ROLE: Story Listening Technologies for Emergent Writing Literacy

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While multiple, and technological literacies have become the topic of considerable research, reading and writing literacy remain the basis of education, and the prerequisites to science, mathematics, and technology fluency. Reading and writing do not start in school, however. Children prepare themselves for later literacy long before first grade. And preparation for literacy consists of more than becoming aware of text. Children learn to treat language as an object (metalinguistic awareness), and to create and maintain cohesive text (decontextualized language) first in oral language. Many of these emergent literacy skills are acquired in language play and in storytelling among peers. In general, however, very few technologies are available for supporting children's storytelling and story writing in sociocultural context for later literacy, despite its importance in children's cognitive, communicative, and linguistic development as a whole. This project lays out a program of research designed to address a specific need of young children -- to learn how to write -- based on one specific ability of young children -- the ability to tell stories. Current views of the relationship between oral and written literacy hold that the development of children's written literacy is intertwined with the development of their oral literacy skills. We believe that technology, and particularly tangible non-screen-and-keyboard based technology, can play a unique role in supporting the emergence of writing literacy by building on one particular aspect of oral literacy, children's story telling. We propose that Story Listening Systems that actually listen to children's stories and interact with them about the stories not only support the development of emergent oral literacy skills but also foster writing skills and the transition from oral to written literacy. The model behind the Story Listening System embodies four essential traits that enable it to effectively scaffold written literacy. The four traits are to (a) depend on children's oral storytelling skills to bootstrap literacy, (b) introduce peers as playmates in the system or with the system, (c) invite the kind of embodied play away from the desktop that is most comfortable for young children, (d) allow children to construct their own personally meaningful content. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of these systems, children between the ages of 4 and 7 will engage with Story Listening Systems and we will assess changes in three crucial predictors of written literacy: (i) use of decontextualized language (language removed from its original context, and reworked for a new audience), (ii) metalinguistic awareness, (iii) collaboration with peers to make meaning. We will also evaluate an additional implication of the SLS: that support for emergent literacy can be made culture-inclusive and therefore can be used to invite more children into emergent writing literacy because the language forms with which they are familiar are embedded in the system. The outcome of the proposed work will be four-fold: (i) a suite of story listening literacy technologies, (ii) a substantive body of data evaluating the role of these technologies in children's writing, (iii) a fuller understanding of the general mechanisms underlying children's development of literacy skills, (iv) a generalized set of design principles that link features of technology with features of children's written literacy acquisition. The design principles will be for two audiences: the design community creating children's digital technologies (e.g. everyone from mainstream toy industries making physical artifacts to game designers to traditional educational/learning software designers) and those actively studying and teaching written literacy (e.g. developmental psychologists, educators). This work has implications, then, for the communities of academics, educators, technologists, and policy organizations concerned with placing technology in school contexts.