Synergy Between Siblings

Article 3 of my Reading Research Article Collection!

When we talk about the advantages of family involvement for young children, the emphasis is usually upon parents working with children in specific ways and often using school-sanctioned materials. What about family members other than parents? Can siblings also play a crucial but informal role in initiating young children into literacy? Eve Gregory explains in her article, "Sisters and brothers as

language and literacy teachers: Synergy between siblings playing and working together," the nature and role played by siblings informally in mediating each others’ language and literacy learning.

Nine year old Stephanie and her four year old brother Billie are reciting nursery rhymes together:

Stephanie: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall 

the King’s . . .

Billie: . . . horses and all the King’s men . . . (falters)

Stephanie: Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The vignette of Stephanie and her younger brother Billie shown above reveals a smooth synchrony of exchanges as sister and brother conduct a type of ‘duet’ together. Gregory asks, "Might this be typical of siblings’ informal teaching and learning? How far do children emulate their teachers’ or their parents’ teaching strategies; or are their strategies unique? How similar are the literacy and learning activities of siblings from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds living in London?"

Existing studies showing ways in which young children’s cultural knowledge might be acquired in and out of school fall largely into four categories: 

• those on ‘scaffolding’ between adult and child, 
• studies into ‘collaborative learning’, 
• work on imaginative play, 
• the role of siblings and peers in fostering each other’s learning

Although these categories are widely used by researchers and practitioners, they each come with recent criticisms. The role of the adult is to ‘scaffold’ or support a young child’s learning, gradually removing pieces of the scaffold as the child gains confidence and competence. The idea of 'scaffolding' is criticized for "overemphasizing the role of the adult as expert and, consequently, for implying a passivity rather than activity on the part of the child" (pg. 303). Even the shift to 'guided participation' still implies an unequal relationship between participants in that learning is unidirectional from the older or more experienced person to the younger child. Classroom practice-based research on peers and collaborative learning has been focusing more on the equality of roles between participants in learning. Here, children are revealed as skilled facilitators of classroom learning. Nevertheless, Gergory still argues that interactions have generally taken place in formal situations (i.e. classrooms) where children are engaged in work activities organized by teachers. Imaginative play takes a vital role in learning. In 1978, Vygotsky argued that "cognitive development involves participating in social activity constituted by systems of shared rules that must be grasped and voluntarily accepted" (pg. 304). When children are engaged in fantasy play, both social skills and their rules are learned. "Even more than peers," Gregory notes, "siblings close in age are likely to share a common ‘language’ and cultural ‘recipes’" (pg. 305). However, the view from existing studies on siblings still takes ‘scaffolding’ to be a unidirectional process from older to younger child.

Gergory explains how the nature of siblings teaching each other goes beyond definitions of 'scaffolding' or 'collaborative learning'. "Instead, we refer to the interaction between the children as a synergy, a unique reciprocity whereby siblings act as adjuvants in each other’s learning, i.e. older children ‘teach’ younger siblings and at the same time develop their own learning" (pg. 309). Younger children’s learning is characterized by repetition or imitation of the older child’s actions or discourse (revealed in word-forword reading, games and rhyme plays), echoing (rhymes and songs), listening, requesting help, challenging and general practicing (often school oriented tasks). Older children learn through practicing consciously what they know and through ‘translating’ official ‘meanings’ into personal ‘sense’ and vice versa for the younger child. This is displayed through the direct instruction of their sibling in school-based tasks, demonstrating and providing a model, supplying alternatives, explaining and coaxing the younger child into doing an activity.

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language . . . but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s concrete contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin 1981: 293–4)

Unlike ‘collaborative learning’ between peers at school (or even outside school) older siblings often share a personal ‘sense’ of words, activities and practices that are important in their everyday lives. Thus older siblings act as cognitive facilitators and younger siblings act as prompters as they play together.These kinds of interactions enables both siblings to practice what they have already learned together.

Gregory, E. "Sisters and Brothers as Language and Literacy Teachers: Synergy between Siblings Playing and Working Together." Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 1.3 (2001): 301-22. Print.