Sylvia Ashton-Warner and children's words: a modern investigation

Abstract

The term 'organic' - rare in educational literature - was used in mid-twentieth century New Zealand by the teacher and writer, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who,working predominantly with Māori in small rural schools,applied her concept of organic education in the teaching of emergent literacy. Ashton-Warner rejected commercial texts for the earliest stages of reading, and instead developed a method whereby children selected their own words for reading and writing. Claiming that words of the children's Key Vocabulary would be based on their inner urges and interests, Ashton-Warner attributed the success of her method to what she believed were psychoanalytic origins of children's words. This thesis explores the Key Vocabulary method from the perspective of major theories about reading acquisition, and finds that the method may be seen as consistent with modern sociocultural theories of learning. In view of perennial concerns to find effective methods for teaching literacy, a small-scale partial replication of Ashton-Warner's Key Vocabulary has been undertaken as a case study with two age groups, to examine whether the method has relevance for today's students. While the method was originally intended as a means of introducing new entrant primary school students to literacy, findings from this study indicate its success with students who were struggling to learn to read and write after a year or more of formal literacy learning, suggesting that the method has merit for selected groups of students. Implications for teachers include developing, in the earliest stages of literacy learning, an emphasis that prioritises the child's own language, thoughts, emotions and experiences as subject matter of prime importance for early texts, and the development of a more critical approach to the use of commercial resources at this stage of schooling.