Popular cultural and media texts often form the majority of young children's first encounters with spoken and written English, yet they are often ignored in analyses of their emergent literacy development. These 'emergent techno-literacy practices' will be crucially important in ensuring that children become competent in the range of technologies which are central to everyday life.

'Techno-literacy practices' are embedded within children's encounters with new technologies such as television, computers and mobile phones, all artefacts which relate to children's popular culture. This
study looked at the techno-literacy and media literacy practices of a group of children aged two to four years, in order to develop work with parents on supporting this aspect of children's development. The
families are predominantly white, working class and live in Sheffield in an area of poverty and higher-than-average unemployment which is the focus of a Government Sure Start project.

Questionnaires probing the extent of children's engagement with media and popular texts were sent out to a random sample of families in the area and 44 were completed. The average age of children in the families that returned the questionnaires was two years and eight months. Twenty-six families responded to the questionnaire's invitation to be interviewed in the home about their children's media use.

The survey found that television is the primary source of textual pleasure for the young children in this study. All of the families reported that children watched television regularly - 45 per cent of the
children watched between three and five hours of television and 20 per cent watched more than five hours per day.

Although excessive television viewing must be of concern, there has been a range of work which has indicated that children are not passive viewers, but active meaning-makers with regard to television {Robinson, 1997). In this study, parents were asked what their children did as they watched television. Only one parent responded that their child sat quietly and did not engage in other activities. Data from the other 43 families all suggested that children sat quietly at times, but they also took part in a whole range of other actions such as singing, dancing, talking to the characters and acting out narratives from the televisual stories.

When watching television, therefore, these young children were, far from being 'couch potatoes', an interactive audience whose television viewing stimulated a range of activities. The parents identified a range of skills, knowledge and understanding that they felt their children had gained from watching television, including knowledge of the alphabet, numbers, songs and general knowledge. For example, in one interview, a parent cited a television programme which she felt had contributed to her child's
acquisition of phoneme/grapheme correspondence:

JM: Do you worry about the amount of TV he watches? Parent: No, because he learnt all his alphabet off the telly. You know, from watching Wheel of Fortune, he just picked up the letters and it came to the point when he knew every letter, and he knows the adult alphabet, not child's ... and he knows all his colours, shapes and the lot. JM: How old was he when he started watching Wheel of Fortune? Parent: Oh, about two and by the time he went to nursery at three, he knew all his alphabet.

Many of the parents also felt that television had played a central role in the development of children's social skills as they learned about sharing, friendship and citizenship from children's programming.
This study did not set out to determine whether in fact children had acquired these skills and knowledge from television (although there is research which suggests that this process can occur - see Singer and Singer, 2001); what was important here was the parents' positive attitudes towards the role of television in their young children's lives.

Of the 44 families surveyed, 72 per cent stated that they owned either a computer or a games console, or both. Of the 26 children whose parents were interviewed, 14 regularly played Playstation games and
half of these were girls. In this under-four age group, therefore, there was little evidence that boys were more likely to play console games, although there is evidence that boys do dominate use in older age groups (Livingstone and Bovill, 1999).

Popular, console-based computer games are often derided by educators, but they can develop a range of skills including hand-eye coordination, parallel processing, spatial and problem-solving skills (Marsh and Millard, 2000). In addition, engagement with such games may motivate children to read a range of related texts. In an earlier study of children's media literacy practices, three and four-year-old children were engaged in reading computer games covers and magazines, for example (Marsh and
Thompson, 2001).

This study also found that young children's encounters with mobile phones and text messaging must impact on their literacy practices. Of the 44 children in this survey, 82 per cent owned toy mobile
phones, from an average age of 12 months. Although none of the children used text messaging, many were aware of it and knew when a message had arrived for their parents.

Some children watched as their parents read and responded to text messages and were thus becoming acculturated into the world of electronic print mediated through telephones. Further research is needed to explore the impact of these encounters with text messaging on young children's growing understanding of literacy in contemporary society.

Young children in this study engaged with a wide range of contemporary texts and artefacts in the home. The impact of these practices on young children's language and literacy development needs to
be the focus of future research if we are to understand fully the implications of this 'emergent techno-literacy' and build upon these early experiences in a meaningful way in nurseries and schools.

References
S. Livingstone and M. Bovill (1999) Young People, New Media, London: London School of Economics.
J. Marsh and E. Millard (2000) Literacy and Popular Culture: Using Children's Culture in the
Classroom, London: Paul Chapman.
J. Marsh and P. Thompson (2001) Parental involvement in literacy development: using media texts, Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 24, no.3.
M. Robinson (1997) Children Reading Print and Television, London: Palmer Press.
D.G. Singer and J.L. Singer (2001) Handbook of Children and the Media, London: Sage Publications.

For more information email j.a.marsh@sheffield.ac.uk.

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