While Wolf’s approach to literacy development reminded me of why I study English–I love it and it makes me feel loved–it’s troubling how she glosses over the unfortunate situation of those who don’t have the warm, cuddly early experience with literature that produces the emotional attachment that encourages a positive association with reading and writing.
It’s clear that children who don’t experience reading early, and ideally with loved ones, are at a profound disadvantage to those who do, but solutions aren’t offered to make up the deficit.
Does this mean that there is no strategy to get these particular children at pace with children that have literacy exposure? What can educators do to balance this extreme lack?
Wolf’s piece made me feel sad and lonely the entire time that I read it. The way that she connected love and early reading experiences had such a melancholy tone that I just felt like children who didn’t have this connection, even if they could read and weren’t at all disadvantaged, were some how being taken advantage of. I did not like this.
Personally I do not connect love from a person with reading. I think it is unfair to link the two. Just because a parent lacks the resources to teach a child how to read or to provide them with positive sponsors early on does not mean that they do not love their child or want them to succeed. However, this is the message that some of Wolf’s images projected. For example the opening image of the child sitting on an elder’s lap reading a book and feeling loved and linking the two.
Your question of there being a way to even the playing field is one that I also felt was not considered in Wolf’s piece. She simply set it up as being two strict scenarios and did not allow room for anything in between.
There has to be a way to bridge the gap. If not, then I feel like more than half of the world’s population would be severely behind in literacy development. But the answer is also probably environmental and situational and far too complicated for Wolf to explore in the one chapter that we read. Perhaps she hints at it in other chapters?