Literacy, Video Games, and Popular Culture

Abstract

In this chapter, I place the role of popular culture – and video games as one characteristic popular cultural media – squarely in the framework of literacy traditionally conceived. So, let’s start with reading. Consider the situation of a child learning to read. What should our goal for this child be? On the face of it, the goal would seem to be that the child should learn to decode print and assign basic or literal meanings to that print. However, the situation is not that simple. We know from the now well-studied phenomenon of the “fourth-grade slump” (i.e., the phenomenon whereby many children, especially poorer children, pass early reading tests but cannot read well enough to learn academic content later on in school) that the goal of early reading instruction has to be more forward-looking than simple decoding and literal comprehension (American Educator, 2003; Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin, 1990; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). The goal has to be that children learn to read early on in such a way that this learning creates a successful trajectory throughout the school years and beyond. Such a trajectory is based more than anything else on the child’s being able to handle ever increasingly complex language, especially in the content areas (e.g., science and math), as school progresses (Gee, 2004). Children need to get ready for these increasing language demands as early as possible. Early phonemic awareness and early home-based practice with literacy are the most important correlates with success in first grade, especially success in learning to read in the “decode and literally comprehend” sense (Dickinson & Neuman, 2006). However, the child’s early home-based oral vocabulary and early skills with complex oral language are the most important correlates for school success – not just in reading but also in the content areas – past the first grade, essentially for the rest of schooling (Dickinson & Neuman, 2006; Senechal, Ouellette, & Rodney, 2006). This latter claim needs to taken in a certain way: as discussed herein, we are not talking primarily about children’s “everyday” vernacular

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.