I want to start by asking you to consider what kinds of knowledge and experience children bring with them when they start school. One of the things we know is that they will have watched an enormous amount of moving image media. Televisions are on in many homes for much of the day, and it’s common practice for parents to use television or video as a child-minder. But children’s engagement with the moving image is often quite active. They quickly identify favourite films and programmes. They use visual search on a video recorder to view and re-view segments of videos that they like, over and over again. They can do this by the time they are two and a half. So by the time they get to school, most children will have been studying moving image media for at least two years.

Is it really legitimate to use the word “studying” for that kind of activity? The conventional view is that time spent watching television and video is time more or less wasted. We’re told it makes children less sociable, more obese, predisposed towards violence and sexual stereotyping, less able to concentrate, lacking in linguistic skills – a whole string of bad effects, presenting teachers with a problem that they have to overcome.

Well, I want to come at that from a different angle, and argue that if children have spent all that time with TV then they must have learned something, because little children do not waste time. Children of two and three years old are learning machines: that’s what they do. They learn. They may not learn what we want them to learn, but everything they encounter or do contributes to their learning: they learn more at that age than they ever will at any other stage of their lives. None of us has the learning capacity of a two-year-old. So rather than dismiss all that TV watching as useless, let’s consider what they may have learned from it.

A group of researchers based at the University of Minnesota  in the USA are investigating aspects of early literacy in young children. They make a distinction between two kinds of skill: the skills of decoding written language, and the skills of comprehension. They point out that in the past, more research has been done on decoding skills than on comprehension skills. The commonly held view is that children must first acquire basic language skills (phonological awareness, vocabulary, character recognition and so on); then they develop the skills of decoding the written language: that is, translating the written code into meaningful language units. It is widely believed that children develop the capacity to comprehend a text on the basis of having acquired these decoding skills. Of course a number of researchers have challenged this view, and argue that children develop comprehension skills from a very early age, at the same time as, or maybe before, they acquire decoding skills.

But what the Minnesota researchers did was to carry out an interesting experiment based on this distinction between decoding and comprehension. Their aim was to try and find reliable ways of predicting the later reading achievement of six-year-olds starting school. They gave two tests to a group of six-year-olds: one to identify their levels of basic “pre-reading” language skills, and one to identify their levels of comprehension of a TV programme – an episode of Rugrats. To test their comprehension of TV they focused particularly on cause and effect – finding out whether the children could identify the reasons for a character behaving in a certain way, for example. They then tracked this group for two years and tested their levels of reading attainment when they got to eight years old.  What they found was that high levels of TV comprehension at age six correlated very closely with high reading attainment at age eight. They were a better indicator of future reading attainment than mastery of basic language skills. In other words if you are a “good TV viewer” when you are six you are more likely to be a good reader when you are eight. They also found that the correlation continued: the good eight-year-old readers continued to be good at understanding TV narratives. What they were good at, in fact, was comprehension.

This research therefore gives us some good evidence for seeing comprehension as a generic skill, not necessarily media-specific. It involves learning about devices such as narrative structure, character functions, symbolic conventions, genre: devices that you don’t need to learn just from print media. Comprehension skills like these can be developed very early, through engagement with moving image media, and extended later to print. And if comprehension skills go on being fostered, children’s competence in understanding all kinds of text is likely to increase.

I think that research offers us a fascinating insight, which has powerful implications for how we approach early literacy. But I also think there is a problem with it. I don’t agree that children’s comprehension skills are somehow being “naturally” nurtured by TV-watching. That implies that TV is immediately comprehensible to very young children, but clearly it isn’t. Let’s consider two-year-olds.

Two to two-and-a-half is the age at which many children start independently choosing to watch TV and have the motor skills to switch it on and insert their tapes or DVDs. But at that age a great deal of what they see is almost incomprehensible! They can’t follow much of a story. They can’t understand most of the language. Almost all the cultural references are beyond them. And yet they will watch it, probably intermittently, and they will very quickly identify favourites. With access to video they will re-view their favourites with a level of persistence that goes way beyond what any adult could manage. I’m sure many of you have seen this happening. What’s going on when they do this?

I suggest that a young child watching a lot of TV and video will begin to learn that sequences of images and combinations of images and sounds can be purposeful, and even predictable.  Think about a film like Monsters Inc, which has hardly any recognisable, “real life” figures in it. We take it for granted that if we see a small image of a green one-eyed monster walking along, followed by a big image of a green one-eyed monster’s face, we are seeing the same monster, closer up. Very young children won’t see this: they think it’s a different, bigger monster. When they do realise it’s the same character, shown differently, they have started to learn the rules of a system. Why are we shown a close up of a face? It doesn’t mimic human perception: we don’t look at something several feet away and then suddenly see it right in front of our noses. A close up is used because the filmmakers want to draw our attention to what that character is saying, or to a character’s reaction to something that’s just happened or just been said. A close up is a filmic convention used for dramatic emphasis. It was not used in the early years of cinema: it evolved as the language of cinema evolved. Its use is not arbitrary: it is governed by rules.

It is true that moving image media do make use of instinctive human behaviour in relation to the visual in such conventions as eye line matching, following movement, etc (Messaris 1994) . For example, when we see a character look off-screen, we expect the next shot to show us what that character is looking at. There are many other conventions in cinematic language that relate closely to instinctive human behaviour, and which seem natural because we are so used to them. They help to sustain the illusion of reality, which is one of the things we all like about moving image media. But what is shown to us on a cinema screen cannot be described as instinctive or natural: it is constructed. Think about an obvious and simple shot such as a camera movement following a character crossing a room. This doesn’t happen by accident. It is there on purpose: because a director has decided it should be there. It’s required perhaps because the audience needs to see the context of the action, or needs to be shown exactly how long it takes this character to cross the room, or because that actor is talking or reacting during that movement.

Furthermore, moving image media are multi-modal. They tend to get labelled as “visual media”, but this overlooks the important functions of aural modes such as voice, music and sound design.   You only have to try watching TV with the sound turned down, or listening to a sound track without the visuals, to realise how important sound is as a component of meaning in moving image media.

Finally, we need to remember that these media are also time-based. Like music and dance, a film or television programme has a fixed duration. It uses rhythm and pace to contribute to meaning. The relationship between “screen time” and “real time” can be deliberately varied: it can be the same, or it can be slower. By cutting to and fro between the speeding train and the heroine tied to the track, screen time is stretched to increase suspense. By cutting straight from a proposal scene to a wedding day, many days or weeks are elided, but the narrative logic is clear. These conventions may seem “natural”, but they are not. We have all learned to understand them.

So it’s important to recognise and accept that moving image media have developed codes and conventions which, like linguistic grammars, are rule-bound and which we have to decode in order to understand the medium. In moving image media, there are distinctive and medium-specific codes and conventions through which time is managed in narratives, characters are presented, generic categories are signalled, analogies expressed, mood and atmosphere are indicated, and different modalities in the relationship between text and reality are established.


So I think the Minnesota researchers may have missed something out when they tested children only for their TV comprehension skills. Those six-year-olds must actually have had an impressive repertoire of TV decoding skills as well. This doesn’t undermine the researchers’ findings – in fact it adds to their force. We need to acknowledge that children come into school having learned not only how to follow cause and effect in film and TV narratives but also a huge and complex system of moving image codes and conventions. We need to accept that this learning is important; but we also need to be very clear about why it’s important.

You could say, “So what? Children do learn TV decoding skills but they learn them very easily and at such an early age that it really isn’t very significant by the time they get to school, so why should we pay any attention to them? And if they do develop their comprehension skills through TV, fine, we can use that to help them learn to read, which is clearly more important”.

Well, let’s look at a film at this point to help us think this through. The film I want to show you is actually part of our KS3 teaching resource, Screening Shorts, but I’d like to show it because the director, Michael Dudok de Wit, will be here this afternoon, and it’ll be a great opportunity to talk to him about it.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER
By Michael Dudok de Wit – 8 minutes

I hope you agree that it would be hard to think of that film only in terms of its usefulness to the teaching of literacy. Most people find it extremely powerful and very moving: it demands thought and reflection in its own right. I wouldn’t agree with anyone who wanted to argue that because it’s a moving image text, it is intrinsically of less value than a print text.  But what would teachers expect to do with it? The instinctive response of many English teachers would probably be to ask pupils to write about it, using the film’s emotional impact as a stimulus. So suggested topics might be, tell the daughter’s story from her own point of view, or imagine that you are one of the people who sees her returning so often to the shore. Those would be quite nice tasks and probably some very good imaginative writing would result. But the film then is just used as a starting-point: its own story-telling strategies aren’t examined.

One of the things Mark Reid has developed in INSET sessions is to ask teachers just to write the opening sentence of Father and Daughter.  Perhaps you’d just like to think about that for a moment.

Here are some examples from other people who’ve tried the same task.

He knew he was going to have to say goodbye – perhaps for ever.
Every weekend we used to ride out to the shore where the boat was moored.
The only sound they can hear is the call of the curlew.
One day, Daddy went away.

Again, it is just a writing task, so no different in some ways from what you’d expect to do in an English classroom. The difference is the level of focus on the strategies necessary for storytelling in each medium. Each of those writers has had to make choices: tense (present, past, past continuous), point of view, and what the first piece of information is going to be. Michael Dudok de Wit also had to make a vast range of choices about that opening sequence: framing, camera distance and angle, sound, music, movement, duration: all of which are meaningful, and all of which combine to create the opening of a story.

By being asked to look so closely at these few moments of the story opening, and to think about how two different media handle it, pupils do have a chance to think more deeply about how story telling works. They may come to understand that all story telling involves many choices, and that those choices matter. And on the way, they will, inevitably, come to see that film is a unique and distinctive medium. Writing is a medium that cannot be replicated on film; film has its own ways of telling stories that cannot simply be replicated in words. This is the essential starting-point for their own adventures as viewers of moving image media, as makers of their own moving images, and as critics of the moving images they encounter every day.

But in the school context, why does this matter? The tempting argument to make is simply that film, television and video are useful stepping-stones to the acquisition of traditional literacy. It’s clearly true that if teachers take account of children’s early audio-visual experiences – respect them; encourage children to talk about them; show films in class for discussion and as a stimulus – then that will help the children to become competent readers and writers.

It’s a tempting argument – but its value is very limited, because it just takes us back to the traditional idea of literacy as nothing more than a competence in reading and writing, a competence that is separate from, and more valuable than, other kinds of decoding and comprehension skills. I don’t think this kind of hierarchical distinction is helpful or constructive. We need to think of literacy as a repertoire of related skills, some of which are generic and some of which are specific to particular media, but all of which are of value. Can we agree that no one is going to be literate in the 21st century unless they’re also media literate?

Keynote address given to the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education in November 2004. 

© 2004 Cary Bazalgette