SOCIAL CLASS AND FAMILY LITERACY PRACTICES

SOCIAL CLASS AND FAMILY
LITERACY PRACTICES

William Louden

Introduction

The starting point for our case studies of family literacy practices was a set of differences based on community location: whether the families lived in urban or rural environments. For this reason, we chose to structure the selection of case study families to represent the range of urban and rural locations in Western Australia. Half of the participating families were to be recruited in the Perth metropolitan area and the other half were to be recruited from a medium-sized country town, a smaller farming community on the margin of the arable agricultural area, and a remote community with a majority population of Aboriginal people. As we began planning to recruit families to represent the range of geographical community contexts, we bore in mind some of the other sets of differences that seem to distinguish families. In particular, we chose to attend to sets of difference based on family language background and our expectations about social class. This chapter reports on our experience of literacy practices and social class differences among our case study families. It begins with a discussion of the reasons for considering social class in the study, describes the relationship between class and location in selection of the case study families, and then considers the evidence the study provides on the relationship between social class and family literacy practices.
Why Consider Social Class Differences?

At least three reasons may be advanced for our decision to attempt to structure social class differences into the selection of families participating in the study. The first reason concerns the quantitative research literature on students’ school performance, which consistently reports a relationship between social class and performance (see, for example, Walberg & Tsai, 1985). Such measures of school performance usually consider reading, writing and mathematics. Although there is also some international evidence of relatively poorer performance in rural schools, these differences do not seem to be uniform (Garden & Livingstone, 1989; Elley, 1992). In reading, for example, urban-rural differences occurred predominantly in less developed countries such as Slovenia, Hungary, Greece and Portugal, Trinidad-Tobago, Indonesia and Venezuela. Rural-urban differences in reading were negligible in several of the more highly developed countries such as Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the United States, and in favour of rural schools in France, Switzerland and New Zealand (Elley, 1992, pp. 62-64). Moreover, recent Australian research suggests a much stronger relationship between social class and school performance than rural or urban location and school performance. Considering a state-wide Western Australian sample of achievement in reading, writing and mathematics, the Monitoring Standards in Education Project concluded:
While the location of the school had a small but statistically significant effect on student performance, there was a much stronger socio-economic effect. That is, students from higher socio-economic areas consistently outperformed students from lower socio-economic areas. (Western Australia, 1993a, p. 8)

The second reason for attempting to structure selection of case study families around our preconceptions of social class differences relates to the international literature on family literacy practices. One strand of this research has examined literacy practices among different social groups (Chall & Snow, 1982; Heath, 1983) leading to the conclusion that “children whose home literacy practices most closely resemble school literacy practices are more successful in school” (Auerbach, 1989, p.167). Another, related, strand of research has considered the relationship between parental involvement and school performance. In a review of this literature, Morrow & Paratore (1993) concluded that “practices such as shared reading, reading aloud, making a variety of print materials available, and promoting positive attitudes toward literacy have been found to have a significant impact on children’s literacy learning” (1993, p.194). Auerbach (1989) provides a complementary list of forms of parent involvement in schooling, including “creating a home atmosphere conducive to learning, responding to school communications, helping at school, performing academic tasks with children, and working in parent advisory groups” (1989, p. 168). If these particular family literacy practices and patterns of parent involvement in schooling were are associated with social class differences (see Wells, 1986, pp. 134-136, for example) it might be argued that the differences in family literacy practices actually cause the widely observed social class differences in student performance.
These two empirical reasons for considering social class in the study - the relationship between social class and student outcomes, and the relationship between parents’ behaviour, social class and student outcomes - are complemented by a third argument for attending to social class differences in literacy practices. Commissioned Australian studies of literacy and schooling, it seems, rarely deal with the hard facts of class inequalities in educational outcomes. Freebody (1993), for example, cites the case of a commissioned report on educational standards in the state of Victoria (McGaw, et al, 1989) which spends some 80 pages discussing barely significant gender differences in reading, writing and mathematics, and submerges in an appendix evidence of a much stronger relationship between school performance and social class. Similarly, the published analysis of a Western Australian study of school performance (Western Australia, 1993b) carefully compares performance by gender, language background and Aboriginality but makes no comment on social class differences. Only later, when a parliamentary committee on rural education began to ask uncomfortable questions about urban-rural differences was an analysis of social class differences prepared in an internal working document (Western Australia, 1993a). The apparent urban-rural differences in the data, this report argued, were largely due to differences in the proportion of lower socioeconomic status students in rural schools. Whatever the reason may be for avoiding social class as a research category, it seems that evidence of first language and gender differences is much more palatable than evidence of social class differences in school performance.
Schools, Families and Social Class Differences

Notwithstanding the apparent clarity of the evidence on school performance and class differences, the study was not commissioned as a study of social class and literacy. The primary category for selection of families was urban or rural location. The original outline of this study called for twelve urban and twelve rural families. Six community locations were selected: three in the Perth metropolitan area and three in the country. In addition, we planned to represent a variety of language backgrounds and social class conditions through these communities. Social class differences in the school intake areas are represented by whether or not the schools were included in one of the Commonwealth government’s programs of support for disadvantaged schools in 1993: the Disadvantaged Schools Program or the Priority Country Areas Program. Chapter 4 of this report has provided an account of the range of language backgrounds among families in the study. A brief outline of each the six communities and their schools appears below.
Windsor Park Primary School, like many other schools in Australia’s sprawling suburbs, serves a recently established and economically advantaged community. Twenty years ago, the land was a pine plantation on the edge of the metropolitan area: now it is occupied by several thousand families living in single dwellings with a median value of almost double the median price of all Perth homes. Forty percent of the school population comes from non-English speaking backgrounds, many of them first generation immigrants from Asia.
Redlands and Radcliffe Primary Schools are suburban schools which draw funds from the Disadvantaged Schools Program. Both schools serve neighbourhoods which include some privately owned single dwellings, many single dwellings rented from the state housing authority, and a sprinkling of multi-story apartment blocks provided by the state housing authority for low income earners. Both schools include substantial minorities of students from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Countrytown is a community of less than 5,000 persons in a wheat and sheep farming area in the South-West corner of Australia. Countrytown has two government primary schools - Countrytown and Highglen - and a small Catholic primary school. In 1993, when we collected the data, one of the two government schools was classified as Disadvantaged. Countrytown Primary, which has received additional funding from the Disadvantaged Schools Program for many years, is the older of the two government schools. Three families were drawn from Countrytown Primary. The second government school, Highglen Primary, was not funded through the Disadvantaged Schools Program. Situated in an area known locally as “Nob’s Hill”, which includes some affluent private housing as well as some publicly provided housing mainly occupied by Aboriginal people, Highglen was locally regarded as the higher status government school. About ten percent of the students in both Countrytown Primary and Highglen come from a Malay background. Twenty five percent of the children at Countrytown identify as Aboriginal; fewer than fifteen percent of the students at Highglen identify as Aboriginal. Four families were drawn from Highglen Primary. One family was drawn from St Andrews, the Catholic primary school. A third of the children at St Andrews were from farming families; none of the children were from Aboriginal or Malay backgrounds.
In addition to the Countrytown families, we also sought to work with two families from each of two very small rural communities. When plans to approach two families through the school in a remote Aboriginal community failed, we used existing personal contacts to approach a family in Blue Creek, a community of five extended families who live close to one of the service towns in the East Kimberley region in the remote North-West corner of Australia. The children from this family, living on the margin of non-Aboriginal Australia, attended a school which received additional funding through the Priority Country Areas Program. The final two families were approached through the primary school at Yabby Creek, a small town of about 120 persons on the edge of the farming land sixty kilometres inland from Countrytown. By virtue of its isolation, the Yabby Creek school qualifies for additional disadvantaged school funding through the Priority Country Areas Program. In view of the small size and homogeneity of the school and community, however, we did not attempt to select the Yabby Creek families according to perceived social class differences in the community.
Across the whole study, then, we worked with six city families whose children were enrolled in Disadvantaged Schools Program schools and six city families whose children were not enrolled in Disadvantaged Schools Program schools. Of the eleven rural families, we worked with three rural families whose children were enrolled in a Disadvantaged Schools Program school, three families whose children were enrolled in a school disadvantaged by isolation, one family whose children were enrolled in a private school with relatively few children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and four families whose children were enrolled in a school not funded by the Disadvantaged Schools Program.
The absence or presence of schools on the list of disadvantaged schools provided the study with a clear first cut on social class differences of school communities. Schools either were or were not eligible for additional funding on the basis of an Australian-wide index of disadvantage. The individual families with which we worked in each school community, however, could not be fitted so neatly to an “upper” or “lower” dichotomy. As we analysed the data on family literacy practices, we wondered whether there were, in fact, any regularities in the patterns of literacy practices we found in the two groups of schools. For some pairs or groups of families, there did seem to be strong sets of similarities; for other pairs and sets of families, there was no obvious pattern of relationships between school type, family circumstances and literacy practices. The purpose of the remainder of this chapter is to consider the case study evidence of relationships between social class and family literacy practices. For the purpose of this analysis, the data from seven of the twenty-three families in the study will be considered. These families will be considered in two groups: Group 1 comprises the Caravaggio, Scott/Clay/Bailey and Kha Families, Group 2 comprises the Long , Waugh, Kelly and Jackson Families
Group 1: The Caravaggio, Scott/Clay/Bailey and Kha Families

The Caravaggio Family

The Caravaggio family have three children who attend Highglen primary school in Countrytown. In terms of income, education and the social status of their occupations, they appear to be middle class. John Caravaggio, the children’s father, is a solicitor. Anne, their mother, is trained as a biochemist but works part-time in her husband’s office. Her father is a medical practitioner. Their children attend the higher status government primary school, Highglen, and they live on “Nob’s Hill”.
The Caravaggios have many of the family literacy practices and patterns of parent involvement in schooling that have been associated with school success. Anne is a keen reader and is closely involved in the children’s schooling. For seven years she was treasurer of the Parents and Citizens Association. One morning a week she helps out with mathematics in the class of her youngest child. She also helps out in the school library once a week. She reads aloud to her six-year old son Andrew, who loves being read to and loves reading books from school. She is well informed about the children’s school activities and closely monitors their homework. She checks Paul’s (Year 7) maths homework and takes him to the library to get information for assignments. One of the few reservations she expressed about the school was that Jane’s (Year 4) teacher does not set homework. I don’t really like the idea, she said. I don’t [think] we get an idea about what’s going on and what they’re doing.
One of the audio tapes collected by the family gives an idea of Anne and John’s involvement in their children’s schooling.

ANNE: And what homework have you got this week Paul?
PAUL I’ve got a car project due in tomorrow I’ve got ...
JOHN: Oh
ANNE: Car project? What’ve you got to do for that?
PAUL: I’ve got time tomorrow
ANNE: What do you have to do in it?
PAUL: Stuff on cars.
ANNE: So what subject is that car project for?
PAUL: Library.
ANNE: Library?
PAUL; Mmmmm
ANNE: So do you need any more information or have you got enough information.......Have you got enough information for it?
PAUL: Yes.
ANNE: Dad might have some glossy magazines or something.
PAUL: He would [laughs].
ANNE: Or are you trying to be lazy and do as little as possible on it?
PAUL: No.
(Something unintelligible)
JOHN: There’s a good chapter in that book of inventions. Are you going to do that? Is it a full blown project like others that you have done?
PAUL: Just sort of a half project.
JOHN: Which half have you done? The absent part?
PAUL: The cars on the cover page.
ANNE: And how much time did you have to do it?
PAUL: Two hours.
ANNE: Did you only get it today?
PAUL: No, it’s not like a proper project.
ANNE: All right, just a bit of work, motion sheet thing. Mrs Painter doesn’t seem to be giving you much homework this term.
PAUL: She’s giving us enough.

In this brief extract, Anne checks Paul’s homework assignment, finds out the subject for which it has been set, finds out when the project has been set and is due, checks that he has enough information, satisfies herself that it is not an important piece of work, and delivers an oblique judgement on what she takes to be the low demands made on Paul by his teacher. At the same time, John recommends a chapter in a reference book, inquires about the scale of the assignment, and jokingly underlines the importance of making an effort to complete homework when he says Which half have you done? The absent part? Paul, who seems much more relaxed about the assignment than his parents, has already classified it as an unimportant time-filling exercise that is not like a proper project.
Anne and John have high aspirations for their children. They judge that Paul, the eldest, is showing enough form to be quite accomplished academically. Paul knows that in order to compete his education he will have to go to Perth: I’ll be leaving my friends behind but it would be better for my education. Anne has read aloud to the children in their early years and they have provided the children with a range of print materials. Anne and John promote positive attitudes towards literacy and school success and the home atmosphere is conducive to learning. Anne helps out at the school; and both parents are closely involved in performing academic tasks with the children. The Caravaggios, then, fit the patterns of literacy practices and parental involvement that are thought to be associated with school success.
The Scott/Clay/Bailey Family

The Scott/Clay/Bailey family provides a clear contrast to the Caravaggio family in terms of education, income and the social status of their occupations. Anne Scott, the children’s mother, and her husband Neil Bailey both left school at the end of the compulsory years of schooling. Anne works three mornings a week as manager of the school canteen, a job she began as a volunteer. Neil is an outside worker at the state electricity authority. They live in a house they rent from the state housing authority, and the children have both gone to Radcliffe Primary School. Radcliffe has received additional Commonwealth funding for many years through the Disadvantaged Schools Program.
In terms of literacy practices and parental involvement, there is also a contrast with the Caravaggio family. Anne Scott has a substantial involvement with Radcliffe Primary through the canteen and the Parents and Citizens Association, but she is not involved in helping out in the classroom. The family owns some reference books and encyclopaedias, but the most popular books in the household are crossword puzzle books. The children are members of three community libraries, but Millie reported that she had not been to the library for ages and ages. Anne takes a close interest in her children’s progress, but has not always been able to help her children with their school work. She told a story, for example, of the difficulty Millie had in learning to read, and her own difference of opinion with Millie’s Year 1 teacher:
ANNE: It’s a nightmare just getting her to read, to learn to read when she was in Grade 1. Her teacher had a go at me. I was working nights at the time because I was on my own. I was always too tired to sit and read with her. One day the teacher had a go at me. And I just said to her “You know you’re the one who gets paid to teach her to read between 9.10 and 3.15 and if you can’t, then this is your problem, not mine”.

Like the Caravaggios, the Scott/Clay/Baileys provided us with audio tapes of family discussions about homework. In the following example, students were given a photocopied sheet with a list of words in one column and a list of sentences in another column. The sentences had a word missing and students were expected to find a word from the word list to fill the space in the sentence. As Anne and Millie worked through the questions, they consulted a dictionary. Towards the end of the exercise, both Anne and Millie became frustrated with the homework task. Anne asked Millie if the answers she had chosen were correct, Millie said yes, and Anne told her that two of the answers were incorrect. This is how the dialogue continued:

ANNE: Well I’ll tell you that two of those are wrong.
MILLIE: I thought so.
ANNE: Hey?
MILLIE: I thought so.
ANNE: You thought so. Why do you think so?
MILLIE: [inaudible]
ANNE: Well flattery is untrue compliment ...
MILLIE: Mmm
ANNE: What does insincere mean?
MILLIE: I don’t know.
ANNE: You should look up words you don’t know in the dictionary not just pretend. Insincere ... [looking up the dictionary] This dictionary is a little bit too adult for you I think. In ... sin ... Insincere. Disingenuous which can mean anything. Let’s look up sincere. G H I J K ... sin ... sincere, free from pretence or deceit, genuine. Do you know what genuine is?
MILLIE: Not really.
ANNE: Real.
MILLIE: Yes.
ANNE: So if sincere means real, insincere means not sincere ...
MILLIE: So it’s not real.
ANNE: Not real. What does that bring us back to? If it’s not real than it’s ... could possibly be ... we were talking about something. One of the words there has been talked about as not real.
MILLIE: Not real ... [very long pause]
ANNE: Are you thinking anything or are you just staring?
MILLIE: No I’m reading .... [long pause again]
ANNE: What are you reading?
MILLIE: Those words.
ANNE: Hey?
MILLIE: I want to find out what ..
ANNE: But these are the words you’re looking at so.
MILLIE: [long pause]
ANNE: Oh leave it.

In this short extract, Anne is trying to help Millie with her homework, but is having little success. She consults a dictionary in order to help Millie find the meaning of “insincere”, but the definition is in terms of “disingenuous”, a word neither of them knows. Anne tries an alternative strategy, looking up “sincere”, but finds that Millie doesn’t know the meaning of “genuine”, either. Trying another tack, Anne provides her own definition of sincere as “real”, but by the time Millie makes the connection from insincere to sincere, from sincere to genuine, from genuine to real, and from real to not real, she has lost her place on the homework exercise sheet and Anne has exhausted her energy for the task.
The contrast between the Scott/Clay/Bailey family and the Caravaggio family seems to follow the social class lines described in the literature of literacy practices and parental involvement. Despite her involvement with the school canteen and her willingness to help with homework, she is not able to help her children perform academic tasks. The children have access to books and libraries, but the family uses only a narrow range of print materials. Anne hopes that the children will do well at school and that school will provide them with some of the skills they need in life, but she has modest aspirations for Millie’s academic success. Millie did not learn to read quickly and is still not a very keen reader. Anne Scott recognises this and agrees with a comment made by one of Millie’s teachers: Her grade 3 teacher said, ‘She’s never going to be a student but she certainly won’t fail in life’, and that’s my opinion of it too.
The Kha Family

The Kha family, a Cambodian family with two children attending the same school as Anne Scott’s daughter, provides a even sharper contrast with the Caravaggio family. The Kha family arrived in Australia less than six years ago after spending eight years in a refugee camp in Thailand. Both of their children were born in Thailand. In Cambodia, Mr and Mrs Kha were farmers. In Australia they both work as strawberry pickers in season, but were unemployed when we spoke to them. They live in a home they rent from the state housing authority. Until recently they shared the house with an uncle, aunt and set of cousins. Mr Kha is presently teaching himself to read in English; Mrs Kha can neither read nor speak English. There are very few books of any kind in the house. The only book Bopha (Year 7) owns is an atlas she won as a school prize. Because of the language differences Mr and Mrs Kha are not able to help their children with homework from school, but they sometimes help with homework from the Cambodian school the children attend on Saturdays. Mr and Mrs Kha have some contact with their children’s school through events such as assemblies and sports carnivals. They don’t visit Bopha’s Year 7 class, but they do visit Sambath’s Year 2 bilingual class.
Although Mr Kha has high aspirations for his children, he is not able to help them with their school work. In fact, important family transactions requiring contact with non-Cambodian agencies are undertaken by the fourteen-year-old Bopha. She translates for her family in medical emergencies and she acted as the go-between in this study. As the following extract shows, she accepts responsibility deciding what her parents do and do not need to know about the world of school:
INT: What do you do when you have to bring a note home, to get it signed?
BOPHA: They sign but fill it all in myself.
INT: Right so what you’d read it to your Dad and Mum, or you just [
BOPHA: [ I just do it. I just let them sign it.
INT: Do they often ask you what it’s about?
BOPHA; Yeah. I say it’s about camp, medical.
INT: And then they’ll sign it?
BOPHA: Yes.

Social Class Differences and Literacy Practices in Group 1

Juxtaposed in this way, these three case studies neatly support the quantitative research conclusions about the relationship between social class and family literacy practices. The Caravaggios are tertiary educated, employed and prosperous. Their children attend a school which is not entitled to additional funding through the Disadvantaged Schools Program. The literacy practices of the Caravaggio families closely resemble the kinds of activities valued by schools. They buy books when they travel to the city or to a larger town on the coast, borrow books from the library, read The Bulletin and The Weekend Australian and read aloud to their youngest child. They help out at school through the Parents and Citizens Association and Ann is involved in the school’s mathematics and library classes, and provide effective academic assistance to their oldest child. The adults in the Scott/Clay/Bailey family work in blue-collar occupations, left school at the end of the compulsory years, live in rented housing provided by the state housing authority, and their children attend a Disadvantaged Schools Program school. The Scott/Clay/Bailey family owns encyclopaedias but makes more use of puzzle and crossword books, they make little use of their libraries, Anne Scott is involved with the school canteen but not the school’s academic program. She energetically supervises homework but cannot assist Millie with some academic tasks sent home by the school. The adults in the Kha family are unemployed. The Kha family owns a few books in Cambodian and English and the children have a much stronger grasp of English than either Mr and Mrs Kha. Mr Kha helps his children with Cambodian school homework but not regular school homework. He visits the bilingual class attended by his son, but does not participate in lessons in the class. The older child borrows books from the library for school projects but not for personal reading and the younger child owns only an atlas he won as a school prize.
Considering this group of families together, it is easy to be persuaded that there is a direct relationship between social class location and literacy practices: that society is neatly stratified by social class, and that family literacy practices echo the social class differences. These are, however, just three of the twenty-three case studies collected in this project. Few of the case studies allow for such a neat juxtaposition. As the next section will go on to argue, there are many cases where the relationship between class location and literacy practices is much more ambiguous.
Group 2: The Long, Waugh, Kelly and Jackson Families

Consider the case of the Long family. Mr and Mrs Long are recent immigrants from Yorkshire. Mr Long works as a machinist; Mrs Long works as a part-time word-processor. Neither of the parents was educated beyond the compulsory years. Their two children attend Redlands, a school supported through the Disadvantaged Schools Program. In terms of income, occupation and education, the Long family sounds working class. The family’s literacy practices and the parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling, however, seem very similar to the middle-class Caravaggios.
Mr and Mrs Long both spend time in the school. Mr Long is treasurer of the Parents and Citizen’s Association and canteen committee, and he attends school excursions and sporting events. The children have many books and magazines, they read widely, and they talk to their parents about their reading. The family plays quiz games together, and the home atmosphere is conducive to learning. Homework is very important to the Long children, and their parents often help. Describing an assignment on Marie Curie, Andrew talked about the help his mother gave him:
“That’s where my mum helped me like, she said to put it in areas like this. Put like the family history one page ... and set it out like that ... I learn how to set it out better and a lot of information like that ... So I found out [from Mum] how to look through books to find more information instead of just looking through it and picking out little things, I should concentrate on what I’m doing.”

Mr and Mrs Long have a good understanding of their children’s academic progress. They know that Andrew (Year 7) is very successful at school and that Sally (Year 3) is working below the average level for her Year. Concerned about Sally’s progress, Mrs Long and Sally’s teacher are working hard to improve Sally’s reading. They have been using a paired reading strategy to motivate her. One bed-time, for example, Mrs Long was reading to Sally from Beware of Boys. She discusses the pictures with Sally, Sally takes over the reading at some points, and Mrs Long prompts where necessary. Sally asks the meaning of unknown words:
MRS L: One barrel of bricks and one trowel. Method. First catch your boy.
SALLY: What’s a trowel?
MRS L: A trowel. That’s ... you put plaster on the wall with it. First catch your boy ...
When Mrs Long has finished reading Sally says, Now it’s my turn and reads Matilda and the Dragon with encouragement from her mother. Errors are not corrected, there is a discussion of the pictures and of new vocabulary, and when Mrs Long insists that story time is over she finishes of with a kiss and a hug.
The Waugh Family

Unlike the Long family, the Waugh family is well established in Australia. Brian Waugh inherited the family farm when his father passed away, and has since bought more land. Altogether, the Waughs now own 7,000 acres. You’ve got to have at least 2,000 acres to make a success of it, Amanda said, so with that we’ll be able to say at least to the boys well, you know, ‘The choice is yours if you want to come on the farm’. Amanda’s schooling ended at Year 10, and Brian spent two years beyond Year 10 at an agricultural school before returning to the family farm. The Waugh’s regular reading includes a farming weekly circulated by Elders, The Women’s Weekly and Women’s Day. They help out at the Yabby Creek school working bees and attend school sports days and parents evenings. Like most of the parents in our case studies, they are involved with their children’s homework. Brian gave examples of helping Michael (13) with maths homework, where He was just guessing and then I put him on the right track and he got it just like that, and helping Adrian (12) with a project on farming. The audio tapes provided by the family include an example of Amanda helping Christopher (7) with his reading:
CHRIS.: A long, long time ...
AMANDA: ago
CHRIS.: ago ... A little man and a little woman lived in a house. In the house there was a shop where ... man ...[
AMANDA: A little old man
CHRIS.: ... made (interruption) shoes ... [
AMANDA: Read that
CHRIS.: The little old woman helped him. They were happy when they met made many shoes. One night the little old man said ... to the little woman no ...
AMANDA: m-o-n-e (sounding out letters)
CHRIS.: money we must have money to get ... (inaudible)
AMANDA: Good boy
CHRIS.: the shoes. We can cannot
AMANDA: C-a-n-t (sounding out letters)
CHRIS.: can’t (inaudible) ...
AMANDA: Sit up, keep going. Only a couple more pages to go.
CHRIS.: Come on, you got to be joking. (inaudible).
AMANDA: Come on.
CHRIS.: The little old woman do not//
AMANDA: Didn’t
CHRIS.: Didn’t like to see the ... old man so unhappy ... I think about now she said we can talk about ... m-m in the morning.
AMANDA: money
CHRIS.: Money
AMANDA: We can talk about the money or the leather in the morning.
CHRIS.: ... or the leather in the morning. So the little old man and the little old woman went to bed ... In the m-o-r-n morning the sh shoemaker came ... n no
AMANDA: new
CHRIS.: New p-a, p-a pairs of shoes ...
AMANDA: how[
CHRIS.: [How can ... (interruption) The little old woman p-a ... (interruption)
AMANDA: Come on, keep going please. Read that bit again there.
CHRIS.: How can this be ... I had r-e ... re-e ... were (inaudible) ... to do//
AMANDA: Today

This piece of transcript shows that Amanda Waugh is anxious to help Christopher with his reading. The assistance she offers, however, focuses on helping him to sound out letters and achieve literal correctness in his reading. As they labour through the task, Amanda frames the reading homework as something that must be completed, rather than an enjoyable and meaningful activity.
Brian and Amanda Waugh’s aspirations are for their children are not narrowly framed in terms of success at school. We don’t want them to leave school, Amanda said. I mean we wouldn’t stop them but we’d prefer them to do something, have something else, some other outlet. So if they become a mechanic or electrician, anything like that so if it’s quiet on the farm they can go out and work at their trade. Then, at least, they’ve got something to fall back on. Whether or not the children will be successful at school, they think, is a matter of attitude:
AMANDA: ... it’s attitudes really, isn’t it. If they’ve got a down and out “Oh I don’t give a damn” attitude, well then they won’t get anywhere. But if they’re keen to go along and do their best and learn the best way they can, they’ll always plod along and get there.

The Kelly Family

The Kelly family is much less prosperous than the Waugh family. Kevin and Bridgit Kelly rent an old house near the centre of Countrytown. The children attend Countrytown, the Disadvantaged Schools Program school. Kevin Kelly left school at fourteen and presently works as a contract gardener. Bridgit was trained as a nurse in the hospital training era and is presently completing a TAFE conversion course. She currently works in a refuge for the homeless. Bridgit does not read fiction, but reads books in relation to her nursing studies, he reads the children’s text books and she reads to the children. Kevin is described by his wife as semi-literate. Notwithstanding his limited reading skill, he has drawn on a collection of Bill Mollison books to develop his interest in permaculture. All three of the children are interested in reading. Patrick (aged 11) reads in bed at night, Liam reads school books with his mother and will get out books ... from the bookshelf. Sinead (aged 4) thinks she can read, said Amanda. She reads in bed or if I’ve gone to bed really early and she wants to give me a cuddle, she’ll get a book and she’ll read one of her little books while I’m reading my book. Kevin and Bridgit do not want to impose expectations of educational success on their children. As Bridgit said, Its up to you, if you want it. It does not seem likely that Patrick will decide that school will be useful to him. He is one of only two children in his class who had no work on display, and he failed to finish most of the work set during the day we visited his classroom. Asked about what he thought about this school day, Patrick volunteered that it was a bit better than usual, because he didn’t get into trouble much. In contrast with his diffidence about school activities, Patrick is a keen musician who is learning the violin, trombone and keyboard. Neither Kevin nor Bridgit is closely involved in the children’s school. The teachers, she thinks, consider her a little eccentric. Nor do they aspire for material success for their children. As Kevin said, I’d rather Patrick ended up a being a surfer and spending his life on the beach than suiciding because he can’t make some goal we’ve set for him.”
The Jackson Family

The Jacksons are a Malay family from Cocos Island. As children, Susan and Azmi Jackson attended school on Cocos Island where they learned English. They speak English well, and use Malay at home. They are both employed at the meatworks, Azmi as a slaughterman and Susan as a cleaner. Their children attend Highglen, the higher status of the two government primary schools in Countrytown. Susan sometimes helps the children with their homework, If I can help, but my maths doesn’t go that high. Azmi reads The West Australian when he is not working (during the off season at the meatworks) and Susan sometimes buys The Women’s Weekly. The three older boys spend a portion of their out-of-school time at Malay school or at the mosque. much of Dawi (aged 11), for example, learns to read the Qur'an for about two hours after school on weekdays. On Saturday and Sunday he attends Malay school, which is located behind the mosque, to learn about Islam. He learns to read the Qur'an in Arabic, which he understands a little bit. Azmi Jackson is very concerned about his son’s future employment. I’m always talking to my children, he said, If you have no education you will be the same like your dad. ... I will always talk to my oldest son, push him to study very hard so he can get a job when he leaves school.
Social Class Differences and Literacy Practices in Group 2

Considered together, this second group of four families paints a much more complex picture of the relationship between social class and literacy practices. The Long family would be considered working class in terms of parents’ education, income, or occupation. They live in a neighbourhood where many of the houses are rented from the state housing authority, and their children attend a Disadvantaged Schools program school. Their family literacy practices, however, seem very similar to those of the Caravaggios. They provide a home environment conducive to learning, they participate in shared reading activities and read aloud to their younger child, they provide academic assistance for their children, and they are involved in the academic life of the school. Like the Caravaggios, they are well informed about their children’s school performance and they regard school success as important for their children. When they help their children with school work, they do so in a way that echoes school attitudes and practices. Their daughter is a weak reader, but rather than correcting their daughter’s reading syllable by syllable, Mrs Long uses a shared reading strategy and focuses first on making meaning from the text.
The Waugh family, on the other hand, combine significant financial resources with literacy practices more reminiscent of the Scott/Clay/Bailey family. Their home provides a relatively narrow range of print materials, they are not involved in the school’s academic program, and when Amanda Waugh listened to Christopher read aloud her efforts to assist him led to a focus on sounding out words and the loss of meaning. The Waugh family would like their children to do well at school if that is what the children choose, but would be equally happy if the boys learned a trade that would give them something to fall back on if farm incomes were to drop.
In contrast with the three families described in Group 1 - Caravaggio, Scott/Clay/Bailey and Kha - the Long and Waugh families do not provide a neat fit with the family practices predicted by the international literature on family literacy practices. Classified according to literacy practices, the Longs seem more like the Caravaggios and the Waughs seem more like the Scott/Clay/Bailey family.
The Kelly family seems similar in some ways to the Scott/Clay/Bailey family They are not well off financially, the parents have relatively narrow reading habits and one of the adults in each family has quite limited literacy skills. They do, however, make active use of written texts that they need to read, such as Bridgit’s nursing texts and Kevin’s permaculture books. Unlike any of the families so far described, the Kellys are not involved with the school. Bridgit acknowledged their difference when she told us that she thought the teachers regarded her as eccentric. Also unlike most of the other families involved in this study, the Kellys have a child who is plainly in conflict with the school. Nor does the family take the conventional attitude to school success. When their children want to participate in school-like activities - such as Sinead’s parallel reading activity - Bridgit joins in, but they seem to attach no more value to literacy activities than to Patrick’s musical learning. They are open to the possibility that their children pursue their interests through further education, but do not believe in applying any pressure towards their children’s school success.
The Kelly family fail to fit a structure which pairs class and literacy practices because they choose to stand outside the mainstream. The Jackson family stands outside the mainstream for different reasons. In their case, issues of language, culture and religion separate them from mainstream life in Countrytown. They are as interested as any of the other families in school success as a means social mobility, but much of the boys’ out of school time is taken up with literacy practices associated with Islam. These practices involve learning to read the sacred text in Arabic, a language the boys do not speak. The text is sometimes translated into Malay, a language they speak but do not read. This form of reading has great religious value to the family and the Malay community in Countrytown, but it operationalises a different definition of reading than school literacy. In the school, reading is taken to be about making meaning through literal understanding of the text. The work of the Malay school, it seems, stands entirely outside the school’s understanding of its work, and the richness of the boys’ knowledge of the Qur'an, of Arabic and of Malay goes unremarked.
Conclusions

With this sort of mixed evidence from the case study families, what conclusions can be drawn about home literacy practices and social class? Looked at through the lens of social class differences, the evidence from the first group of families seems to suggest an association between social class differences and family literacy practices. On a continuum from the Kha family through the Scott/Clay/Baileys to the Caravaggios, family literacy practices seem increasingly supportive of the kinds of activities the children’s schools define as literate. The Khas are keen for their children to do well at school, but have language and cultural resources that are different from those assumed in mainstream schools. They are not able to provide assistance with their children’s homework in English or to provide them with books in English. If it were not for Bopha Kha’s Year 2 bilingual English/Khmer class, there would be even fewer points of contact between the parents’ language and culture and that of the school. The Scott/Clay/Baileys provide a family environment with more English books and membership of local libraries, but puzzle and crossword books are the most popular written texts in the household. Anne Scott helps her children complete their homework, but the case study material suggests that her efforts neither teach Millie how to do a task nor motivate her to complete it on her own. When the Caravaggios undertake what is ostensibly the same practice, helping with homework, they scaffold the task in a way which helps Paul with the work and they motivate him to complete the work on his own.
This regular relationship between rising social class and increasingly school-like literacy practices, however, is not sustained in the second group of families. For some, such as the Longs and the Waughs, there is an inversion between the social class location and the expected literacy practices; for others such as the Kellys and the Jacksons, social class location seems unrelated to their literacy practices and the meaning they ascribe to the practices. The Kelly family choose to stand outside of conventional beliefs about the value of school, and the Jacksons have well developed literacy practices associated with Islam which bear little relationship to the understanding of literacy which is most common in the schools.
In framing this study, we began with an either/or indicator of social class: whether or not children were enrolled in Commonwealth disadvantaged program schools. This, it must be admitted, is a crude and static operational definition of social class which implies that the mean on a set of social indicators adequately summarises all of the variation within a school community. Such means may be adequate for statistical purposes, such as justifying the allocation of disadvantaged schools money, but it overestimates the impact of social structures in individuals’ behaviour and underestimates the impact of their personal agency. The real world of class relations, as Connell (1993) has argued, is not a static set of social structures:
The real world of class relations ... is a world where some kinds of possibilities are constantly being opened up, others closed down; where some kinds of practice lead into unexpected traps, and others to unexpected transformation; in sum, where structural mutation is the rule rather than the exception (Connell, 1983, p. 157).

In this study, we think that there are some working class families where possibilities are being opened up. The Long family, for example, seems to be in a state of transformation. They are closely involved with their children’s school work and are pleased with their progress. After some intervention from the school and her parents, Sally is now improving. Andrew is top at the moment and he’s head boy. Next year he has the choice of scholarships at three selective high schools. In a somewhat different way, the Kha family was not able to intervene to help their children with their academic work, but Mr Kha’s insistence that his children work hard and do well at school may be just as powerful a force. As he said when we first interviewed him and reiterated at later interviews, he often says to his children you have to go to school, working hard at school, don’t be lazy ... don’t like father go to work at the farm. The Kha family shares this sentiment with the Longs, with Azmi Jackson who said If you have no education you will be like your dad ... I will always talk to my son, push him to study very hard, and with the middle class Caravaggios who expect that Paul will be quite accomplished academically.
There are also some families where possibilities are being closed down. The Kelly family values their children’s independence over conformity to the school’s norms, but the family’s scepticism about the value of schooling seems to be echoed in Patrick’s marginalisation within his Year 6 class. Similarly, the Scott/Clay/Bailey family’s acceptance that Millie is never going to be a student and the Waugh family’s judgement that the value of education is that it provides something to fall back both serve to limit the prospect that their children’s schooling is going to play a part in social mobility.
Following Connell’s line, that structural mutation is the rule rather than the exception in class relations, leads to a different formulation of the relationship between social class and literacy practices. Instead of the static view of the Caravaggios firmly located at one end of the class structure and the Kha family stuck at the other end without language, cultural or financial resources to assist their children, a more open and ambiguous set of relationships emerges. The literacy practices of some middle class parents are different from some working class families. They tend to have more books and magazines, and more involvement with their children’s academic work. When they help with homework they often do the same kind of work as teachers do. But the mutation of the class structure and the transformation of individual families begins to occur when families such as the Longs open up the possibilities, become involved in the academic program of the school, provide the kind of assistance with homework that teachers believe to be useful, and set or share their children’s high aspirations. In other cases, such as the Kha and Jackson families, where the literacy practices may be tangential to those of the school for cultural reasons, the active belief in the possibility of growth and change may be as important as any particular set of school-like literacy practices.
We understand the evidence of this study to confirm that some of the literacy practices associated in the international research literature with middle class families are present in some of our middle class families, and that these practices are likely to provide a support for their children’s school learning. We also understand the study to confirm that some of these practices are either absent from some of our working class families or conducted in such a way as to have a different meaning. We think, however, that the personal agency of individual families can be as important as their location on a static social class structure: creating middle class practices in a working class family, creating working class practices in a middle class family, or supporting ambition for social mobility through education in the absence middle class literacy practices.
To draw these conclusions, however, requires movement from the particulars of individual families to the generalities of social class relations. As we move from the particulars of the twenty-three families in our study and the seven families that have been used to build the argument in this chapter, to the macro-sociological world of social class categorisation, an intellectual sleight of hand takes place. We stop talking about the Longs or Caravaggios, where the reader can return to the specifics of the evidence to test our assertions, and start talking about middle class and working class practices, about static and mobile models of social class. As Dorothy Smith (1989, 1990) has pointed out, such conclusions can only be achieved by objectifying the experience of individual subjects:
Social scientific strategies for exploring macro-social relations depend on conceptual practices that construct a textual version of society and social relations excluding the presence of subjects (Smith 1989), hence displacing the connection between the explored and analysed relations and the actualities of people’s lives (1990, p. 10).

Despite the abstract language, this is not an abstract point. Once created, sociological categories and conclusions have a life of their own in the world. Teachers and principals talk about middle class parents or working class parents or non-English speaking background parents or Aboriginal parents as if the sociological label defines a set of uniform behaviour, rather than abbreviating some set of particular data.
We have concluded family literacy practices are part of a pattern of class relations which opens up or closes down educational possibilities for individual families. School success is harder to achieve for children in families disadvantaged by poverty, with literacy practices which are different from those valued at school, or with language and cultural backgrounds different from their teachers. But it is not sufficient to see these differences as part of a monolithic class-based deficit for all working class children and class-based advantage for all middle class children. Nor is it sufficient for teachers and policy makers to act on the assumption of such monolithic and static generalisations. All of our schools are heterogeneous to some extent, catering for children from families with a range of aspirations and family literacy practices. For teachers, the practical question is not are more of these children middle class or working class, but what can we do to open up the possibilities for these particular children?
References

Auerbach, E. R. (1989). Toward a social-contextual approach to family literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 59 (2), 165-181.
Chall, J. S., & Snow, C. (1982). Families and literacy: The contributions of out of school experiences to children's literacy. A final report to the National Institute of Education.
Connell, R. W. (1983). Which way is up? Essays on class, sex and culture. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin.
Elley, W. B. (1992). How in the world do students read? The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.
Freebody, P. (1993). Social class and reading. In A. Luke and P. Gilbert, Literacy in contexts: Australian perspectives and issues. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McGaw, B. (1989). Literacy and numeracy in Victorian schools 1988. Melbourne: ACER
Morrow, L. M., & Paratore, J. (1994). Family literacy: Perspective and practices. The Reading Teacher, 47 (3), 194-200.
Smith, D. E. (1989). Sociological theory: Methods of writing patriarchy. In Ruth A. Wallace (Ed.) Feminism and sociological theory. Newbury Park: Sage.
Smith, D. E. (1990). Texts, facts and femininity: Exploring the relations of ruling. London and New York: Routledge.
Walberg, H. J., & Tsai, S-L. (1985). Correlates of reading achievement and attitude: A national assessment study. Journal of Educational Research, 78 (3), 159-167.
Wells, G. (1986). The meaning makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Western Australia, Ministry of Education. (1993a). A comparison of student performance in metropolitan, rural and remote Western Australian schools. Perth: Ministry of Education, Monitoring Standards in Education Project.
Western Australia, Ministry of Education. (1993b). Monitoring Standards in Western Australian schools: 1992 Report. Perth: Ministry of Education, Monitoring Standards in Education Project.