Ten Years After: A Reexamination of Symbolic Play and Literacy Research

The past decade has witnessed a tremendous interest in the ways in which children become literate. An interdisciplinary group of researchers has been posing questions basic to the very nature of literacy and the ways in which children from different segments of the population become literate. Developmental psychological constructs have also been introduced to help chart the ways in which literacy develops in children. In this article we will examine the way in which one such construct, symbolic play, has been applied to the study of literacy. Though the study of the interrelations between symbolic play and literacy dates back to the early 1970s (e.g., Wolfgang, 1974), most of the work in this area has appeared in the last 10 years (thus the title of this article). This latter corpus of research will be reviewed in terms of the ways in which it informs us about the developmental processes involved in symbolic play and literacy and about the related issue of teaching young children. We begin with a brief review of early research on symbolic play and literacy to set the historical context.