ABSTRACT
Most parents follow their children’s gradual entry into the world of print with a mixture of delighted fascination and terror. Seeing, close up, the intensely energetic, innovative, creative path which any one child makes for itself into that mysterious world which adults seem to value so much, cannot fail to produce wonder and delight. But terror is ever present, for failure looms in so many forms. Now that the child has learned to speak-and at what age did your children utter their first words, were they late (developers), or early? Did their progress match the charts provided by helpful experts? Did they fall behind or did they do far better?—now comes this new terror: will she or he learn to read and write at all, will they be slow, fall behind, or make you feel pleased at their startling progress? In England the National Curriculum now makes specific demands: at the age of 7, for instance, a child must understand what a sentence is. (Do you know what a sentence is?)
Fortunately nearly all children find their way into and through the maze of print and solve the mysteries of alphabetic writing, even if a disappointingly large number decide for a range of social and cultural reasons not to continue, to give up at some later stage. Their achievement is astonishing because, it has to be said, we know very little indeed about the real problems and cognitive challenges which alphabetic writing presents to someone who first learns it. This seems an outrageous statement, given first and foremost the enormous dedication and wealth of practical experience of teachers in the early years of schooling. It also seems to slight the massive amount of research carried out in various forms of psychology on this matter. But the practical experience of teachers remains just that: teachers do not have the time (and often not the inclination) to engage in a theoretical
articulation of their experience: they know what they know; they pass it on to younger colleagues in myriad ways in which informal knowledge has always been passed on, whether between professionals as in this case or as the knowledge of everyday lifethrough talk, demonstration, anecdote, materials loaned, observation of teaching, and so on. Given my outrageous statement, my first task here is to show just what complexity resides in the mysteries of print-because it is as print rather than as handwriting that children first encounter language-and what kinds of things we need to begin to ask questions about, where at the moment no questions seem to be being asked.
