Margaret Watkinson

What is literacy? The short answer is that it is the use of some sort of symbol, or set/combination of symbols to represent and idea, and the idea is begin communicated to another person without spoken language, but through their interpretation of the symbol(s).

Memory and language are deeply linked, so it would stand to reason that ideas are related to language. Children’s first words are based on concrete, see it/touch it/feel it- experience it events. Single words can represent entire thoughts. Baba (bottle) can represent “I want more milk/some milk/the milk”. Can memories exist without language, absolutely. Language, however, is the necessary vehicle to process, recreate, explain and remember details about a memory. Additionally, we are the only species that uses our language to imagine or create unknown scenarios by looking into the future.

If language and ideas are the representation of ideas held by one person, the ideas shared are only limited by that person’s facility with language. Having a broad, rich and varied vocabulary based on experiences with the world, understanding what others need to know and how best to express that insight or thought are two basic language abilities that come with practice, exposure and experience

The limitation is that one person to speak or sign that language to others to share their thoughts. The development of a writing system, whatever that looks like to a specific culture or language, was developed so that ideas and information could be shared with anyone who learned the system. A permanent representation of language bred the written word in all it’s nuances, genres and ‘rules’. Reading and writing was born of the spoken word.

So, for this reason, literacy begins at birth. Infants are born with the biology to acquire language. Any language. The sounds of all languages are within that infant’s ability. Click languages, sign languages, French, Russian, Spanish, English- any and all sounds and social infections of all languages are within that baby’s ability, and will be acquired without any accent when acquired from birth or within a few years. As Children get older, the brain gets rid of unused connections and not only can some sounds not be heard, they lose the ability for form them as a native speaker. This results in the ‘accent’ and the struggle for most people to learn a new language later in life.

So, back to early literacy. The sounds, or phonemes of language are one aspect of forming words and later connecting those sounds/phonemes to symbols. The second aspect of becoming a native speaker, and later literate in that language, is learning the words, what those words mean and expanding on that, the concepts behind those words and groups of words. This also demands that a child learn the intonation, social cues and physical aspects of communicating. Phonemes are combined to make the words, so learning to isolate them, manipulate them through sound games, word games contributes to the whole process.

Basically, the first five years of life is spend learning the sounds of your native language while also learning all about context and meaning. Children are building the ability to comprehend- a deep understanding based on experience from which, when the time comes, a child will discover through explicit experiences that the sounds and phonemes are represented by symbols, and connecting those symbols to the phonemes and mapping them back to words that represent your experiences and…voila….a reader is born!