Reading and writing the world using beautiful books: Language experience revisited

Hoffman, James V., & Roser, Nancy. (2012). Reading and writing the world using beautiful books: Language experience revisited. Language Arts, 89(5), 293-304.

An updated version of the venerable Language Experience Approach is presented here. The update, called Beautiful Books, was used with four and five year old children by the authors’ teacher education students at the University of Texas at Austin. The original Language Experience Approach (LEA), which was supported by the work of well-known literacy educators of the mid-20th century like Russell Stauffer, Roach Van Allen, and Sylvia Ashton-Warner, involved helping children generate language about objects, events, people, and other meaningful things in their lives, and then having the children dictate their own words and sentences about those things, which were “scribed” by the teacher as closely as possible to the child’s language. These dictated and scribed stories then became texts that the children could read and work with. The point of the LEA, according to Stauffer, was to lead children to the insight that print was “speech written down.” Making that powerful speech-print connection has long been considered a prerequisite for learning to read.

Hoffman and Roser provide a detailed history of the LEA, including the approach’s roots, its evolution over the decades until its support by literacy educators like Stauffer, Van Allen, and Ashton-Warner put the approach into the canon of literacy education (and thus into every literacy methods text and course in the English-speaking world and probably beyond), reaching all the way to the concerns raised about LEA by the Whole Language scholars when that movement was at its height in the 1980s and 1990s. The explanation here of exactly what those concerns were was helpful to me. As a literacy educator who has used LEA with promising results in a number of contexts, and who has taught the approach as a teacher educator, and as a supporter of whole language principles myself, I always wondered why the whole language scholars seemed lukewarm about LEA, and distanced themselves from it. The LEA seemed meaning-based and learner-centered enough to me. Why wouldn’t a text that came from a child’s own language about his or her world be meaning-based and learner-centered? The explanation Hoffman and Roser provide finally cleared that up for me; though a teacher’s verbatim “scribing” of a child’s words could be seen as a form of scaffolding, it could also be seen as interference, or as getting in the way of a child’s own discoveries about language, which would be seen as a negative thing through whole language lenses. Thinking about that made me reconsider my own approach to LEA.

In Hoffman and Roser’s version, Beautiful Books, the child is much more in control of the process. The child determines how much and what kind of scaffolding he or she needs from the teacher. The child creates his or her own little books, which contain drawings and writings about things that are important in his or her life. Very often, a drawing is the starting point, though a special word might also be the starting point. A form of shared writing follows which is tailored to the child and his or her particular literacy needs. Sometimes the teacher might provide parts of the text, thinking aloud about letters and sounds as a word is written. Sometimes the creation of the text is a pure collaboration, with both teacher and child providing parts of the text as they “share the pen.” Sometimes the child writes independently, in a way that is consistent with his or her current literacy development.

I don’t know if the revised LEA will meet with more acceptance from the Whole Language community than the previous iteration of LEA did, but reading about Beautiful Books made me anxious to try it, and to tell my students about it. I’ve had some success with LEA for struggling readers as well as for English Learners, but Beautiful Books might be even better. The authors suggest a version for struggling adult readers that intrigues me. The article provides rich details about the updated approach that make the article readable and engaging, and the carefully researched history of the LEA adds weight to the article’s assertions. This article is definitely a “keeper” for literacy educators and classroom teachers.