ABSTRACT
The concluding section of this book brings together the hitherto separate strands of the theoretical enquiries and the fieldwork to draw some conclusions about the effect of children’s narrative and other reading interests on their literacy development. It focuses particularly on ways in which the gender differences identified interact with the range of experiences brought from home. The research, reported in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6, has provided strong evidence to support a prior perception that boys’ and girls’ orientation towards work in language-that is their attitudes to reading and writingbecomes increasingly divergent as they enter the secondary phase of education. This chapter relates the data from the surveys, interviews and textual analyses, reported in the second section of the book, to the theoretical issues raised in the first section. These include:
• The historical role of narrative in the teaching of literacy • The influence of visual literacy • Literacy and the new technologies • Boys’ disadvantage in the current language curriculum • The nature of gendered difference and feminist research • Masculinity and narrative choice • The teacher’s role • Literature and literacy
The Role of Narrative in the Teaching of Literacy
The role of story in education has powerful advocates. Narrative is now widely accepted both as an academic genre and as an approach to teacher education (Meyer, 1995). In the early years of education, the influence of story has been shown to be even more powerful. Wells’ Bristol study (1987) identified the reading of stories by parents to their pre-school children as the key factor in the creation of difference in academic achievement between
social groups. Few social class differences were found in the way parents engaged their children in talk, but those children whose parents had regularly read stories to them at home managed the transition to school literacy far more successfully than those whose parents did not (Wells, 1987, pp. 143-5). Wells devotes a whole chapter to arguing the case for ‘storying’ (1986, pp. 193-213) and it is important in a study that has taken a critical view of primary teachers’ preoccupation with narrative to reiterate his findings that the sharing of pleasurable early literacy experiences around books is vitally important in giving children an early start in learning to read.
