a source of enjoyment, and the enjoyment they experience motivates them to persist through the often difficult early stages of literacy acquisition.
Views regarding the importance of affect in helping to explain literacy outcomes are supported by the demonstrated increase in the complexity of the reading matter one can comprehend, if the topic is of interest (Scollon & Scollon, 1981). Furthermore, reading with engagement and expectation of enjoyment leads to more time spent reading, i.e., more practice, and thus greater fluency--a major predictor of long-term reading outcomes.
Of course, as Csikszentmihalyi (1991) points out, many children have sufficient extrinsic motivation to keep them involved in literacy acquisition, since they believe parents' and teachers' precepts that literacy is a prerequisite to school success and achievement in later life. But for children who have less reason to believe in literacy as a route to success (e.g., minority children with adult acquaintances who are unemployed even when well educated), entry into a state of high level enjoyment while reading--the flow? to use Csikszentmihalyi's term--may be crucial to keeping children focused on literacy long enough to make serious gains.
Finally, other researchers have argued that the parental role is most crucial in helping children to develop oral linguistic precursors to literacy, such as a sophisticated vocabulary and extended discourse skills, rather than literacy skills, themselves, which can be easily acquired at school, if language prerequisites are in place.
Vocabulary has been associated with literacy development across a variety of studies for children speaking different languages and learning to read in a variety of instructional settings (Anderson & Freebody, 1981). One of the ways that a larger vocabulary might promote reading is obvious in a language like English, where the pronunciation of words is not easily predictable from their spelling. In this case, knowing what the word might be can help eliminate mispronunciations and misidentifications in most cases. However, vocabulary also predicts literacy in languages like Spanish, in which the spelled form is absolutely unambiguous as to pronunciation. It seems likely, then, that vocabulary knowledge in these cases indexes world knowledge--background information that the reader can use to help in the task of comprehension.
One might expect that children in families who talk a lot have larger vocabularies. In fact, talking a lot might not correlate with talking in ways that introduce relatively sophisticated lexical items. In our work studying 75 low-income families with preschool aged children--the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development (HSSLD)--we have found that families who use more sophisticated or rarer vocabulary, i.e., vocabulary that goes beyond the 8,500 most common words in the English language, are the families whose children score well on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a test of receptive vocabulary given when the children are five years old (Beals & Tabors, 1995). It seems, then, that exposure to less common, more sophisticated vocabulary at home relates directly to children's vocabulary acquisition.
Beyond vocabulary, though, performance on tasks like describing pictures or telling stories in a way that is relatively complete, detailed, and comprehensible relates to reading. Telling stories and describing pictures have in common the demand to produce extended discourse. Extended discourse emerges when talk deals with complicated events or topics, when a simple story is embellished by making connections to feelings, related events, causes and implications, when talk moves beyond facts to explanation, or beyond opinion to argumentation.
One might expect that children learn how to do this sort of thing from participating in opportunities at home to hear or provide extended texts--e.g., opportunities at dinner to tell about their day or to listen to their parents explain something complicated. In fact, results from the Home-School Study confirm that this is the case (Beals, De Temple, & Dickinson, 1994; Snow & Kurland, in press). It seems, then, that opportunities to engage in extended discourse in the home build skills in producing extended discourse of precisely the type that is needed for high levels of literacy.
While family literacy programs are generally aware of the importance of teaching the basic skills related to literacy and often promote book reading as a joint literacy activity between parents and children, these programs may not include activities which would promote literacy as social practice or focus on the need for rich oral language interactions, both of which are necessary to support children's development of the full range of literacy skills. Representative suggestions for how these aspects of literacy could be introduced into the four components of family literacy programs--adult education classes, early childhood education classes, parenting classes, and parent-child interaction periods (Darling, 1995)--follow.
Adult education classes, whether in the form of adult literacy or General Educational Development (GED) preparation classes, could make a greater contribution to family literacy if one of their goals was to develop their students' self-images as "readers" and "writers." By developing these sorts of self-images, these programs can convey a sense of both the functional and entertainment value of reading and writing. Parents with positive attitudes towards literacy will buy books for themselves and their children, will model reading and writing behaviors, and will create home environments in which literacy practices are common and viewed as engaging.
Early childhood education classrooms within family literacy programs are ideal settings for the introduction of rich oral language opportunities. Researchers have found that staff members who sit down at snack times and mealtimes with children in early childhood classrooms, for example, raise the level of conversation by maintaining topic continuity and introducing complex syntax and vocabulary (Dickinson, Cote, & Smith, 1994). Dress-up corners create a context for small groups of children to engage in fantasy play, which has been found to involve much more extended discourse than whole class activities or seat work. Engaging children in active, analytic talk during book reading generates gains not seen if books are simply read to children, without questions and opportunities for discussion. In general, small group activities generate more participation and active talk from children than activities in larger groups, and the systematic introduction of novel, challenging content (e.g., a science corner, books about faraway places, discussions of field trips) creates a context in which sophisticated vocabulary and world knowledge can be developed. Family literacy programs which include quality early childhood education components can capitalize on all of these opportunities for exposing children to rich oral language.
We know too little about the mechanisms for supporting richer parent-child talk during interactions. Although Whitehurst (1988) has successfully trained both parents and preschool teachers in a technique which he calls "dialogic reading," which has been shown to produce gains in children's language, there has been no research on how to stimulate more sophisticated adult talk in general contexts, e.g., during mealtimes or while riding the bus. Family literacy programs which incorporate parent-child interaction periods might well be an ideal setting for research on the development and application of techniques for encouraging this type of talk between parents and children. Such work is necessary if family literacy programs are to do the best job possible of promoting parent-child conversation during interactions.
Interesting conversations are not likely to occur in the absence of interesting topics. Research by Snow and her colleagues (1991) and by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) demonstrates that parents who are engaged in a wider variety of activities (e.g., political action, social engagements, work outside the home, etc.) have children who are better readers. This relationship is presumedly mediated by the more interesting conversations such parents can engage in with their children. Parenting classes within family literacy programs could well focus on the value of parental participation in community, church and school-related activities as a source of varied conversational topics, during which new vocabulary and more complex ideas might well be introduced into the home.
We have seen evidence that families support literacy development via direct transfer of knowledge about print, by engaging their children in literate practices, by ensuring that literacy activities are both fun and meaningful, by modelling the uses of literacy in the home, and by providing opportunities for children to develop the language skills that will be prerequisite to higher level literacy functioning. Clearly, all these mechanisms might well be at work. Precisely because literacy is a complex capacity that changes as children grow, and that has prerequisites in several different domains of knowledge, the sources of familial support for literacy development are likely to be multiple and varied.
The most widely cited familial supports (transfer of knowledge about print and participation in the culture of literacy) may be of particular importance for children just entering literacy--these are the familial behaviors that distinguish successful versus unsuccessful kindergarteners and first-graders. Family-induced motivation to pursue literacy and family-generated language abilities, on the other hand, may exert their influence throughout the elementary school years. Reading tasks change character most notably in the middle of elementary school, when children are first expected to read complex, sophisticated texts and to learn new material through reading; at this point, the motivation to persist and oral familiarity with the types of language used in text may be crucial prerequisites to success.
In the process of seeking the mechanisms for social support of literacy development, researchers have, in effect, redefined literacy, itself, as a far more complex process than was conceived in the past. Furthermore, the views of the ways in which the family might play a role in literacy development also have been expanded and diversified. The challenge facing us as we work to improve family literacy programs, then, is to analyze the family's role so as to understand how to help families provide a full range of aids to their children's literacy development.
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Some of the material in this paper has appeared previously in Snow et al., 1991, Unfulfilled expectations, Chapter 1, and Snow, 1993, "Families as social context for literacy development," in C. Daiute (Ed.), The development of literacy through social interaction, pp. 11-24.
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