Children's First School Books (Language Library) - Softcover

Children's first school books are neither content free nor neutral and reading schemes represent their first encounters with the terrain of school culture and the first stage in the systematic recasting of the child's world. Working from textual analyses of a large collection of early reading materials, Carolyn Baker and Peter Freebody present a thorough account of their language, form and content. Their concern in particular is with the part they play in introducing children to the conventions of written text, to school knowledge and the social relations of schooling. Embedded in the content and structure of these books they find subtle but powerful guidelines as to how children should view themselves and conceive of themselves as members of the social world. Exploring the relations between these apparently simple introductory school books and contemporary theorizing about literacy, society and schooling, the authors discuss how, in the light of their findings, teachers can best deal with the problems and possiblities presented by the reading materials they use.