Intertextuality in preschoolers' engagement with popular culture: implications for literacy development

Research has demonstrated that popular culture often finds its way into classroom discourse, generally in the form of intertextual references that students make. As some scholars have shown, such allusions are often ignored. Even if they are validated, this does not happen in a systematic way that would exploit their full potential as a learning scaffold. This is partly because most teachers are unaware of the nature of students' engagement with popular culture. Drawing on data gathered in an ethnographic study of home literacy practices of five preschool boys in Singapore, we would like to offer insight into these boys' engagement with popular cultural texts. The boys were observed for 30 hours each over nine months in their homes. Data were gathered using a variety of instruments, namely field notes, literacy diaries, photographs and audiovisual recordings. Using the analytic lens of intertextuality, we demonstrate how engagement with popular cultural texts provided these boys with prior textual experience, and served as a stimulus not only to access more texts but to be involved in the creation of novel texts. We also discuss pedagogical implications, encouraging educators to harness popular culture as a platform for fostering literacy development in schools.