It was only by accident that Troy came to my notice, due to the event described in the following passages. He was a very quiet child who just seemed to blend into the background at Emu Plains District High School; indeed, he seemed to put effort into not being noticed. He was rarely at school when the siren went for the start of school, and tended to slip quietly into the classroom halfway through the morning, giving the impression that he had somehow just materialised.
Attendance
The attendance data collected for Troy show that he was not enrolled at school during term one of his preschool year, and had a very high number of absences during the rest of that year, although the number of absences decreased as the year progressed. During term one the following year, he was taken off the roll at Emu Plains, due to his extended absence. There were no records to confirm that he was attending school elsewhere during this time. He returned to Emu Plains in term 2, when he missed only one full day; however he had a significant number of absences through terms three and four of that year. Table 7.2 below shows Troy’s attendance data collected over the course of the study.
Table 7.2: Number of half days absent, by year and by term: Troy
Term 1 Term 2 Term 3 Term 4 Total
1998 (P) not enrolled 88 38 24 150
1999 (Y1) not enrolled 2 14 10 26
2000 (Y2) 6 20 data not collected 26
Year One at Emu Plains
School starts early at Emu Plains. By 7.30, groups of children were already making their way across the town towards the school. When the siren sounded at 8.00, the children lined up at the bottom of the staircase. Gerri, their teacher, moved them quickly up the stairs and into the classroom. Some children went straight to the mat area and sat down, waiting. There were thirteen children in the classroom at this point. The day began with morning greetings, then news. Gerri chose Jason to tell his news first, and he came out to stand in front of the group. From where I was sitting, behind the group on the floor, what he said was completely unintelligible. He looked at the floor, spoke very quietly and indistinctly, said as little as he could get away with, and returned as quickly as possible to his spot on the mat. Once there, he turned round to talk to Kelly, and at that point he could be heard quite distinctly.
At 8.10, another child arrived and joined the rest of the group on the mat. Now it was August’s turn to tell news. “We got a big fish pond and there was all seaweed in it. And we got a big fish in it and that fish did bite my finger.” At 8.15, Raylene wandered into the classroom and seated herself at the back of the group on the mat. August’s news was very extended, and she was still going. She was now telling a story that involved Rita, and Rita found August’s retelling of the event hilarious. Finally, Gerri told August to wind up her news and August said, “Thank you for listening to my news. Any questions?” Rita asked a question that was almost as extended as August’s news.
Troy was called upon next to tell his news. Like Jason’s, Troy’s news was also very short and almost unintelligible. While this was happening, Gerri was collecting lunch money and completing absentee lists. Some of the children began to get restless and stopped attending. Gerri called them to attention:
Excuse me August, would you sit on your bottom properly. Right, Raylene, Vera, sit on your bottom! Show some manners, please! I can’t believe we’ve got one, two, three rude people in this class not listening. Everyone else is listening beautifully. Unbelievable! Ella, here’s your star, and I love the way you are listening! Ashleigh, fantastic! Jaime, Jack and Kelly, absolutely fantastic listening! I loved the way they sat there, didn’t move, listened very, very, very nicely. We’ve got a few names on the board, but Kelly’s name’s probably going to come off very soon, and he won’t have to do lunchtime detention. Right, first thing we’re going to start off with, let me see…Emma, Jaime, Jack, Ashleigh, August, Rita. Right, word sorts. You guys, look at the words, put them into groups. Gerri had a sheaf of worksheets in her hand, which she passed out as she called out the names. On hearing her name, August immediately responded with “No, I’m not doing a hard thing.” She took the worksheet anyway. As she took the worksheet, she said, “Miss, I’m sitting next to Rita?” Gerri responded in the negative. August tried again: “Miss, I’m in charge?” Gerri said, “No, Emma’s in charge.”
The worksheet was a word sort. The children had to sort a number of words into groups according to their spelling patterns, and then at the end of each list they had to identify and state the spelling rule that applied to that group of words. One group was words that begin with the digraph sh. Another group involved words that had the a‐e pattern and the final group was for words with the i‐e pattern. At this point they had been given no further instruction or explanation.
Gerri directed another group of five children over to a small hexagonal table to play Concentration with sight words. Gerri told one of the children from the group that he was in charge. This left a third group of children still sitting on the mat, waiting for instruction. The third group included Jason, Ella, Troy and Vera. They also had a word sort worksheet, but they had to sort their words according to initial letters. The words were milk, sugar, lollies, lost, money, sun, monkey, smarties, lion, long, Mum, smile. On the worksheet there was a grid with three columns for children to write their words in lists, and at the bottom there were four or five cloze sentences, each of which required one of the words from the list to complete the sentence. At the bottom of each list, there was a space for children to write in other words from around the room. Gerri had blown an example of the worksheet up to A3 size on the photocopier and she worked through the first example with the children on the mat.
Everyone, grab your sheet, come up here. I love the way Emma and Ashleigh are straight to work, that’s fantastic! Now, we’ve got a letter sort. We have to sort them into one, two, three groups. Okay, give me a word, what’s your word, Troy? (Troy points to a word, but doesn’t say
what it is.) Okay, this is mmilk. Mmilk. (Emphasising the /m/). Who can
tell me another word that’s going to go into this group? Vera? What’s another word that can go into this group? Which one? (Vera points to
word.) Excellent, that’s Mmonkey. Jason, what’s another word that goes
in that group? Mmoney. Excellent. And Ella, can you tell me the last – oh, beautiful, she had /m/u/m/, Mum. Okay, who can tell me, why do those words all go together in the same group? Jason? They all start with the same sound, don’t they? /m/ M up there. Okay, look around the classroom, what’s another word that begins with M? Another word? Jason? I want another word. Look around the classroom and give me another word that begins with M. (Long pause.) Okay, go and find one, walk around the classroom. I can see one right now! I can see an M‐ word! Vera, can you see an M‐word? That? That’s Mmonday! Right, come and sit down. Monday. So I’ll just write Mmonday here.
While Gerri was working with this group of children, August came up to her and asked for help with her worksheet. Gerri sent her back to her seat. By now it was 8:45, and Steven arrived at the door, accompanied by another staff member. His hands, his t‐ shirt, his mouth and his lips were covered in some kind of green substance. He entered the room and sat at the back of the group with whom Gerri was working on the mat. He was not directed to do anything.
By this time, several children from the first worksheet group had their hands up, and one or two, like August, were out of their seats. Gerri told them she would be with them in
a minute. “Hands down, guys, I’m working with this group, then I’ll come and help you.” She went through the next group of words with the group on the floor and then sent this group of children to their seats: “What we’re going to do now is, you’re going to go back to your seat and you’re going to do this all by yourselves.” She then she turned to Steven: “Steven, up here, please!” She told him to go to the toilets and wash his hands and face, then come back to class. “Okay, Emma’s group, down here, sitting on the floor. Off you go!” The children came down to the mat and Gerri began to demonstrate to them what they were required to do. The group who were playing Concentration so far seemed to be managing fairly well without any direction. Occasionally there was some argument about the rules of the game and who should be allowed to pick up which cards. Despite Gerri’s nomination of Jamie as “in charge”, Kelly appeared to have appointed himself as the leader of the group, and was issuing instructions to all the others, telling them when it was their turn to have a go. All this time, he kept up a steady drum‐beat on the table. Jason, who was supposed to be doing the initial sound word sort, kept wandering over to their table to see what was going on. The children at this table began to sing the alphabet song, but after a few minutes, they were making so much noise that they attracted Gerri’s attention. By this time, she had finished working with the group of children on the mat, and she came over and spent some time playing Concentration with this group.
Troy, who had been given the activity that involved sorting words by their initial letter, was sitting quietly at his desk, looking around the room. He had not yet attempted anything on his worksheet. I decided to move over and spend some time working with him. While I was working with Troy, I noted that he seemed to be unsure about the terms “word” and “letter”. When I asked him to point to a letter M, he pointed to a whole word. He appeared to use the two terms interchangeably. He could find all the words that started with a lower case m, but he did not demonstrate that he understood that upper case M was the same letter as lower case m.
When he wrote his answers, it appeared that Troy was simply copying the words as they appeared on the worksheet. The worksheet had been typed in a font that used the representations a and
g
, rather than thea
andg
representations that were more common in the classroom. When Troy wrote words that included these letters, he copied them as they were represented on the worksheet. He had very poor motor control, and found it difficult to form the letters.I concluded from this interaction that Troy did not really understand the activity, and, because he did not have enough letter knowledge, it was beyond his level of capability. Later that day, I mentioned my assessment of what Troy understood about print with Gerri. She disagreed wholeheartedly, saying, “He knows it. He can do it. He just doesn’t want to do it.” However, my assessment appeared to be confirmed when Troy participated in the literacy assessment tasks that were part of the study, and these data are reported below.
Troy was a relatively quiet and compliant student who usually appeared to be participating in classroom events. I watched him carefully for the next few days. When on the mat, he appeared to be attending. He often raised his hand when the other students did, but was never called upon to supply an answer. When assigned seatwork tasks, Troy would sit at his seat, pencil in hand and head down, but I noticed that he spent a lot of time watching others, and rarely completed much, if any of the assigned task. It seemed to me that he had developed coping strategies for the classroom. He was working at becoming an invisible child. He had worked out how to get through tasks without drawing attention to himself, or being “shamed” because he did not have to demonstrate his lack of proficiency with print. However, this strategy also worked against him. When Gerri’s attention was drawn to his difficulties, she judged that he did not complete the work because he was “lazy”, rather than because he needed some more instruction.
Assessment data for Troy were not collected during his pre‐primary year, as he was absent from school at the time the assessment tasks were conducted.
Literacy assessment: Year One
Troy was able to identify nine upper case and five lower case letters in Clay’s (1993a) Letter Identification task. He was unable to identify M or m, a, g, a or g. He made a number of substitutions, particularly in the case of the upper case letters. For instance, when presented with the upper case B, he said A; for H he said G, and for J he said S. He scored five points on Clay’s (1993a) concepts about print task. He was able to find the front of the book, recognised that the picture was inverted, and that the print was inverted. He knew what a full stop was, and he was able to show one and two letters. However, when he was asked to show one and two words, he demonstrated this by showing letters again. He was not able to identify any words on the list of sight words. He was able to both recognise and produce rhyme, and he was able to blend three out of eight words at the syllable level.
Troy was given a simple caption book (Foundations, level 1) to read. He “read” the book by labelling the pictures, using a “book‐reading” tone of voice (Sulby, 1985). Figure 7.7: Troy’s writing sample, term 3, 1999 A sample of Troy’s writing, taken at the time the assessment tasks were conducted, demonstrates that at this time Troy knew what writing should look like and showed him experimenting with strings of letters and letter‐like signs. Although he assigned a message to his writing, he had yet to learn about and demonstrate proficiency in using the alphabetic principle. Year Two When Troy was assessed in year two, he was able to identify 12 upper case letters by name and two by sound (Clay, 1993a). He also identified 12 lower case letters by name, and four by sound. He was able to identify both the lower and upper case forms of seven letters. He scored eight points on the Concepts about Print test (Clay, 1993a). He was able to find the front of the book, and demonstrated his understanding that the print carries the message. Once again, he noticed the inversion of the picture and the print, and he was now able to demonstrate that he understood the directionality of print. He was able to point to a full stop. He was not able to adequately show his understanding of the terms “word” and “letter” (items 22 and 23).
Once again, Troy was unable to identify any of the words on the list of sight words. In the test of phonological awareness adapted from Bowey (1995), he was able to easily recognise rhyme, but had difficulty producing it, correctly answering only one item out of four. However, he was able to correctly answer all the items that required him to blend at the syllable level, although he was not able to segment them.
Once again, Troy “read” a simple caption book (Foundations, level 1), using a “book‐ reading” intonation. It was difficult to collect a writing sample from Troy at this time. An examination of his writing book revealed that there were no pieces of writing that had been carried out without assistance. There were few samples of writing of any kind, but figure 7.8 below is typical of the few samples available. This was a photocopied worksheet, with the instructions, “Write a Viking poem” and “Draw a sea monster”. The poem on Troy’s worksheet had been scribed by an adult, and Troy had traced over the top. It was not evident whether the composition of the poem was Troy’s, which had been dictated, or whether it had come from some other source. Figure 7.8: Troy’s Viking poem: 2000 Figure 7.9: Independent writing sample: Troy, 2000
Because I wanted to get an idea of what writing Troy could do without assistance, when the assessment tasks were carried out, I introduced the idea of a written conversation. I wrote a sentence and then read it out to him. I asked him to respond by writing his answer. His response was the writing sample shown above in figure 7.9. When I asked him to read it, he shook his head. Troy had correctly identified the upper case letters
T, R and K in the Letter Identification test (Clay, 1993a), but he had not been able to name the letters M or J.
Figure 7.10 below shows the growth of Troy’s knowledge about school literacy as he moved from year one to year two. It appears that the only area of significant gain is a minimal increase in letter identification. Troy’s writing samples suggest a decline in confidence. When he was in year one, Troy’s writing sample shows that he was using letter‐like forms to approximate writing, and that he assigned a message to his writing. In year two, he used the letters he could remember, but he had a very small bank of known letters to draw from, and he had difficulty forming them. He knew that his writing did not carry a message. It appeared that what he had learned about literacy over the last nine months was that he could not do it. Figure 7.10: Troy: Growth of literacy knowledge