At Home in Trackton

11

In the daily life of the neighborhood, there were numerous occasions when print from beyond the primary network intruded; there were fewer occasions when adults or children themselves produced written materials. Adults did not read to children, and there were few pieces of writing produced especially for children. Sunday School books, and single-page handouts from Sunday School which portrayed a Biblical scene with a brief caption, were the only exceptions. Adults, however, responded to children of all ages, if they inquired about messages provided in writing: they would read a house number, a stop sign, a name brand of a product, or a slogan on a T-shirt, if asked to do so by a child. In September, children preparing to go to school often preferred book bags, pencil boxes, and purses which bore labels or slogans. Adults did not consciously model, demonstrate, or tutor reading and writing behaviors for the young. Children, however, went to school with certain expectancies of print and a keen sense that reading is something one does to learn something one needs to know. In other words, before going to school, preschoolers were able to read many types of information available in their environment. They knew how to distinguish brand names from product descriptions on boxes or bags; they knew how to find the price on a label which contained numerous other pieces of written information. They knew how to recognize the names of cars, motorcycles, and bicycles not only on the products themselves, but also on brochures about these products. In these ways they read to learn information judged necessary in their daily lives, and they had grown accustomed to participating in literacy events in ways appropriate to their community’s norms (see Heath, 1980 for a fuller description). They had frequently observed their community’s social activities surrounding a piece of writing: negotiation over how to put a toy together, what a gas bill notice meant, how to fill out a voter registration form, and where to go to apply for entrance to daycare programs.

12

There were no bedtime stories, children’s books, special times for reading, or routine sets of questions from adults to children in connection with reading.¹ Thus, Trackton children’s early spontaneous stories were not molded on written materials. They were derived from oral models given by adults, and they developed in accordance with praise and varying degrees of enthusiasm for particular story styles from the audience. In these stories, children rendered a context, or set the stage for the story, and called on listeners to create jointly an imagined background for stories. In the later preschool years, the children, in a monologue-like fashion, told stories about things in their lives, events they saw and heard, and situations in which they had been involved. They produced these stories, many of which can be described as story-poems, during play with other children or in the presence of adults. Their stories contained emotional evaluation of others and their actions; dialogue was prevalent; style shifting in verbal and nonverbal means accompanied all stories.

13

All of these features of story-telling by children call attention to the story and distinguish it as a speech event which is an occasion for audience and storyteller to interact pleasantly to a creative tale, not simply a recounting of daily events. Story-telling is very competitive, especially as children get older, and new tricks must be devised if one is to remain a successful story-teller. Content ranges widely, and there is truth only in the universals of human experience which are found in every story. Fact as related to what really happened is often hard to find, though it may be the seed of the story. Trackton stories often have no obvious beginning in the form of a routine; similarly, there is no marked ending; they simply go on as long as the audience will tolerate the story (see Heath, 1980 and chapter 5 of Heath, 1983, for a fuller description).

14

In response to these stories, Trackton adults do not separate out bits and pieces of the story and question the children about them. Similarly, they do not pick out pieces of the daily environment and ask children to name these or describe their features. Children live in an on-going multiple-channeled stream of stimuli, from which they select, practice, and determine the rules of speaking and interacting with written materials. Children have to learn at a very early age to perceive situations, determine how units of these situations are related to each other, recognize these relations in other situations, and reason through what it will take to show their correlation of one situation with another. The specifics of labels, features, and rules of behaving are not laid out for them by adults. The familiar routines described in the research literature on mainstream school-oriented parents are not heard in Trackton. They do not ask or tell their children: What is that? What color is it? Is that the way to listen? Turn the book this way. Let’s listen and find out. Instead, parents talk about items and events of their environment. They detail the responses of personalities to events; they praise, deride, and question the reasons for events and compare new items and events to those with which they are familiar. They do not simplify their talk about the world for the benefit of their young. Preschoolers do not learn to name or list the features of items in either the daily environment or as depicted through illustration in printed materials. Questions addressed to them with the greatest frequency are of the type What’s that like? Where’d that come from? What are you gonna do with that? They develop connections between situations or items not by specification of labels and features in these situations, but by configuration links.

15

Recognition of similar general shapes or patterns of links seen in one situation and connected to another pervade their stories and their conversations, as illustrated in the following story. Lem, playing off the edge of the porch, when he was about two and a half years of age, heard a bell in the distance. He stopped, looked at his older siblings nearby, and said:

Way

Far

Now

It a church bell

Ringin’

Dey singin’

Ringin’

You hear it?

I hear it

Far

Now.

16

Lem here recalls being taken to church the previous Sunday and hearing a bell. His story is in response to the current stimulus of a distant bell. He recapitulates the sequence of events: at church, the bell rang while the people sang the opening hymn. He gives the story’s topic in the line It a church bell, but he does not orient the listeners to the setting or the time of the story. He seems to try to recreate the situation both verbally and non-verbally so it will be recognized and responded to by listeners. Lem poetically balances the opening and closing in an INCLUSIO, beginning Way, Far, Now, and ending Far, Now. The effect is one of closure, though he doesn’t announce the ending of his story. He invites others to respond to his story: You hear it? I hear it. All of these methods call attention to the story, and distinguish it as a story. The children recall scenes and events through nonverbal and verbal manipulation. They use few formulaic invitations to recall, such as You know, You see, etc. Instead, they themselves try to give the setting and the mood as they weave the tale to keep the audience’s attention. The recall of a setting may depend on asking the listener to remember a smell, a sound, a place, a feeling, and to associate these in the same way the storyteller does. A smiliar type of recall of relevant context or set of circumstances marks children’s memories or reassociations with print. When they see a brandname, number, etc., they often recall where and with whom they first saw it, or call attention to parts now missing which were there previously. Slight shifts in print styles, decorations of mascots used to advertise cereals, or alterations of television advertising mottos are noticed by children.

17

Trackton children’s preschool experiences with print, stories, and talk about the environment differ greatly from those usually depicted in the literature for children of mainstream school-oriented parents. Similarly, adults in Trackton used written materials in different ways and for different purposes than those represented in the traditional literature on adult reading habits and motivations (cf. Staiger, 1979; Hall & Carlton, 1977). Among Trackton adults, reading was a social activity which did not focus on a single individual. Solitary reading without oral explanation was viewed as unacceptable, strange, and indicative of a particular kind of failure, which kept individuals from being social. Narratives, jokes, sidetracking talk, and negotiation of the meaning of written texts kept social relations alive. When several members of the community jointly focused on and interpreted written materials, authority did not rest in the materials themselves, but in the meanings which would be negotiated by the participants.

18

New instructions on obtaining medical reports for children about to enter school provoked stories of what other individuals did when they were confronted with a similar task; all joined in talk of particular nurses or doctors who were helpful in the process. Some told of reactions to vaccinations and troubles they had had getting to and from the doctor’s office. In the following conversation, several neighbors negotiate the meaning of a letter about a daycare program. Several neighbors were sitting on porches, working on cars nearby, or sweeping their front yards when a young mother of four children came out on her porch with a letter she had received that day.

19

Conversation on various parts of the letter continued for nearly an hour, while neighbors and Lillie Mae pooled their knowledge of the pros and cons of such programs. They discussed ways of getting rides to Kent, the county seat thirty miles away, to which all mothers had to go to get their children’s birth certificates to prove their age at school entrance. The discussion covered the possibility of visiting Lillie Mae’s doctor and getting papers from him to verify Lem’s age, teachers now at the neighborhood center, and health benefits which came from the daycare programs’ outreach work. A question What does this mean? asked of a piece of writing was addressed to any and all who would listen; specific attention to the text itself was at times minimal in the answers which followed.

20

Adults read and wrote for numerous purposes, almost all of them social. These were:

21

On all of these occasions for reading and writing, individuals saw literacy as an occasion for social activities: women shopped together, discussed local credit opportunities and products, and sales; men negotiated the meaning of tax forms, brochures on new cars, and political flyers. The evening newspaper was read on the front porch, and talk about the news drifted from porch to porch. Inside, during the winter months, talk about news items interrupted on-going conversations on other topics or television viewing. The only occasions for solitary reading by individuals were those in which elderly men and women read their Bible or Sunday School materials alone, or school-age children sat alone to read a library book or a school assignment. In short, written information almost never stood alone in Trackton; it was reshaped and reworded into an oral mode. In so doing, adults and children incorporated chunks of the written text into their talk. They also sometimes reflected an awareness of a different type of organization of written materials from that of their usual oral productions. Yet their literacy habits do not fit those usually attributed to fully literate groups: they do not read to their children, encouraging conversational dialogue on books; they do not write or read extended prose passages; reading is not an individual pursuit nor is it considered to have intellectual, aesthetic, or critical rewards. But Trackton homes do not conform to habits associated with the oral tradition either. Literacy is a resource; stories do not fit the parable model; children develop very early wide-ranging language skills; and neither their language nor their parents’ is marked by a preponderance of routine formulaic expressions.