The selected chapter from Handbook of Family Literacy provides a summary of literary practices within socio-cultural context of African American families. Perhaps the key context of the socio-cultural model is cognitive context that looks at world views and defines socialization goals for African American families in connection with beliefs. Interrelated is linguistic context that looks at a pattern of language used for communication within a family. Also, behavioral context and interpersonal context is important to achieve socialization goals and form positive relationships, especially with younger learners in the family. For example, acquisition of reading competence is related to the social and cultural context. Even more, it influences literacy through a language and its practices that are shared between the members of the family.
African American families most value three beliefs in life: spirituality, a solid education, and nominal knowledge as the foundation for learning. Also, they use a specific community language or socio-cultural dialect (AAVE) that has many variations of common English words. Therefore, children from Black communities more often experience difficulties in acquiring literary language skills later at school than their counterparts. Benson (2009), states that these children may have some kind of reading difficulties if their progress from oral to literary language is slow. It is common that family relations in a community are maintained through passing oral information, storytelling, and singing. Oral language dominates in Black communities, as opposed to contextual language. Because of this peculiarity that dates back to the early times of slavery, reading proficiency in most African American families is second to oral proficiency. Moreover, smaller children are commonly exposed to decontextualized narratives at home. Often such literacy practices in families involve certain values, beliefs, and goals that are equally important.
Many researchers these days support a fact that the development of reading correlates with the general knowledge about the children worldviews. Typically, African American parents or, sometimes, grandparents use a number of activities to foster literacy practices with their pre-school children, such as singing, storytelling, and playing games. Such activities, without any doubts, set a solid background for language interactions and thus promote literacy, which otherwise is largely ignored within these families. Children naturally benefit from them by having fun and developing the necessary routines that later support their reading skills.
In my view, a practical application of literacy in social-cultural context for African American families involves designing a set of activities to improve the basic reading skills for pre-school children. My interest lies in working with parents and their children together to foster literacy interactions through games. As already mentioned in the book, a joint reading with young children is crucial. Based on earlier observations of African American pre-school kids, reading skills can be developed best through text reading, modeling, joint attention and child centered reading. I also suggest regular family involvement to create a positive learning environment. Findings in the field show that involvement of families during literacy development more often results in a successful cooperation. Within the interpersonal context, supportive relationships in the family add positively to the experience of their kids and their perceptions of reading as a positive family activity. As a teacher, my goal is to help develop independent thinking skills in kids from an early age onwards. To achieve it, the activities need to go beyond a daily story reading: the kids can be asked to narrate a story or expand its concept in conversation.
Work Cited
Wasik, Barbara, H. Handbook of Family Literacy. 2012. Print.
