Jackie Marsh
Menace or motivator?
"Teletubbies" and the language
and literacy curriculum in the early years
This article provides
a broad outline of a project which was undertaken in order to explore
the potential the television programme the Teletubbies has for motivating
children to take part in literacy activities in the early years.
The Teletubbies programme reflects certain aspects of a postmodern
childhood in that children watch television screens within television
screens as short documentaries are played on the Teletubbies' tummies.
Thus, as Wagg (1992) has pointed out, children in the latter part
of the twentieth century are exposed to a media which has become
increasingly self-referential. Television programmes, films, videos,
video games, children's magazines and comics make reference to each
other in a microcosmic media world. This cultural intertextuality
which pervades much of children's media isolates some adult audiences
and the potential for misunderstanding is high. In addition, the
Teletubbies has faced further censure because it has dared to appeal
directly to toddlers through the use of simplified sentence structure
and the repetition of one and two word phrases. This is a language
which they instantly recognise because it mirrors the grammatical
structures which feature in children's early spoken discourse (see
Garton and Pratt, 1998). The programme has been criticised in the
UK for this use of language and its supposed lack of educational
focus (Messenger-Davies 1997). Stephen Byers, the schools minister
at the time, claimed that the programme typified the 'dumbing down'
of children's television. However, as McDonnell (1994) has pointed
out, some adults have always resisted children's popular culture,
each generation concerned that innocent youth are about to be corrupted
by contemporary media:
It may appear to contemporary crusaders that
violence in the popular media is a threat of an entirely different
order than these quaint artefacts of the past. But in their day
the Rovers boys, silent movies and True Crime comics were believed
to be every bit as threatening to the existing social order as Ninja
Turtles and Terminator movies are today. (Mc Donnell, 1994, p. 112)
This kind of reaction is both an over-estimation
of the potential power of the media and an example of the socio-cultural
construction of childhood as a state of purity (see Walkerdine,
1999). The furore over the Teletubbies has led to some extreme reactions,
including the banning of the programme by some playgroups (Wainwright,
1999) and the suggestion that watching the Teletubbies can delay
the linguistic development of young children (Timms, 1999). However,
the exclusion of children's popular cultural interests from the
nursery and school curriculum is nothing new.
The absence of many children's cultural interests
within the nursery and school curriculum is well documented (Luke,
1993; Lankshear and McClaren ,1993; Lankshear, 1997; Gee, 1996;
Street, 1997). This has led to the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977)
of middle class children forming, almost exclusively, the primary
currency of education. Thus the texts which line classroom shelves
are located within mainstream literary traditions and not within
children's media experiences. Media education syllabuses in secondary
schools appear to be the only spaces for work relating to children's
media choices, but such courses are marginalised within the system.
There is very little evidence of work relating to the media in the
early years' curriculum. There are no references to children's media
or popular cultural texts in curriculum documents pertaining to
the early years in England. Instead, the texts teachers are directed
towards are located primarily within the traditional canon of children's
literature. A critical reading of the statutory curriculum documents
in England supports the assertion that the curriculum has been constructed
within class boundaries. The acquisition of literacy model which
is utilised is rooted firmly within the middle-class child-rearing
practices of industrialised societies. The work of Brice-Heath (1983)
demonstrated strongly that this model was not applicable to all
classes and that the literacy practices of white and black working
class communities are largely ignored in schools. Work on popular
culture in schools, including children's media choices, could mean
that the cultural capital of working class children gained some
acknowledgement within the curriculum. This is not to suggest that
working class children hold a monopoly on the consumption of popular
culture; however, many middle class children do have other cultural
interests which are reflected within the curriculum. Middle-class
children also watch Rugrats or Barney the dinosaur, but their bookshelves
are more likely to contain the texts found on school library shelves
or government recommended lists.
The early years are a fundamental stage in
the development of literacy skills (Hall, 1987; Whitehead, 1999).
How much more powerful could this development be if children were
encouraged to interact with texts which were highly motivating to
them? Guthrie, J.T., Van Meter, P., Dacey Mcanu, A., Wigfield, A.,
Bennett, L., Poundston, C.C., Rice, M.E., Faibisch, F.M., Hunt,
B., and Mitchell, A.M. (1996) suggest that 'long-tern increases
in motivational and cognitive aspects of literacy are interdependent'
(p.323) and it appears that children's interests in the literacy
tasks with they engage is central to any meaningful progress in
those tasks (Turner 1995; Guthrie et al., 1996). Literacy practices
in nurseries and schools should be located within children's socio-cultural
worlds if this motivation is to be enhanced (Smogarinsky and O'Donnel-Allen
(1998) and there is research which suggests that media and popular
texts can indeed be a powerful motivator in the early years' literacy
curriculum (Dyson, 1997; Marsh, 1999). Often, topic-based work in
nurseries and primary schools fails to engage critically with the
lived realities of children. The project which is discussed in this
paper was undertaken in order to explore the potential that popular
culture has for motivating young children towards language and literacy
activities.
The
study
The study was undertaken in three primary
schools and two nurseries. The nurseries and schools were situated
in inner-city areas of a northern English city. They served diverse
communities which included African-Caribbean, Pakistani, Bengali,
Chinese, Yemeni, Somali and white British and Irish families. The
majority of the families were working-class. The five-month long
project contained a number of elements which involved introducing
a range of literacy activities into the curriculum. Some of these
activities were related to the Teletubbies. This programme was chosen
because of its enormous appeal to young children. The activities
introduced into the nurseries and classrooms included: reading Tubby
custard recipes; writing Tubby recipes for a range of food; reading
Teletubby comics; making Teletubby comics; writing letters to the
Teletubbies; writing Teletubby stories; designing adverts to place
in the Teletubby comics. Altogether, 63 nursery-aged children and
68 primary-aged children were involved in the project, although
they did not all take part in the same activities. Qualitative data
were collected using field notes, photographs, children's work and
interviews with staff. Work undertaken in the nurseries has been
reported elsewhere (Marsh, forthcoming). Here, the effect of the
introduction of Teletubby comics into one of the nurseries and one
of the primary classes is used to illustrate the potential the programme
has for enlivening the early years' language and literacy curriculum.
Teletubbies in the literacy hour
Since the advent of the National Literacy
Strategy in England in 1997, the use of big books for shared whole
class reading has been a key feature of many classrooms. It was
decided to use Teletubby comics in an enlarged text format during
the shared reading sessions. This led to much excitement from the
children, as this extract from the project diary indicates:
"As soon as Jane placed the comic on
the big-book stand, there was a wave of excitement from the class
and whispers of, 'Teletubbies' comic!'. Jane discussed the layout
of the front of the comic with the children and the interchange
demonstrated that they were very confident with the genre. The shared
reading of the story contained within the comic was obviously enjoyed
by all and children maintained interest throughout, demonstrating
familiarity with the characters and able to predict key sequences.
This was especially noticeable with children who were in the early
stages of acquiring English, children who were not usually able
to sustain concentration throughout a shared reading session."
Because of the pervasiveness of American
popular culture which uses the medium of English, related texts
have great potential for developing children's confidence and expertise
in English when it is an additional language for them (Orrellana,
1994; Marsh, 1999). This is not to suggest that popular culture
which is rooted in children's first language experiences is to be
ignored in an unquestioning acceptance of this imperialistic saturation
of the market. Nevertheless, in this study, the use of the Teletubbies
programme did encourage young bilingual children to engage in talk
in English. Some of the children talked about their home life, in
terms of consumption of the Teletubbies programme and related merchandise,
for the first time since attending nursery (Marsh, forthcoming).
As the head of one of the nurseries, Catherine, noted:
"The children all watch television,
don't they…and they all watch the Teletubbies, no matter what their
first language. So it means that they can all share understandings
when they come to nursery, they all know it. It's something they
can respond to straight away."
The incorporation of work on the Teletubbies
into the early literacy curriculum not only encouraged oracy, it
also provided motivation for reading and writing activities. Some
children sustained more interest in the writing activities based
on the Teletubbies than writing activities based on other topics.
For example, Yassar, a 5-year-old child, asked to take part in almost
every writing activity based on the Teletubby comics. He was not
usually, according to class teacher, so vociferous in his requests
to write and this extract from the project diary does indicate that
it was his love of the Teletubbies which was the key to his motivation.
Yassar came up to me again and pleaded, "Can
I do that?" "Again?" I asked. "Yes", he nodded vigorously, "I want
to do Teletubbies". Each time I set up a writing activity based
on the Teletubbies, he rushes over to join in. Our initial surprise
at this has worn off! Today he settled down to write yet another
Teletubby story (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Extract from Yassar's Teletubby story
There were many examples of this kind of
reaction throughout the study. Children who had been described as
usually reluctant to take part in reading and writing activities
were highly motivated to undertake them during this project. This
is not to suggest that the work on the Teletubbies had a direct
effect on children's attainment in reading and writing; the aims
of the project did not lie in this direction and the methodology
could not support such a claim. However, the study did demonstrate
that work on the Teletubbies provided a strong attraction to language
and literacy activities within these schools and nurseries and without
such engagement the drive to read and write can flounder.
This article has focused on the use of popular
cultural texts as a means of stimulating literacy and oracy in the
early years of education. However, the debate has wider implications
concerning the nature of texts with which children are currently
engaging. Many nurseries and primary schools need to recognise that
children are reading a wide range of texts outside of school, much
of it consisting of televisual print as they encounter computer
screens, teletext and video games at home and in the community.
Many of the same skills are used when reading paper-based and televisual
texts (Robinson, 1997) and the links between this rich plethora
of texts should be exploited to the full if children are to make
progress in a wide range of reading skills. Thus watching the Teletubbies
on screen could be linked to a range of reading activities using
related print-based and televisual texts in the nursery and primary
classroom. Like many other television programmes, the Teletubbies
has spawned a vast industry which markets related products such
as dolls, games, household ware and clothing. Robinson (1998) suggests
these are 'secondary texts' (p. 34) and argues that they:
"…may have a particular mediating role
in terms of heightening awareness of intertextuality and thus need
to be seen as part of the community within which children learn
to read television" (Robinson, 1998, p. 34-35).
It may be the case that these products also
provide a strong context for learning to read and write print-based
text. Environmental print is now recognised as a strong factor in
early reading development (Hallet, 1999). How much more familiar
is this print when it appears on children's mugs or t-shirts and
is related to their favourite television programmes? Educators in
the early years need to recognise the transformative nature of technology
and its impact on literacy practices as we approach the third millenium.
We need to familiarise ourselves with the media-saturated environment
surrounding the children we teach and utilise it in order to provide
a powerful tool for learning. Some may question this rather opportunistic
appropriation of children's culture, but it important to steer clear
of a simplistic response to what is a complex web of media consumption,
pleasure and critical engagement. Ultimately, if we fail to grasp
the significance of these powerful media texts for children and
do not exploit the potential they have, we may be in danger of locating
schooled language and literacy practices within a remote cultural
wilderness which becomes increasingly irrelevant to children's everyday
lives.
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AUTHOR
Jackie Marsh is Principal Lecturer, Centre
for English in Education, Sheffield Hallam University, Great Britain.
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