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Children as authors and actors: literacy development through 'basic activities'

Saint Xavier College, Chicago

Gillian Dowley McNamee

Erikson Institute, Chicago

Storytelling and dramatization activities are described for language- learning-disabled children which highly motivate them to write, listen to, and dramatize stories. The work of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, and other recent research in mediated learning, demonstrates that when children participate in such activities that challenge them, they gradually become aware of the skills necessary to carry out the tasks, and internalize the means for doing so based on the help they are receiving from teachers and peers. Thus children become literate by mastering skills in the context of an activity that has a purpose which makes sense to them.

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