Change Over Time in Children's Literacy Development presents a comprehensive account of young literacy learners constructing networks of interacting systems for processing information, an account extending from the time of the children's first engagement with reading and writing tasks to their development of a self-extending system of literacy expertise.
To show how children's initially simple sets of responses become controlled, accurate, and coordinated, Marie Clay has drawn on research evidence and theoretical constructs from developmental psychology, neuropsychology, information processing theory, and linguistics.
This book is a theoretically rich, informative, and compellingly readable account of children's literacy learning with wide professional relevance. Teachers, educators of teachers, researchers, and students will return to it often to advance their understandings and guide their work with young literacy learners.
Marie Clay presents her theoretical perspectives on learning, intervention, and the prevention of literacy difficulties with reference to:
- detailed observational studies of young children learning to read and write
- theoretical models of literacy processing
- understandings from neurological sciences
- her thirty years of experience with the successful literacy intervention Reading Recovery.
She directs particular attention to the often neglected topics of children's writing, visual learning, and self-correction and also alerts readers to the limitations of current explanations and poses provocative hypotheses for ongoing exploration.
Challenging, thoughtful, and vitally relevant, Change Over Time in Children's Literacy Development will continue to be essential reading for literacy professionals around the world.
About the Author: 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.
