Developing a Literary Orientation: A Parent Diary

Looking at young children's literary and book-reading experiences in a natural, home environment, researchers can supplement what we know about early enculturation into various kinds of literate environments. Several parents have kept diaries that record adult-child interactions during book-reading activities. Most of these have been published only in small pieces, outside of the American scholarly network, but two diaries, Dorothy White's Books Before Five and Dorothy Butter's Cushla and Her Books, are full-length publications, widely known in this country by those interested in many aspects of children's literature.¹

There is a great deal to be learned from these two full-length diaries. In a warm style, White informed us of her daughter's development into a "literate person" who loved and talked about books as if they were her own family and background. Butler chronicled the book experiences of her severely handicapped granddaughter within a devoted, literary family.

In these accounts, however, White and Butler provided many summaries rather than original transcriptions or quotations from their diaries. They leave us wanting to know more about what mothers and children actually said about books and how they actually said these things during book-reading sessions. They also leave us with additional questions about the contexts within which book-readings occurred. We need this background information so that we can understand the data within the context of the home and family.

It was partly to fill this void that I set out to collect book-reading data on my child in a more systematic, yet naturalistic way.

The essay that follows, which describes some of the experiences my son, David, had with books, is drawn from a larger study of the emergence and development of this 2½- to 4½-year-old child's preschool reading-related behaviors.² In my two-year study, data were collected daily in a household diary, which included both a description of household details and David's interactions with literature (e.g., book-reading sessions, David's questions concerning story vocabulary, his use of book vocabulary, his role play and dramatizations of storybooks, and the incorporation of book language into his own speech).

Using these records as a data base, I tried to identify patterns in David's early reading and writing, and to examine how David's preschool reading-related behaviors formed a basis for the development of his particular literary orientation.

From the data emerged three kinds of reading behaviors. The first category, which I call Reading Wise behaviors, includes book-handling, such as holding a book appropriately, turning pages in proper sequence, pointing to pictures and print, and pretend-reading, such as using book language to tell a story as David pointed to pictures and print. The second category, Book Reading, focused on book-related interactions that occurred both within book readings and outside of them. The third category, Early Reading-Print, refers to David's attempts to read print, to create print messages with manipulative devices, and his playing with print. In this report, I will discuss only some features of the "Book-Reading category insight into the development of my son's language through his literary experiences.

The Book-Reading category contained information about Book-Reading Environment, which included both the physical setting for book reading and an in-depth discussion of book reading encounters between David and a parent or sibling; and, Book-Reading Response, which included David's use of book language, comparisons of words, questions concerning vocabulary, and the way in which he related everyday life and books.

One important feature of Book-Reading Environment is that at a very young age, David had developed a particular reading ritual. During book readings, David and I sat in his bedroom alone; he chose his own books and placed them in a pile. We sat on his bed together, with David's head on my shoulder. Our reading could not be interrupted by other members of the family. David did not want to break the storyline with questions and discussion; if there were any interruptions, questions or discussion, they came from David...