Three families, multiple discourses : parental roles, constructions of literacy and diversity of pedagogic practice

To understand more fully what it means to be literate, we need to consider the people who use literacy and how it is constructed, defined and supported in varied contexts. In this paper, we share part of an ongoing research project that has sought to understand the sociolinguistic complexity of literacy practices at home and school for a number of specific families. This study examines the discourse practices of members of three families as they engage in shared reading activities. The families are unique both socially and culturally, and construct meanings about literacy according to their own ways of experiencing and using it. As well, they engage in sociolinguistic practices to support literacy learning and further their children’s educational opportunities. The data discussed was gathered as part of a large-scale study involving multiple ethnographies (Cairney & Green, 1997). The paper reports on an exploration of the nature of literacy practices in three diverse families. Specifically, it looks at the discourse practices families engage in as they support children’s literacy understanding during shared story reading events. These events were examined to explore how the definitions of literacy implicitly held by parents and the roles they adopted in supporting their children, impacted on the literacy discourse practices of home story reading events. Our discourse analysis of shared reading events indicated that while two families relied on implicit understandings of literacy that shared much in common, the strategies employed in supporting shared reading varied quite significantly. Furthermore, our analysis showed that while such events could be examined in terms of the cognitive support that parents offered, this in no way explained the complexity of what parents were doing as they supported their children’s literacy learning. What our analysis demonstrates is that the sociolinguistic complexity of literacy support that adults offer, makes it difficult (indeed unwise) to make simplistic statements concerning differences across literacy contexts, or even repeated occurrences of the same type of literacy event within a single context. Hence, one could assume that where there is congruence between the pedagogical practices found at home and at school, this must also reflect a degree of intersubjectivity, developed through the parents’ own experience of school, parent education programs and involvement in children’s education. However, our work shows that without greater attention to the discourse practices, the picture is at best incomplete. Detailed discourse analysis of the kind we have undertaken offers us the power to look more deeply at the sociolinguistic strategies that are being employed. This in turn offers us opportunities to identify how pedagogical practices need to change both in the home and at school in order to more fully support all students as literacy users.