Viewing young children’s drawing, talking, and writing through a ‘language as context’ lens: implications for literacy assessment

ABSTRACT

We report on our analysis of talk during an assessment task where we asked children living in northern Canadian communities to draw and write about activities they share with family and friends in their daily lives. We introduce a language as context approach to assessing young children’s (ages 4–6 years) literacy and sociocultural knowledge, defining context as understandings of the demands of creating texts through drawing and writing, the genre of classroom assessment, and the values and worldviews of their local community and family. From our inductive analysis of children’s (n = 64) talk during the assessment tasks in the fall and spring of one school year (n = 128), we conceptualise relationships between children’s oral language strategies and their understandings of the conventions of an adult-initiated, one-on-one classroom assessment, their strategies for carrying out the task, and of social meanings in everyday experiences with family and friends in their northern communities. We argue this form of assessment provides a comprehensive picture of children’s meaning-making that encompasses social and cultural practices of a diversity of contexts, including school and community.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood
• oral language
• writing
• drawing
• assessment

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge this research was conducted in the territories of: Treaty 3, Ojibwe First Nations; Treaty 8, Woodland Cree First Nation; and Treaty 9, Ojibway Nation. We are grateful to the communities for welcoming us to work and learn with them. We are thankful to the participating children and their teachers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 895-2012-1007].