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GITA JANGID AND R. AMRITAVALLI

WHOLE LANGUAGE, STORY READING, ANDCHILDREN’S WRITING*

ABSTRACT: The rich and highly motivating input provided by a story project under awhole language approach, implemented in Class I for one academic year, promotesEnglish as a second language in children. Project children’s writing is superior in volume,language, content, and mechanics to that of children one year senior to them, even thoughwriting is not a skill addressed by the project. Initial individual differences in abilitylevels get evened out, and there is suggestive evidence of a confident multilingualism.Accuracy remains a concern; but the regular curriculum is seen to achieve neither accuracy,nor any growth of language in the children.

KEYWORDS: whole language, story project, children’s writing, learning opportunities,rich input, teacher research, accuracy, fluency, multilingualism

0. INTRODUCTION

This article reports some findings from a story project (Jangid 2004)implemented for one academic year in Class I of a privately managedco-educational English medium school in Hyderabad (India). The storyproject was a teacher research project inspired by the whole languageapproach. As Goodman points out (1992:356), the whole languageapproach is particularly suitable for teachers undertaking action research,being “a movement of knowledgeable professional teachers who havetaken control of their own classrooms.” Weaver (1990) observes thatthere are as many definitions of whole language as there are wholelanguage practitioners, who interpret it and modify it according to theirown understanding.

* The research reported here (from Jangid 2004) was conducted by the first author withthe second author as supervisor. We thank the participating schools and students, and,for valuable comments, Warwick Elley, B. K. Das, T. Sriraman and N. P. Sudarshana. Anyremaining shortcomings are our responsibility.

The EFL Journal 2:2 June 2011.©2011 The English and Foreign Languages University.

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In Section 1 below, we briefly discuss the whole language approachadopted in Jangid (2004). Section 2 describes the implementation of thestory project. While demonstrable gains were seen during the project inthe children’s speech and reading, we here discuss the development intheir writing: a skill not focussed on in isolation during the project,nevertheless of crucial concern to educators and parents. Section 3discusses samples of writing elicited by picture description and narrationtasks immediately prior to the commencement of the project, andimmediately prior to its completion. It also compares the project children’swriting to the writing of children a year senior to them in (i) the sameschool (affiliated to a State board of education), and (ii) a Central Schoolin the same area. The project children’s writing, though not error-free, isshown to be superior in volume, language, content, and the mechanics ofwriting; arguing thus for a place within our school system for the input-rich and high motivational content of the story project.

1. WHOLE LANGUAGE

The whole language approach adopts a holistic view of language, asagainst fragmenting it into skills. Children are expected to learn to readand write as naturally as they learn to speak. The emphasis is not ondirect instruction, with the concomitant discouragement of constantcorrection, but on learner participation. Literacy skills are developed inthe context of whole and authentic literacy events; the whole languagecurriculum is permeated with real reading and writing experiences.Moreover, the attempt is to integrate learning within the classroom withthe entire life of the child.

The mode of learning is visualized as active and transactional, drawingupon the insights of Piaget and Vygotsky, rather than on Behaviouristmodels of learning that underlie the transmission mode of teaching andlearning. Learning is seen as a complex cognitive process that can befacilitated by peer- and teacher-interaction; risk-taking is encouraged,and errors are seen as part of a process of learning, rather than a sign ofincompetence or failure. Learners are expected to be at different stages

Gita Jangid & R. Amritavalli

17Whole language, story reading, and children’s writing

of learning or development, and to develop at their own pace and in theirown time. Thus there is no concept of failure.

Goodman (1992) sees reading and writing as transactional, constructiveprocesses; hence texts become the smallest authentic, meaningful unitof language. Hudelson (1994:130) maintains that “this view of literacyapplies to both native speakers of English and learners for whom Englishis not their native language.” Reading begins in print-saturatedenvironments. It is promoted by storybook reading by an adult and childtogether: e.g. the reading of “predictable” books, over and over again.Children’s hypotheses of how to read a familiar story change over time.They begin globally by considering the overall plot and using the picturesto construct the story. With increasing familiarity, they focus on the story’ssentences and lexicon and pay attention to the text: “children begin withthe whole story and gradually work their way down to the parts” (Hudelson1994:132).

For writing, the contrast between the transmission and the transactionalmodes may be illustrated by Calkins’ (1980) comparison of two ways ofteaching punctuation in Grade III. In the transmission class, the teacherused daily drills and workbook exercises. She began class by writing asentence on the blackboard and asking the children to insert the missingpunctuation marks, starting with simple sentences, periods and capitalletters. The children rarely wrote on their own. This teacher was teachingisolated skills; children were practising them, and were tested for theirmastery of them. The assumption was that they would later put the skillsso learned to effective use. In the transactional classroom, children wereallowed to write for an hour a day, three times a week. The teacherintervened to teach them punctuation during the process of their writing,as and when it was needed to clarify their writing. In this class the learningof punctuation was linked to the children’s own real experience of writing;the teacher was a facilitator of learning, not a transmitter of knowledge.

At the end of a year, Calkins interviewed the children to determine whatthey knew about punctuation. The children in the transmission class couldon the average explain the use of 3.85 punctuation marks (usually theperiod, the question mark and the exclamation), typically by reciting therules they had learnt. In contrast, the transactional group explained an

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average of 8.66 punctuation marks. In addition to the period, the questionmark, and the exclamation, they explained the apostrophe, the comma,the colon, the dash, and quotation marks through reference to their ownwriting experiences: “Punctuation tells people things – like if the sentenceis asking, or if someone is talking, or if you should yell it out…” Calkinsconcluded that “when children need punctuation in order to be seen andheard, they become vacuum cleaners, sucking up odd bits from books,their classmates’ papers, billboards and magazines. They find punctuationeverywhere and make it their own” (1980:572-73).

2. THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE STORY PROJECT

The story project was implemented for one academic year (July 2001-April 2002) for forty minutes a day, six days a week, in a 15 year oldschool catering to the middle and lower middle classes (the annual tuitionfees ranged from 2000-5000 rupees). The school was fairly representativeof recently established English-medium schools in urban India. Therewas no library, nor was the reading of storybooks encouraged; Englishwas taught through textbooks, exercises, and memorized answers toquestions from the texts. 31 children of Class I (age 5+ years) participatedin the project. They had not yet encountered the continuous language ofa written story, having read and practised isolated words and sentences.1

As the school did not wish to give up the regular English class, the projectwas arranged during the “Moral Science” and “Games” periods.2 Tenstories and ten poems were chosen for their potential to provide delight

1 The results of a questionnaire suggested that story reading was considered by mostparents as a leisure activity that had no role in the child’s academic or emotional growth.Only about 5 children (with both parents knowing English) had storybooks bought for orread out to them. 5-6 children were first generation learners whose fathers were farmersor unskilled workers. The rest had mothers schooled in an Indian language; the fathers,who knew English, were not able to spare time for the children.2 The moral science period consisted of the reading out of a prescribed book of storieswith morals, with children writing answers to questions and learning the moral. Duringthe games class, as the school had no playground, children were allowed to sit in class anddo whatever they liked under the watchful eye of the physical instructor.


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in reading, keeping in mind insights from the literature on children’s readingchoices (Hall and Cole 1997), and the “predictability” of the text: “thetext has to be predictable in terms of ideas, concepts, language …”(Goodman 1982:5). The idea of predictability has been developed inHoldaway (1979), Rhodes (1981) and Heald-Taylor (1987). Predictablebooks are patterned in plot and language (e.g. refrains, rhymes, wordsequences), and so are easier for children to understand, and to rememberand predict chunks of language.

The core classroom activity was the researcher reading a story aloudand the learners’ reading and repeated reading of the story along withthe researcher. A photocopy of the story was given to each child, whilethe researcher retained the original with coloured illustrations.3 Trelease(1989:200) notes that reading aloud is the “single most important activityfor building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.”Repeated reading promotes automaticity in reading (Samuels 1997); it isparticularly beneficial for poor readers, whose word recognition rate andaccuracy improves with multiple readings (Herman 1985). On completionof the reading and re-reading of a story, children were encouraged to re-tell or to re-write the story; their efforts ranged from a few rememberedwords and phrases or a fuller verbatim reproduction, to re-telling thestory. Story reading was punctuated by the choral reading of poems, i.e.,a performing of poems (Arbuthnot 1961, Pearson and Fielding 1983). Inaddition, there was individual reading of stories during the lunch break; aset of sixty storybooks and twelve issues of a children’s magazine weremade available to the children in a class library for this purpose.4

An initial assessment of the children’s speaking, reading and writing abilityin English served to group them impressionistically into those who (i) hadno English at all (ii) had only a few halting words (iii) readily namedobjects and some actions (iv) were able to construct sentences in English.

3 See Jangid (2004, Chapter 3) for an extended discussion of the project materials andmethods. Towards the end of the project, stories supported by audio tapes, withprofessional readers reading at their own pace, were introduced. Initially, the researcher’sreading aloud took into account the ability of the class to keep pace with her.4 During the 45-minute break, the researcher sat in class to provide books to children, andwhere necessary to help individual children to read.

Whole language, story reading, and children’s writing

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Portfolios were started for individual children, in which their languagedevelopment was documented using samples of their speaking, readingand writing. In this article we discuss the development of writing abilityalone, based on 16 portfolios: 4 each from the 4 ability groups listedabove. Although the development of speaking and reading in the childrenwas remarkable, we choose to report on writing, for two reasons. On theone hand, writing was not a skill that the project focused on in isolation:story re-writing was treated as a natural extension of the reading togetherof stories. On the other hand, writing is the one skill that parents andteachers are most anxious to teach, perhaps because examination resultsare based purely on written answers. Yet the only writing so far permittedto the children had been the copying down of questions and answersfrom the blackboard, for their reproduction in tests; the children wereconsidered too young to compose a self-expressive piece in writing. Thedevelopment of writing skills during the story project thus stands asremarkable testimony to the whole language approach adopted by thatproject.

3. CHILDREN’S WRITING

Indicators of development in writing ability may range from the mechanicsof writing,5 to spelling, vocabulary and sentence construction, to the effortat self-expression and an increase in the volume of writing. For reasonsof space, we do not here discuss story re-writing, nor even the entirerange of writing represented in the portfolios. We discuss only the picturedescription and narration tasks given as a pretest in July 2001 and a posttest in April 2002.6 We also contrast the post test (April 2002) performanceof the project children with the performance of two groups of children

5 “New space as in a blank piece of paper places great demands on the young writer …At first, we note that children run words and sentences together. As language meaningincreases the spaces begin to appear” (Graves 1978:395, 397).6 These, and a set of personal writing tasks, were given on five other occasions: Septemberand December 2001, February 2002 (two occasions), and March 2002. There was aperceptible change in the children’s writing from February 2002 onwards, suggesting aperiod of incubation for the language encountered during the project to serve in spontaneousproduction.


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one year senior to them, one within the project school, and the other in ageographically nearest Central School (a Kendriya Vidyalaya); in April2002, data was gathered from the children of class II in these two schools.

The pretest had eight pictures of familiar objects for identification (naming)and description: a pen, a pencil, a jug, leaves, flowers, a knife, a potatoand a packet of biscuits. The post test had a set of seven pictures depictingevents. Four of these, which find mention in the tables below, are givenafter this page. A few physical samples of writing are provided to showthe children’s progress in the organization of space and the mechanics ofwriting. The language growth of these children may be judged from Tables1-4, which present select transcripts by picture and child (sex in brackets),with the spelling and punctuation unaltered but annotated where necessary.


Raghava Group IV Pretest July 2001

Post test April 2002

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Table 1: Pretest & Post test, weakest ability group


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Post test picture 1

Post test picture 2

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Post test picture 6

Post test picture 7

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These children’s writing is, from an adult point of view, error-ridden.Looking at the writing on its own terms, however, we notice a dramaticincrease in both the volume of language and its variety. The children arewriting recognizable words and complete sentences. They use phrasalverbs (fell down), possessives (a his house), the there-construction,prepositions (at, up, with), connectives (and, so), as well as their ownmade-up words (climber) and expressions (seeing back) to convey mean-ing. Each picture is recognizable from its description; i.e. the descrip-tions are consistent. Nevertheless, there is a welcome absence of theuniformity that characterizes “taught” or “memorized” language.

In the next ability group, notice in the post test the quite natural use of theTelugu word niccana ‘ladder’ for the corresponding English word bythe child ‘Rav,’ who also makes up an appropriate spelling for it. This notonly suggests an acquisition of spelling-sound correspondences in En-glish; it also attests to the spontaneity with which the child now uses allthe linguistic resources available to her (a manifestation of the multilin-gualism repeatedly argued for in Indian education: e.g., NCERT 2005,Agnihotri 2010).


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Table 2: Pretest & Post test, next weakest ability group


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Pretest July 2001, Anj : Group III


Turning now to the initially superior ability groups, the volume of languagein the post test appears to be larger than that of the weaker groups.Notably, however, the language of the description does not appear to bequalitatively different from that of the two initially weaker groups. Suchevidence of the “leveling” of language ability across initially disparategroups is a welcome development. It argues that all five-year olds have


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Pretest July 2001, Rav: Group III

an ability to acquire English, given equal opportunities for learning; at thisage and for this subject, we do not expect to find differences in “aptitude.”7

7 A remark is in order about the sparseness of sentence-initial capital letters and sentence-final full stops. From the outset, the children indicated separation between sentences, oreven words used as labels in naming, by setting these out on separate lines and numberingeach such new line. Often, a full stop appears only at the end of the writing. (This is astyle of punctuation reportedly seen in college entrants to remedial classes in Hyderabadas well, who claim to have been taught it, and who (therefore) are sceptical aboutsuggestions to the contrary.) In our transcripts, the numbering and line layout of thewriting have not been preserved, for reasons of space.Note however the use of legends such as “The end” and a heading “Story” in thedescriptions of the Post test picture 7 by ‘Tar’ and ‘Meg,’ suggesting that some layoutdetails are indeed being acquired by these children.


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Table 3: Pretest & Post test, second best ability group


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Table 4: Pretest & Post test, best ability group


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4. A COMPARISON WITH SENIOR GROUPS

We have acknowledged that the children’s writing is not target-like atthe end of the project; but we argue that this apparent shortcoming shouldbe seen against the backdrop of the evidence for ongoing, genuinelanguage acquisition promoted by the story project. In other words, errorsare a part of language growth in the second language as in the first, andthe task of early language education is to promote opportunities forlanguage growth (sometimes referred to as “fluency”), rather than toinsist on accurate production, in writing as in speech.

In order to check the viability and validity of this argument, we comparethe post test writing of the project children with that of two groups ofchildren one year senior to them, one within the project school, and theother in a geographically nearest Central School (a Kendriya Vidyalaya).The choice of Class II for comparison is because in the project school,there was no other section of Class I; and in the other school, an attemptto administer the post test task in Class I met with no success. TheKendriya Vidyalaya was located geographically within a couple ofkilometers of the project school. It is affiliated to the Central Board ofSchool Education, unlike the project school, which is affiliated to a Stateboard; it has better infrastructure (e.g., a library), and its teachers arebetter qualified. Most KV children, being the wards of transferableCentral Government employees, are also arguably from a better socio-economic and educational background.

Twenty students from Class II of the KV were administered, in April2002, the identical Post test given to the project children. It was foundthat

(i) six responses – see ‘VB,’ ‘Abi,’ ‘Vin’ in Table 5 below - rangedfrom merely one or two words in all, to single word descriptionsof some pictures.

(ii) three children – see, e.g., ‘Son’ – wrote 2-3 sentences, sometimesillegibly.

(iii) ten children attempted longer pieces of writing. Their spelling,punctuation, and mechanics of writing are not noticeably superior


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to that of the project children (samples given in the Appendix).Their language resources and the volume of writing appear to benoticeably poorer. ‘Rah’ and ‘Kau’ are the two best transcriptsin this group.

Comparison writing samples from KV, Class II‘Abi’

‘Son’


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Table 5: Post test, KV Class II

Even if we make allowances for the children’s unfamiliarity with thetask and the researcher, it is evident that these children do not have thevocabulary, the linguistic structures, or the confidence to write at length,although they are a full year senior, and from a better school.

Turning now to Class II in the project school, these children were givena set of pictures that had been used with the project children for anearlier speaking task, rather than the identical post test, to guard againstthe chance that they might have discussed the post test pictures withtheir school mates. Thirty two children were administered the task. Ofthese,

(i) 13 were unable to write more than two words (is plaing) orsentences in all (one boy look in the tree this boy is a lapping;two children are standing; going to a house). There werealso nil responses and unintelligible responses (the a boy is eatingthe; I Bog is reading a Book; boy is; The The is eat get detDear Thie; The dog is cat; the cat is dog; ware are hling akeit; fall a house with)


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(iii) Only 3 children wrote sentences which, though still “patterned,”formed a coherent description:

Child Sai (f): The dog is eating in the mud. The dog is playing inthe grass. The dog is sleeping the grass. The dog is eating theflowers. The dog is running. The dog is playing.

Child ??: This is boy and girl. The are eating. The charot is onthe forest. The are seeing a house.

Child Shi (f): This is a house. He is seeing stars. I go to myhouse. I have flowers. I talk about the picture. …

(ii) 16 wrote “patterned” sentences, sometimes along with non-sentences. An echo of the teacher’s questions may also be seenin these children's writing (cf. Table 6):

Table 6: Class II, Project School, picture description/narration

Comparison writing samples from Project school, Class II


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5. NATURAL LANGUAGE GROWTH,OR A STIFLING ACCURACY?

Writing is a difficult skill to acquire and needs time to develop. Thereforethe level attained by children following the usual curriculum during twoyears of schooling serves as a reference point for the project children’sdevelopment in writing. We may say that the project children are at leastone year ahead of the other children in this regard. A second importantdevelopment we have pointed out is the “levelling” of writing ability acrossgroups initially thought to be at different levels of ability. This we interpretas a promise of democratizing access to English to all children in India.

We do not claim that the project children’s writing has developed to apoint where the goals of teaching writing as part of a school curriculumhave been met. What we do claim, however, is that the story project hasset these children on a developmental path for independent writing, in away that the curriculum usually followed in our schools does not. It is atruism that good readers become good writers; research has evenestablished specific links between, e.g., reading and spelling (Krashen1989). We have cited in this article the connection between learningpunctuation, and the effort at genuine communication through writing, onthe part of the child. Primary school education in English in India howevernormally encourages neither children’s reading for pleasure, whetherextensive or intensive, nor children’s independent writing. As mentionedearlier, children’s writing in most schools is confined to the copying downof teacher-composed material from the blackboard, for reproduction later.

The reasons for this are not unknown. There is a great concern foraccuracy in our school systems right from Class I, with little knowledgeof or tolerance for the developmental milestones well-documented inchildren’s cognitive development, including in language. The expectationis that school should shape five-year olds into miniature adults (seeAmritavalli 2005 [2009] for some discussion). In the field of English as asecond language, accuracy is often polarized against fluency, and schoolteachers, apparently constrained to make a choice, naturally conceptualizethe absence of accuracy as a failure on their part. We agree that theteacher’s job is to bring the child onto the path of accuracy; but thewriting of the two groups that had the benefit of only the regular curriculumargues that not even accuracy is achieved by stifling all languagedevelopment in the child.


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It is our contention that language development in the second language, atleast in the primary school, can happen on the same terms as in the firstlanguage. Its prerequisites are the availability of language to the child(“an input-rich environment”), and the child’s intellectual and emotionalengagement with the language (“motivation,” “communication”). Theseare the needs that the story project, we believe, addressed. The teacher’srole, we believe, is as a facilitator who allows the child to enter the worldof the new language, and who intervenes where and when necessaryto further the child on its path of language development.

REFERENCES

Agnihotri, R. K. 2010. Multilinguality and the teaching of English in India. TheEFL Journal 1 (1), 1- 13.

Amritavalli , R. 2005 [2009]. Understanding learning at the primary level. ThePrimary Teacher. 30.3-4, NCERT, New Delhi. Adapted and reprinted withpermission in Learning Curve 13, 16-19: Azim Premji Foundation.

Arbuthnot, M. H. (ed.) 1961. The Arbuthnot anthology of children’s literature.Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman.

Calkins, Lucy McCormick. 1980. When children want to punctuate: basic skillsbelong to context. Language Arts 57, 567-573. Reprinted in Childrenwant to write …, 89-96, (Ed.) R. D. Walsh. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.

Goodman, Kenneth S. 1982. In Fredrick V. Gollasch, (Ed.) Language and literacy:the selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman. Vol.1: Process, Theory,Research-Boston: Rontledge Kegan Paul.

Goodman, Kenneth S. 1992.Why whole language is today’s agenda in education.Language Arts 69, 354-363.

Graves, Donald H. 1978. Research update: handwriting is for writing. LanguageArts 55.(3), 393- 399.

Hall, Christine, & Cole, Martin. 1999. Children’s reading choices. Routledge:London.

Heald-Taylor, G. 1987. Predictable literature: selections and activities forLanguages Arts instruction. The Reading Teacher 40, 6-12.


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Herman, P. A. 1985. The effect of repeated readings on reading rate, speechpauses, and word recognition accuracy. Reading Research Quarterly20, 553-565.

Holdaway, D. 1979. The foundation of literacy. Ashton Scholastic: Sydney.

Hudelson, Sarah. 1994. Literacy development of second language children. InFred Genesee, (Ed.) Educating second language children: the wholechild, the whole curriculum, the whole community, 129-158. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Krashen, Stephen D. 1989. We acquire vocabulary and spelling by reading:additional evidencefor the input hypothesis. The Modern LanguageJournal 73 (4), 440-464.

Jangid, Gita. 2004. A whole language approach to second language instruction:literacy and language acquisition. Doctoral dissertation, CIEFL.

NCERT, 2005. National Curriculum Framework. National Council forEducational Research and Training, New Delhi.

Pearson, David P. & Fielding, Linda. 1983. Implications of listeningcomprehension. Reading education research report 39, Centre for theStudy of Reading, University of Illinois, Urbana.

Rhodes, Lynn K. 1981. I can read! Predictable books as resources for readingand writing instruction. The Reading Teacher 34: 511-518.

Samuels, Jay S. 1997. The method of repeated readings. The Reading Teacher50 (5), 376-381.

Trelease, Jim. 1989. Jim Trelease speaks on reading aloud to children. TheReading Teacher 42, 200-206.

Weaver, Constance. 1990. Understanding whole language: from principles topractice. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.

Gita JangidSenior Consultant, Jaypee Associates IT branch

JIL Information Technology, [email protected]

R. AmritavalliThe English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad

[email protected]


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