Teaching Children in a Fundamentalist Church

Zinsser's "For the Bible Tells Me So: Teaching Children in a Fundamentalist Church," Michaels' "Narrative Presentations: An Oral Preparation for Literacy with First Graders," and Fishman's "Literacy and Cultural Context: A Lesson from the Amish," are three ethnographic studies of literacy relevant to the literacy hypothesis. The literacy hypothesis, that writing is a technology which transforms human consciousness and brings into existence new forms of thought that could not have existed in the absence of writing, can be challenged by an examination of three communities in which literacy is bound to the contexts of Fundamentalism, Black orality, and Amish tradition.

Zinsser's article focuses on one less-often studied context for literacy--the Sunday school. Zinsser's investigation is an ethnographic one, that is to say, a case study in the subjects' natural setting. With such an approach, Zinsser is able to observe the actual roles reading and writing play in the real, particular contexts in which they are used. Zinsser (1986) cites Heath's observation that in fundamentalist religious settings, there is a "striking similarit[y] of the teaching methods used in church and home" (p. 1). The similarity between church (Sunday School) and home literacy instruction makes a study of the acquisition of reading and writing more manageable, by consolidating what might have been two variables--school and home instruction.

Zinsser's subjects (four- and five-year-olds) were give

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eir speech. "Show and tell" times were special for the children, because they could become the center of their teacher's and classmates' attention for the lengths of their narratives. Explicitly, the children were directed not to tell about TV movies (it takes too long) and private family matters (such as quarrels); other than these restrictions, the children were free in their discourse. Implicitly, however, the children were given cues by their teacher to highlight one particular topic, describe it adequately, and tell their story in sequence--in other words, to use an expository (prose) style. Michaels observed that Black children and white children have two distinct styles of discourse. The Black children had "a way of doing narrative accounts that approximate[d] a highly developed oral narrative tradition which does not require the restricted temporal and causal chain ordering conventions of literate narrative" (Micahels, 1986, p. 7); in other words, the Black children more freely associated throughout their narratives in a topic-associating, rather than topic-centered, style. The white children's discourse tended to be "tightly organized, centering on a single topic or series of closely related topics, with thematic de

Category: Psychology - T