Parent-research (From: Sisters and Brothers Reading Together:An Untapped Resource in Family Literacy by Baghban, M. Our Daughter Learns to Read and Write by Baghban, M. Linking Families, Learning, and Schooling Parent-Researcher Perspectives by Kabuto, B.

By PetraMelville
  • 610 BCE

    James VI of Scotland

    (According to a legend) James VI of Scotland as early as 610 B.C. placed two infants on an uninhabited island in the care of a deaf-mute nursemaid in order to discover humankind's first language, that is, the language which Adam and Eve spoke (Deese, 1970, p. 53 in Baghban, 1984, p. 10)

  • Darwin

    Systematic research on child language begins in the nineteenth century with diaries kept by parents (Darwin, 1877; Prior, 1894; Shinn, 1893; Sully, 1895; Taine, 1877)
    Darwin had kept a diary on his son's development

  • Leopold

    Leopold presents an extensive study of his bilingual daughter Hildegard from her eighth week to her seventh year in both German and English-speaking contexts.
    in the twentieth century, descriptive observations of language in the context of total child development shift to purely linguistic themes, comparing child language to an adult model (Brandenburg, 1915; Cooley, 1908; Leopold 1939-1949; Nice, 1915; Stern, 1924)

  • White

    Dorothy White records her daughter Carol's interactions with literature. Dorothy White (1965), Books Before Five, had kept a retrospective parent diary of her daughter Carol's interactions with books from the time Carol was 2 years old until she was 5 years old, and noted in particular the interactions between literature and life.

  • Skinner

    child=tabula rasa, and acquires language as a sophisticated response system through processes of conditioning
    language=behaviour
    Critics point out reinforcement, inquisitiveness, hypothesis testing, and generalization in language acquisition.

  • 1960s

    Definite perspectives emerge as to why children learn to speak and why they follow much the same patterns of language development.

  • Weir

    Two-and-a-half-year-old Anthony's review of language learned and his play with language sounds are documented in Weir's (1962) presleep soliloquies of her son.

  • Chomsky

    NATIVISTS inquire into the ability of the child to go beyond the examples heard in the environment. They claim many more endowments for the child: innate capacity, innate language acquisition device
    Relying heavily on data from evolutionary theory and biological sciences, Lenneberg(1967) emphasises that language=species-specific behaviour

    However, still no answer for what actually happens in language learning. NATURE VS NURTURE (behaviour vs grammar) BUT no historical orientation of language

  • Jean Piaget

    Jean Piaget had studied all three of his children to generalise theories of learning and language

  • Cognitivist perspective

    Slobin(1966)
    Piaget's hypothesis that cognitive dev. directs language development. Parallels between Piaget's descriptions of the establishment of basic categories of thought during the sensorimotor period and the basic semantic relations expressed in early sentences have also been drawn(Bloom, 1973; Brown, 1973)
    SUMMARY: lang.acq.must be studied in conjunction with the acq. of other kinds of abilities involving soc.dev since interaction of all these factors determines.ling.growth

  • Hymes

    Sociolinguistics: acquisition of the STRUCTURAL RULES + COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
    environmentalist position-recognises individual and group differences in language learning which act as external forces on the internal mechanisms of the speaker-learner (examining the environment for possible sources of influence on a child's language development)

  • The Semantic Revolution

    Clark (1973)applies the Semantic Features Hypothesis to lang.acq.
    Fillmore (1968) THEORY OF CASE GRAMMAR (innate concepts derived from human judgments)
    linguistics began to supplement grammatical descriptions of the emerging language of children with broader descriptions of the context of such utterances (Bloom, 1970 ;'mommy sock' utterance)
    Schlesinger(1971) generative grammar+semantics(sem.grammar)
    SCHEMA THEORY (Hacker, 1980) -process of interpretation of data/input (text+world understanding)

  • The First International Symposium on First Language Acquisition in Florence, Italy

    The First International Symposium on First Language Acquisition in Florence, Italy, 1972 emphasises the important role parent studies play and continue to play in studying the phenomenon of language.
    (child language researchers study their own children to construct models of language development)

  • Halliday

    Halliday (1975) presents a study of his son Nigel's language development from nine months of age.

  • Emery(1975) Teachers often discouraged parents from exposing pre-schoolers to reading

    Succumbing to the notion that literacy requires formal instruction, teachers often discouraged parents from exposing pre-schoolers to reading on the grounds that they will confuse the children, make school more difficult for them later on, damage their vision, or cause them to be bored with school activities (Emery, 1975).
    Emery, Donald G. Teach your pre-schooler to read. in Baghban 'Our Daughter Learns to Read and Write. A case study from birth to three p. 4

  • Bruner / Halliday

    speech act approach
    Cook-Gumperz (1975) :a principle of reciprocity -language acq.=a process of realising the normative character of a shared world rater than simply a linguistic and/or cognitive process
    Halliday-children construct social reality through use of language while maintaining meaning
    BUT a contribution made by the learner? indiv.learning strategies?

  • Dorothy Butler

    Dorothy Butler (1975), in Cushla and her Books, had studied her handicapped granddaughter's interactions with books and emphasised the importance of the social environment on a child's literacy development.

  • Bissex

    Bissex (1980) introduces her five year case study on her son by stating that her methodology is '..an attempt to understand another person through enlightened subjectivity' (p. vi).
    Bissex studied the writing of her son David. She also spoke about the importance of case study research. Bissex and Baghan's studies emphasised the persp. that by studying 1 child we could learn to observe more closely other children's literacy development.

  • Sirley Brice Heath

    10year studies of the Appalachian communities cemented the need to understand family life and its models of literacy in order to understand children in schools. No child is independent of the sociocultural identity of the family. Need to pay attention to the variety of lit. exp.the children brought to school and whether or not these fam.and school exp. supported each other. The persp. of multiple paths to literacy was affirmed by others-Wells1985 Bristol Study in theUK
    Taylor 1983 fam=case study

  • Baghban

    The 20th cent. marks the era of scientists' lengthy,careful documentation of their own young children's lang. dev. By the 1980s those parents who read with their children decide to use similar methodology to earlier researchers to record the ev. observed in reading dialogues in order to construct models for literacy dev. (Haussler,1985; Baghban,1984; Crago, 1983).These case studies focus on the reading of children's books with a parent-observer over relatively long periods of time in the home.

  • Margaret Mead

    Margaret Mead's mother had tried to document Margaret's development in 13 notebooks and in four notebooks on Margaret's brother Richard, until she had so many children she turned the recording task over to Margaret Mead (1989, p.7)

  • Spelling parent case studies

    In the 1990s, parent case study research changed from recorded observations of literacy development to focus on particular questions. Judith Schickendanz’s study (1990)’ Henderson’s Virginia Studies (1981) and Ehri’s (1997) work analysed their children’s conceptions of spelling.
    In retrospectively analysing her son's writing development, Schickendanz found that her son Adam required considerable knowledge about phonemic segmentation and letter-sound correspondences before he was able to spell.

  • Wolf and Heath (1992) Critics could no longer say only non-middle-class children had difficulty with literacy instruction in school.

    Wolf and Heath (1992) studied text-to-life connections of Wolf’s two daughters. Martens (1996) studied her daughter’s view of learning to read and write. All of the aforementioned studies made the tenuous bridge between home and school learning increasingly obvious and firmly established the mismatch between these two contexts even for middle class children. Critics could no longer say only non-middle-class children had difficulty with literacy instruction in school.

  • Whitmore, Martens, Goodman & Owocki, 2005

    Literacy research continues to build on the results of 'the revolution': particularly the view of the learner as an active, social constructor of knowledge and the inter-supportive nature of reading, writing, and drawing. Its focus tries to discover how each child handles both his or her personal inventions and conformity to language conventions (Whitmore, Martens, Goodman & Owocki, 2005).

  • Kabuto

    We continue to try to understand the dynamics of this complex relationship where parent and researcher and child are not so separate (Kabuto, 2008).But a detailed, lengthy study of a child learning aspects of language and becoming literate would be virtually impossible for a non-parent researcher.No other person will ever know the child, the context of the child’s life, and the particular research situation as completely as the parent. No one but the parent would have such time and opportunity.

  • Petra Melville and her co-researchers Tia and Brandon Melville

    This case study linked out of school contexts and school literacies by exploring creativity in everyday home literacies: including digital and embodied literacies. COVID-19 confirmed our research findings: literacy and learning are a matter of creating meaning, and, through intra-acting with literacy, the children re-create the world, for the world is remade again in each intra- action https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337844927_Artefactual_Literacy_as_a_Nomadic_War_Machine