Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control

From her lifelong study of children’s development and learning, Marie Clay traces children’s paths of progress in literacy learning. Acclaimed a classic since its first publication, Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control is essential reading for teachers and educators committed to enabling all children to become literate.

Effective teachers have a sense of the changes to expect as children begin to engage with early literacy instruction. Becoming Literate provides a rich description of those progressions. But Marie Clay does not prescribe instructional methods or sequences. She urges teachers to base their teaching decisions on careful observation of children’s reading and writing behaviours, while questioning accounts that conflict with the patterns of responding that they observe.

The information and understandings in this book provide guidance for delivering powerful literacy learning experiences for all children in the early years of formal instruction, from their first days of school to the relative independence of their third year.

Key chapter content includes:

• language and literacy learning before school
• the transition to formal schooling and engagement with classroom programmes
• ways in which existing oral language competencies and knowledge of the world become linked with children’s developing awareness of print
• the constraints and opportunities provided by different instructional approaches
• the development of processing activities such as self-monitoring, searching, and self-correcting.

A picture emerges of how competent young children construct self-extending systems of literacy expertise. Successful literacy learners call up a range of ways of working with the information in texts and become able to learn more from their own efforts to read and write text.

Finally, aware that some children for a variety of reasons do not construct an inner control of literacy processing in their initial encounters with formal instruction, Marie Clay argues that these children need extra resources and effective early intervention in order to build a sound foundation for further education.

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon),Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies. Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems. Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.