Heath (1986) discusses the importance of literacy-related interactions between mainstream parents and preschoolers. Among the literacy events that children are engaged at home even before they join formal schooling are “bedtime stories; reading cereal boxes, stop signs, and television ads; and interpreting instructions for commercial games and toys” (Heath, 1986, p.98). With the help of their parents, children are trained to answer what-questions, and, later on, after they have acquired the strategies needed to answer these different kinds of questions, children can provide reason-explanations or affective commentaries. According to Heath (1986) bedtime stories are a crucial literacy event that prepare preschoolers for a successful future student life.
Just as talk has an important role in literacy-related interactions between parents and their children, classroom talk is also a major key in teaching and learning processes. The default teacher-student conversation pattern known as IRE (initiate, respond, evaluate) has its equivalent in the ‘what-questions’ asked by the parents during story reading.
The IRE pattern is based on the teacher asking a question, the students answering it, and then the teacher evaluating the student’s answer. These kinds of questions require the students to give a specific answer, the purpose of the questions usually being to check the students’ understanding of something.
The following example from Transcript: Deb-clip-01 (2005) exemplifies a typical IRE pattern:
“T: … What day does that one say? Connor?
SN: Monday.
T: Monday. Well done.”
The teacher (T) asks the students a question with just one possible answer, thus initiating the talk (“What day…”). The student (SN) responds by giving the correct answer (“Monday.”) and, as a result, the teacher evaluates it by giving praise (“Well done.”). In this particular example, the teacher chooses to echo the student’s answer too, probably for reinforcement.
The what-questions that preschoolers are exposed to at home during story reading also follow the IRE pattern, with parents asking their children such questions as “What colour is the ball?” (Heath, 1986, p.100). These questions have just one correct answer, which the child can respond to, from the book that is being read to him. Upon his/her answer, the parent corrects or praises the child and then moves on to another question.
As what-questions or questions that follow the IRE pattern predominate through primary-grade levels, the parent-teacher bedtime story interaction “is a major literacy event that helps set patterns of behaviour that reoccur repeatedly through the life of mainstream children and adults” (Heath , 1986, p.99).
Resources:
- Heath, S.B. (1986). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. In B. Schieffelin & E. Ochs (Eds.), Language socialization across cultures (pp. 97-124). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Transcript: Deb-clip-01 (2005). In Teachers’ Hands: Effective Literacy Teaching Practices in the Early Years of Schooling. Retrieved December 11, 2008.
