Becoming Literate by Marie M Clay

Becoming Literate by Marie M Clay

From her lifelong study of children's development and learning, Marie Clay traces children's paths of progress in literacy learning. Acclaimed a classic since its first publication, Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control is essential reading for teachers and educators committed to enabling all children to become literate.

Effective teachers have a sense of the changes to expect as children begin to engage with early literacy instruction. Becoming Literate provides a rich description of those progressions. But Marie Clay does not prescribe instructional methods or sequences. She urges teachers to base their teaching decisions on careful observation of children's reading and writing behaviours, while questioning accounts that conflict with the patterns of responding that they observe.

The information and understandings in this book provide guidance for delivering powerful literacy learning experiences for all children in the early years of formal instruction, from their first days of school to the relative independence of their third year.

Key chapter content includes:

• language and literacy learning before school
• the transition to formal schooling and engagement with classroom programmes
• ways in which existing oral language competencies and knowledge of the world become linked with children's developing awareness of print
• the constraints and opportunities provided by different instructional approaches
• the development of processing activities such as self-monitoring, searching, and self-correcting.

A picture emerges of how competent young children construct self-extending systems of literacy expertise. Successful literacy learners call up a range of ways of working with the information in texts and become able to learn more from their own efforts to read and write text.

Finally, aware that some children for a variety of reasons do not construct an inner control of literacy processing in their initial encounters with formal instruction, Marie Clay argues that these children need extra resources and effective early intervention in order to build a sound foundation for further education.

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon), Emeritus Professor, began her career as a primary school teacher before moving on to the University of Auckland, where she spent the following 30 years teaching educational psychologists how to prevent psychological issues. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to study Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota and earned her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis on Emergent Literacy. Her early literacy intervention, 'Reading (and writing) Recovery,' is now being adopted in five countries and three languages. Literacy Courses Tailored For Individuals combines what's been learnt from that experiment with new research and theoretical stances. Teachers can use her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish, and French to track changes in early literacy learning.

A manual called Reading Recovery: Recommendations for Teachers in Training can be used to offer a series of individual courses in those languages to roughly 150,000 youngsters worldwide each year. A comparable manual, Literacy Lessons Tailored for People, tries to help people with a wider range of issues make faster progress. Marie Clay served on the editorial boards of professional journals, worked as a research consultant at home and abroad, including for UNESCO, led a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked worldwide on problem-solving linked to early intervention research and practice.