Reading in the Digital Age: A case study of print and digital literacy practices and dominant discourses around reading in the homes of middle-class children in Cape Town across Grade R and Grade 1
Young children who are learning to read are exposed to digital technology from a very young age and many contemporary families have access to a range of digital devices. This project investigates the reading practices, both digital and print-based, of six middle-class suburban children in Cape Town and how the children and their mothers conceptualise reading. By analysing reading practices and associated discourses, this study aims to ascertain how the dominant discourses of the mothers influence the children's reading practices. This research project is a case study using a qualitative approach, with ethnographic data generating techniques. These included observations, interviews with the six children and their mothers and a questionnaire. Analysis of the data showed that middle-class pre-school children engage in many emergent literacy practices, both digital and print-based, in their homes. Both mothers and children conceptualise reading as being the decoding of print, thus not recognising the multimodal meaning-making strategies to access and read screen texts as being part of the children's emergent literacy practices. A critical discourse analysis of the mothers' answers to the interview and questionnaire revealed that their dominant discourses are ‘literacy is a skill' and ‘being a good parent'. This resulted in the mothers in my study all exposing their children to digital technology, but also restricting the amount of time that their children spend engaging with it. The mothers failed to acknowledge the emergent literacy practices present in their children's digital activities and viewed online and offline literacy practices as separate, not acknowledging the relationship between the use of digital technologies and print-based decoding, seeing their digital practices as ‘other' to what they needed to achieve. This serves to marginalise these digital literacy practices in the children's ‘coming to literacy'. In trying to be a good parent, they feel conflicted by the need to expose their children to digital technology and the need to protect them and thus limit their access by imposing restrictions. Thus, discourse shapes which literacy practices are valued and which are restricted. Regimes of truth about what reading is and the need to restrict access to digital technology reinforce the suburban middle-class ideas and ways of becoming literate and being a good parent. Discourse is thus shaping literacy practices in suburban homes and constituting knowledge, marginalising particular ways of being and doing and, thus failing to recognise the child's potential to contribute to their own learning and full participation in their emergent literacy practices. This project concluded that despite literacies changing as a function of social, cultural and technological changes, how people view reading has not changed since the 1950s. If people regard the contribution that the digital is making towards a child's emergent literacy, the ‘formal' literacy learning that occurs in schools and other institutions may improve.
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