Becoming Literate & Literate Traditions

Becoming Literate & Literate Traditions

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about children is education. Most parents want their children to grow up and become Doctors and Lawyers and to be well off. So to help with this dream the parents try to start their children’s education as young as possible. This is why there are such learning programs as Hooked on Phonics and others like Fisher Price. Both of these programs are geared towards helping children achieve literacy at early ages. These programs almost eliminate the need for parents to read to their children or help them with school work, however this in not the case in some families and also communities in today’s society. Some Families feel that their children should go to private schools others to public and then on to college to pursue a degree. This is not the case with either Becoming Literate or Literate Traditions. Both of these illiteracies describe families and even whole communities that have different views on education.

In Becoming Literate the Fishers, an Amish family, censor what their children read, “Eli and Anna attempt to carefully control the reading material that enters their home” (Fishman 239). The do this because they are Old Order Amish. They try to eliminate all outside influences that might have a negative effect on their children.

The people of Trackton, Literate Traditions, are the complete polar opposite. They do not impose at all on the material that their children read, “adults do not create reading and writing task for the young, nor do they consciously model or demonstrate reading and writing behaviors for them……children are left to find their own reading and writing tasks”(Heath 298). This demonstrates two totally different perspectives about reading and writing in which the parents have both a passive influence and a somewhat dictatorship like presence.

In Literate Traditions, children play games to help seep their learning along. They sometimes read the return addresses as a type of game, “Reading names and addresses and return addresses becomes a game-like challenge among all the children, as the school-age try to show the preschoolers how they know “what dat says.”(Heath298) This also brings up another difference between the two literatures. The children of Trackton ask frequent questions towards the adults which in turn the adults respond to their inquiries. These questions range from “what is that” to “how dose this go”. The Amish children seldom ask questions and when the preschoolers “read” it’s more