FAMILY LITERACY

The Importance of Family Literacy

The Importance of Family Literacy

What I Know About My Subject

As a middle school reading teacher, I have often found myself frustrated by the lack of involvement of parents in the education of their children. Increasingly, I have noticed a pattern: students with low comprehension and fluency skills also have seemingly absent or apathetic parents when it comes to the reading habits of their children. Year after year I call home to the parents of my struggling readers and hear things such as “He's never enjoyed reading, but really neither do I, so I don't feel right pressuring him to do it.” or “She tells she is reading for 30 minutes every night, so I sign her reading log, but I don't have time to listen to her read aloud.”

Over the last seven years, the social demographic of my current school has slowly changed due to economic hard times and boundary line changes. As we inched closer to Title I status, I couldn't help but notice that these calls home were becoming more regular, and I'm spending more and more time teaching remedial readings skills as opposed to higher order thinking skills. A couple of years ago, out of sheer frustration born from the realization that the majority of my students were not familiar with the basic nursery rhymes I was using in class to illustrate figurative language concepts, I conducted an informal survey. I asked my students to respond by show of hands how many of their parents read aloud to them when they were children. Less than one third of the students raised their hands. I felt disheartened, but I went on to ask how many of them saw their parents reading on a regular basis or even ever at all. This question yielded less than one fourth of the student's hands being raised.

Later that same day, in my honors section, my figurative language lesson was going beautifully and a realization struck me. I immediately conducted the same informal survey and almost every child in the room's hand shot up for each question. Instinctively, I knew it would, because these students were all familiar with Humpty Dumpty's great fall and were wise to the fact that the dish ran away with the spoon. This was the first moment that I began to see a correlation between early childhood experiences with reading and the development of reading skills at an older age.

My desire to research the effect of family literacy on the development of reading abilities at a later age was born out of frustration in my classroom that has been building over the years. But, also out of my desire to prove the importance of family literacy, backed by legitimate research, to my colleagues and the parents of my students. I am envisioning being empowered by my new knowledge to suggest interventions for my current struggling readers, and as a future librarian to encourage and promote family literacy for all age ...