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She has most of all enabled us to see the minds of children at work and their great capacities as scholars and researchers as they develop their understanding of our written language.
-Eleanor Duckworth (1999)
Emilia Ferreiro is a world-renowned scholar who has devoted her academic career to understanding how children come to know literacy. Her questions and insights about how young children think about what it means to read and to write have led language arts and reading educators to significant understandings about early literacy learning and teaching. In this biographical sketch, we highlight her unique contributions to the field of literacy learning.
Yetta was introduced to Emilia's work in the 1970s. This was a dynamic period when language and literacy researchers were engaged in establishing new and exciting research directions about the influence of language use in homes, communities, and schools on children's language and literacy. We were thinking in new ways as psycholinguists, linguists, anthropologists, sociolinguists, and educators and were introducing each other to new ideas and insights about the social and cultural influences on children's literacy development.
In 1979, when Yetta was the incoming president of NCTE, and Dorothy Strickland was president of IRA, they planned a series of conferences called Oral and Written Language Development Research: Impact on the Schools (Goodman, Haussler, & Strickland, 1979). The goal of the "Impact Conferences" was to bring together interdisciplinary and international researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to discuss the dynamic research in language development and to consider its implications for curricular change and innovation. They had been hearing about Emilia Ferreiro, a literacy development psychologist in Argentina, who was using Piagetian theory to study how Spanish-speaking children learn to read and write. They invited Emilia to the conference where she reported on her longitudinal research with three- to six-year-old middle- and working-class children in Buenos Aires. This research showed how actively children are involved in learning concepts about literacy and how the relationship between oral and written language evolves over their life history (Ferreiro, 1979). Emilia introduced the audience to the concept of Piaget's term psychogenesis, as she applies it to literacy learning. Psychogenesis explores the ways in which humans contribute to their own ideas and knowledge development. Emilia focuses on how children...