Intertextuality in preschoolers’ engagement with popular culture: implications for literacy development

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that popular culture often finds its way into classroom discourse, generally in the form of intertextual references that students make. As some scholars have shown, such allusions are often ignored. Even if they are validated, this does not happen in a systematic way that would exploit their full potential as a learning scaffold. This is partly because most teachers are unaware of the nature of students’ engagement with popular culture. Drawing on data gathered in an ethnographic study of home literacy practices of five preschool boys in Singapore, we would like to offer insight into these boys’ engagement with popular cultural texts. The boys were observed for 30 hours each over nine months in their homes. Data were gathered using a variety of instruments, namely field notes, literacy diaries, photographs and audiovisual recordings. Using the analytic lens of intertextuality, we demonstrate how engagement with popular cultural texts provided these boys with prior textual experience, and served as a stimulus not only to access more texts but to be involved in the creation of novel texts. We also discuss pedagogical implications, encouraging educators to harness popular culture as a platform for fostering literacy development in schools.

Keywords:

• popular culture
• literacy development
• intertextuality
• preschoolers
• reading

Notes

*WC = white collar; BC = blue collar.

**Decoding only, using Nelly and Smith (2005). AL = at age level; ABL = above age level; BAL = below age level.

***Based upon researchers’ and parents’ judgment.

1. While some researchers (e.g. Sipe 2001; Pappas et al. 2003) consider references to children's personal experiences as intertextual connections, we do not do so in this study.

2. It is common for children in Singapore to start learning how to read (decode) in kindergarten. The five boys were able to speak Tamil and English, and all five were able to decode simple texts in English. They were able to recognize and read simple words in Tamil but did not know all the letters.

3. However, it is not difficult to see that the youth entertainment industry has exploited and is partly fueling children's fascination with some of these themes, attested by an abundance of movies and books in the fantasy and horror genres.