Reading and Writing *

• Frith (1985)

  • reading is too focused on academic development
  • phonics is not enough to teach reading
  • must create a book loving culture at school and home
• Grapheme 


  letters representing a sound, eg. ‘c’ in ‘cat’
• Phoneme 


  the smallest unit of sound, eg. /c/, /a/, and /t/ in ’cat’
• Masha Bell


  ‘the english language has different, logically unpredictable graphemes for identical sounds’, eg. ‘plain‘ and ’plane’
• Read (1985)


  children simplify constant clusters in writing and language, eg. ‘sip’ for ‘ship’
• Czerniewska

  • Developmental Model (functional approach) - children learn to write when needed, eg. christmas list
  • Cognitive Model (traditional approach) - children learn chronologically, the brain can only understand something when it is ready to
• Anderson and Stokes (1984) - cultural and ethnic differences in interaction 


  white families engage in twice as many literacy events than spanish and african-american families, white families focus on academic education rather than other families who focus on everyday discovery learning
• sentence types

  • simple - 1 main
  • compound - 2 main
  • complex - 1 main, 1+ subordinate
  • compound complex - 2+ main, 1+ subordinate