Fifteen-month-old Callum is reading a book with his grand-

mother. She turns the pages of Jan Pienkowski s Zoo, a tiny board

book just big enough for the baby s fist to grasp. As they look

at each picture Callum s grandmother names the animals: bear,

dog, goriIla. Callum responds by making bbb sounds when he

sees the bear. He looks down at his dog when he sees the pic-

ture of the dog. When he looks at the picture of the gorilla he

turns the book over to show his grandmother that the same pic-

ture is to be found on the front cover. CaIlum does not yet have

many words in his vocabulary, but he is already a reader. He

knows that objects -- people, places, things -- can be represented

in pictures. Callum also knows that pictures have meaning. They

correspond to things in his world. When he picks up a book that

is upside down, he automatically turns it the right way round.

As his life experiences accumulate and his world view widens

so will his awareness of the way in which we use symbols to

represent our experience.

Callum is learning to be a user a words -- a maker of mean-

ing. The roots of literacy are being established through the inter-

actions that occur in his life around stories, books, and rhymes,

and through the naming of objects and the simultaneous match-

ing of the sound of words to their shape in print. There are many

things that he must learn about language before he will be able

to read words fluently, but the process of learning has begun.

Whatever the first language the baby learns, the roots of future

reading and writing skills lie in the learning of language as a sym-

bolic system, a means of representing ideas and communicat-

ing them to others.