When I was a child, you could have told me the word Coca-Cola was my grandfather’s name, or I might have told you that. It wouldn’t have been the word itself, but the iconic white script on a red background that I recognized and remember from at least three years old, long before I began connecting letters into sounds into words as a reader. It was because he had a huge collection of Coke memorabilia in the room where we visited, so for me, his name might as well have been Coca-Cola.
Years later, in a developing literacy course, I came to understand this concept as “environmental print” where pre-emergent readers identify logos and brands as words. This is not because they read the word “McDonald’s”, “Detroit Tigers”, or “Coca-Cola”, but because the design represents the concept they have connected visually and verbally. As readers develop, most kids phase out of environmental print to actual reading around 1st grade, but I am curious if we might be extending or revisiting the crutch of environmental print to the detriment of literacy itself.
On a recent morning, I threw away the wrapper to a stick of butter. The waxed paper was stamped in red, white, and yellow. My third-grade reader, walking by the can stopped in his tracks to inquire, “Who went to Burger King?” (This is a restaurant our family nearly never visits.) His brain connected the environmental print without processing if, at 7:30am or in our house, a Burger King wrapper even made sense. Environmental print trumped his reading. Later that day, I watched a two-year old child attend parent conferences and manipulate a tablet computer multiple layers deep into the apps. This child could obviously not read, but knew visually with no text how to find, open, and operate multiple apps on the device. Before I left that night I wanted to check the forecast on my phone and scrolled through all the icons on my phone to the Weather Channel app, processing minimal text.
For all technology has done to make our lives efficient and seamless; as fun as it is to play the logo game online, I can’t help but wonder if extending the utility of a concept like environmental print into adulthood is really making our brains stronger.