So far when writing the journal I have come across many different frameworks and critical theories relating to children's literacy. In order to put all that critical information in one place I have decided to do a brief overview of the most prominent frameworks in the course, there are may other critical authors that I have come across but these I feel are some of the most important.
Carrington and Marsh - Forms of Literacy (2008)
The ways literacy is changing due to developments in technology
Communication is increasingly more multimodal which challenges the traditional focus on written or print modes.
New advancements in technology and the access to different texts, on the internet will impact meaning making in students.
The digital age is beginning to blur the boundaries of reader/writer as writers can now directly read comments their readers make on their own writing.
Reconfiguration in learning environments to include the greater access to knowledge and their will be a better capacity to include out of school development through online resources.
Luke and Freebody - The Four Resources Model
Code breaker (coding competence)
Meaning maker (semantic competence)
Text user (pragmatic competence)
Text critic (critical competence)
The four resources model is in opposition to older traditional single method models.
"break the code of written texts by recognizing and using fundamental features and architecture, including alphabet, sounds in words, spelling, and structural conventions and patterns;
participate in understanding and composing meaningful written, visual, and spoken texts, taking into account each text's interior meaning systems in relation to their available knowledge and their experiences of other cultural discourses, texts, and meaning systems;
use texts functionally by traversing and negotiating the labor and social relations around them -- that is, by knowing about and acting on the different cultural and social functions that various texts perform inside and outside school, and understanding that these functions shape the way texts are structured, their tone, their degree of formality, and their sequence of components;
critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral -- that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people's ideas -- and that their designs and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways." - From Allan Luke and Peter Freebody - <http://www.readingonline.org/research/lukefreebody.html#hasan>
J. Collerson - English Grammar: A Functional Approach
Collerson gives his 'archway' diagram to explain how a text can be analysed.
We can look at texts in these stages - Culture, Context, Field, Mode, Tenor, Purpose which really make up the Who, Why, What and How of a text.
This approach is quite simple and could be practically applied with children.
Collerson goes on to split these up into functions -
Experiential function - people and things processes (actions, states)
Interpersonal function - statements, questions, commands.
Textual function - language as part of the action or as a reflection
J. Callow - 'Show Me' Framework
Callow in his article clearly gives a step by step nature of how to apply his framework in a practical classroom environment.
This is probably one of the reasons why it is the most concise and useful as it is intended for practical application.
His table work through three sections starting with the Affective Dimensions, then the Compositional Dimensions and finally the Critical Dimensions.
Callow spends the most time discussing the Compositional Dimensions which looks over the aesthetics and details of a text which probably lend themselves best when discussing multimodal texts for children.
This has been a very brief overview of some of these frameworks and without posting all of the visual resources such as diagrams and tables it is still helpful for me to get the main points across in one place.
