Three Accounts of Literacy and the Role of the Environment

During the last decade, increasing interest has developed about the description and explanation of children's knowledge about writing prior to being formally taught to read and write. Researchers have studied children from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as from a range of economic levels. There seems to be no doubt that children in all of these conditions are sensitive to the formal features of writing and to the different functions that written language fulfills (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979/1982; Gibson & Levin, 1975; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984). It also seems that the hypotheses children build about the writing system “are not idiosyncratic but developmentally ordered” (Ferreiro, 1986, p. 16). Moreover, empirical studies in different languages (e.g., Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Catalan) have proved that some of these hypotheses ¹ reappear in different linguistic environments and in Semitic as well as Latin orthographies (Tolchinsky Landsmann, 1991a). The fact that some of the children's ideas about writing are developmentally ordered and recurrent in different environments has led some researchers to characterize the acquisition of writing as a “psychogenetic process, in the Piagetian sense” (Ferreiro, 1986, p. 16) or to speak about the “ontogenesis of written language” (Scinto, 1986, p. 30). They hint at a sort of self-propelled, natural process of acquisition.