Change Over Time in Children's Literacy Development

McGill Journal of Education, Spring 2001 by Helen Amoriggi

MARIE M. CLAY. Change Over Time in Children's Literacy Development. Auckland, NZ & Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann (2001). 328 pp. $29.50 (ISBN 0-325-00383-1 [0-86863-300-3 in New Zealand]).

In her meticulously documented book, Change over Time in Children's Literacy Development, Marie Clay provides the reader with an honest, nonintrusive but provocative alternative to conventional support for early literacy. Dr. Clay, whose work began in New Zealand four decades ago, is the founder of Reading Recovery, the foremost researched early intervention program in the world today. Reading Recovery (RR) has been launched successfully on four continents and delivered in both English and Spanish. RR is currently being developed in French for implementation in all parts of bilingual Canada. She writes, "This early intervention is like a standard boat tossed into several turbulent rivers and struggling to master the rapids and stay afloat in each of them" (p. 298). Clay challenges early intervention reading professionals, tutors, and researchers alike to ask more questions in order to continue the search for even better solutions in their work with children. In this book Clay succeeds in silencing the critics who have misconceptions of early interventions. She believes that "sound research" is essential to sustain support for early intervention programs such as Reading Recovery.

There are eight distinctive chapters in Change over Time. The author presents so much of her valuable acquired knowledge in this one publication that I believe this is the foundation for a "pandect" or complete digest on Reading Recovery.

In chapter one, the author challenges parents, teachers, and reading researchers to think about the "common ground" that beginning reading and writing share, regardless of the reading approach employed currently in schools. Clay insists that when children fall behind their classmates who learn faster, it is really important to work with reading and writing simultaneously. The guiding question research proponents should be directing to a sample of children's work is: "Which features of this extremely complex activity is this child attending to?" (p. 13). Clay recommends several published works to which teachers can refer; but it is she, herself, who is the acknowledged authority on this subject. As a researcher Clay discusses what "children reveal" as they explore their own reading and writing in the first year of school. What these children reveal is similar to the "tell back" system used by coaches with student athletes who are taught to build from strength to strength. The whole idea is "to make links between what they say and how they might create a record of it" (pp. 34, 35). Reading then becomes talk written down.

In chapter two, "Acts of literacy processing: an unusual lens," Clay poses three incisive questions: "What do 'proficient' young readers do as they problem-solve increasingly difficult texts? What evidence do we have of sequential changes in their proficiency? In what ways do proficient readers and writers make use of information from print as they read?"(P. 43). Clay states that if she is to make a strong case for a new set of hypotheses concerning how literacy processing "changes over time," hypotheses which could be useful in future research, then a careful, detailed review of original studies must be done by "revisiting the history of evidence we collected when we attended to the detail of beginners trying to read and write texts" (p.41). Her own research covers a span of some forty years, commencing with studies of what independent readers actually do at age eight, in order to identify some of the components from which effective functioning was likely constructed.

What seems to be clear to Clay in her view of the research is that the literacy process `constructed by learners' during their early literacy is seen to be profoundly influenced not only by their school curriculum's expectations, but by the teaching practices of their teachers. Using her knowledge of psychology, she proposes an `alternative view' which is referred to as the "literacy processing view of progress during literacy acquisition" (p. 42). She affirms, "I believe it is the processing view of progress that is the main reason why Reading Recovery (RR) teachers consistently get good results with individual tutoring across the world in many different education systems, child after child, year after year" (p. 42). When we look at how `children work on texts' as they read and write, regardless of how teachers are teaching, we come to a different conclusion of how each pupil progresses. Change over time suggests "a record of acts"; i.e., transcriptions of precisely what each child said and did. In her researcher role, Clay calls this a "Running Record" (p. 45), and it is only one example of what she focuses on as "an unusual lens". The detailed Table 1, "Hypotheses about possible progressions in acts of processing occurring in early reading and writing for tentative and flexible discussion" (pp. 84, 85) is excellent.