Why Ernie Can't Read: "Sesame Street" and Literacy.

Abstract

After a quarter century, Sesame Street (Connell, 1969) continues to be tele vision's most highly regarded program for young children in the U.S. Conceived in 1967 as an electronic parallel to the then new Head Start program for preschoolers (Lesser, 1972), Sesame Street was designed to present a compensatory early childhood curriculum intended to promote both social and cognitive growth and to prepare disadvantaged children for school. Naturally, the program was de signed to include material to help prepare young children for formal reading instruction. The Sesame Street literacy curriculum in cluded instructional goals identified by Lesser (1972) as distinguishing letters from numbers, matching letters, pairing upperand lower case letters, naming letters, identifying letter sounds as the initial sounds in words, and learning the alphabet. These goals were ex panded over the next several seasons to in clude word families (soon to be replaced by rhyming and verbal blending), sight words, and bilingual vocabulary (Children's Tele vision Workshop, 1974) as well as story read ing, writing, and decoding (Children's Tele vision Workshop, 1987). Familiarity with Sesame Street has been found to be a good predictor of knowledge of the alphabet (Taylor, 1983), letter names, letter sounds, and sight words (Flood, as cited in Hiebert, 1986). However, it is increasingly clear that an understanding of the nature of lit eracy (Hall, 1987; Spencer, 1986) is essential for reading success. This led us to question whether Sesame Street is effectively contribut ing to this understanding. We will begin by describing current think ing about how young children learn to read. We will then discuss our study of literacy mes sages on Sesame Street and conclude with sug gestions for ways in which this popular pro gram could more effectively help children become readers.