What's inside the box? Children's early encounters with literacy in South African classrooms

Research on children's early literacy learning has predominantly focused on a 'child attribute improvement methodology' (Bloome & Katz, 2003) in which the child is conceptualised as having a series of attributes which are potentially affected by particular sets of treatments or events. These 'input-output' studies, also described as 'black box' studies, set up one kind of literacy pedagogy against another, where early literacy is seen as a neutral, cognitive, perceptual and individualised activity or set of skills to be acquired centred on sound-symbol relationships. The theoretical orientation in this article draws on work in emergent literacy (Clay, 1972; Ferreiro & Teberasky, 1982; Goodman, 1986), new literacy studies and social semiotics( Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Dyson, 1993; Barton, 1994; Gee, 1996; Prinsloo Breier 1996; Kress, 1997) to analyse the ways in which reading and writing and other communicative modalities are taught and learnt as forms of socially situated activities, with boundaries, prohibitions and procedures set by different theories of reading and different sets of institutional practices. Through an exploration of data collected in early literacy classrooms in the Western Cape and Gauteng as part of the ethnographically based Children's Early Literacy Learning (CELL) project, the writers examine the nature of young children's early encounters with literacy and the implications of these encounters for their later development as readers and writers in schools. The writers suggest that rather than being viewed as 'black boxes, the sites of early literacy practices should be investigated as complex multi-semiotic communicative environments ill which the differences in the environments result from how the teachers in each site invent their activities around literacy differently, despite following the same broad curriculum. It is at the level of 'local culture' within classrooms and institutions that a wide variety of differences around early literacy practices can be detected.