Emergent literacies
Emergent literacy is a term that is used to explain a child's knowledge of reading and writing skills before they learn how to read and write words. It signals a belief that, in literate society, young children—even one- and two-year-olds—are in the process of becoming literate. Through the support of parents, caregivers, and educators, a child can successfully progress from emergent to conventional reading.
The basic components of emergent literacy include:
- Print motivation: Being interested in and enjoying books.
- Vocabulary: Knowing the names of things.
- Print awareness: Noticing print, knowing how to handle a book, and knowing how to follow words on a page.
- Narrative skills: Being able to describe things and events and to tell stories.
- Letter knowledge: Understanding letters are different from each other, knowing their names and sounds, and recognizing letters everywhere.
- Phonological awareness: Being able to hear and play with the smaller sounds in words.
History
Traditionally, society has considered reading and writing in their formalistic senses, and viewed children as being knowledgeable about literacy only when they were capable of identifying written words without picture clues, and spelling words that adults could read.In 1966, New Zealand researcher Marie Clay introduced the concept of emergent reading, using it to describe the earliest behaviors and concepts young children employ in interacting with books even before they are capable of reading in the conventional sense. The 1970s and early 1980s saw robust research activity in children's early language development, early childhood education, and reexamination of the concept of reading readiness. This work resulted in Teale and Sulzby assembling a book authored by various leading researchers of the time that proposed reconceptualizing what happens from birth to the time when children reading and write conventionally as a period of emergent literacy.
Since then, an extensive body of research has expanded the concept, illuminating that a child's literacy development begins well before formal introduction in school, and can be influenced by social interactions with adults, exposure to literacy materials, and the use of engaged learning activities.
While the concept of reading readiness suggested that there was a specific point in time after which children were ready to learn to read and write, Clay's notion of emergent literacy suggested that there were continuities in children's literacy development between early literacy behaviors and those displayed once children could read independently. Clay also emphasized the importance of the relationship between writing and reading in early literacy development. Until then, it was believed that children must learn to read before they could learn to write.
According to Whitehurst and Lonigan's model of emergent literacy developed from a cognitive science approach to reading, there are two prominent developmental areas. The areas are inside out skills and outside in skills. Inside out skills include phonological awareness and letter knowledge. Outside in skills include language and conceptual knowledge. These skills develop during different periods of times from birth throughout childhood. Outside in skills are associated with literacy environments. However, the origins of when inside out skills develop are not as clear. What is clear is that interventions that teach outside in skills and inside out skills greatly increase literacy development.
Emergent literacy skills
Print motivation
This component relates to a child's interest in and enjoyment of books. A child with print motivation might enjoy being read to, playing with books, pretending to write, and going to the library. Children who enjoy books are more likely to want to read, and to keep trying, even when it is hard.Vocabulary
The component "vocabulary" relates to the knowing of the names of things. Children with rich vocabularies are at a tremendous educational advantage, since studies show that vocabulary is the best predictor of reading comprehension at the end of second and third grades and is otherwise linked to overall academic achievement.Print awareness
This component relates to noticing print, knowing how to handle a book, and knowing how to follow words on a page. It includes knowing that books are organized from left to right, the words are read from left to right and top to bottom, and how to tell words from letters. These skills are invaluable to a child's literacy development because without these skills, a child will have difficulty learning how to read and write.Oral Language
Emergent literacy can be boiled down to 2 categories. One category is code related skills. Phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge fall under this category. These skills help individuals decode words and read them. The other important category is oral language and vocabulary skills. While code related skills help the students read the words, oral language and vocabulary skills are necessary to help understand the meaning of the text also known as reading comprehension. Oral language includes skills such as: comprehending and producing sentences, inference, vocabulary, and other listening abilities. Code-related skills will only take a reader so far. Once the text becomes more challenging, new vocabulary, ideas and concepts will be harder to understand even if correctly read. Additionally, if a child can read words but do not know what they mean, comprehension will likely suffer as a result. To achieve maximum understanding when reading the reader will need to have strong code related and oral language skills.There was a study done to determine the amount of influence oral language and code-related skills in pre-k has on reading comprehension 5 years later, in 3rd grade. This was a longitudinal study where the same group of students were tested while in pre-k and again as 3rd graders. 420 students were tested in pre-k with a final group of 305 students in grade 3. The others left the study for a variety of reasons. The students, while in Pre-k, were put through a variety of assessments that tested the following oral language skills: vocabulary, discourse and grammar. These same students were also tested in code related skills: letter and print knowledge and phonological processing. As third graders, the skills that were tested included to measure reading comprehension were listening comprehension and word recognition. Strong relations between the skills tested in Pre-K and how it affects the Grade 3 skills were found. These pre-k skills could be used as a predictor of future reading comprehension ability in 3rd grade. The same study also found the pre-k skills of oral language and code related skills were often very connected. If a student was proficient in oral language they were often just as strong in code related skills and vice versa. However, for the third graders, the skills of listening comprehension and word recognition did not share the same connection. One was not necessarily a good predictor of the other.
Narrative skills
Narrative skills which are defined as: the ability to tell stories, as well as describing things and events. They can also be defined as the ability to orally present a series of events in a temporally coherent fashion as required to generate or retell a story . These skills often are supported by having conversations with adults. During a read aloud, a child's narrative skills can be supported through conversation and discussion about the book. These skills will help the child understand story structure and may increase a child's understanding and engagement with the reading. There have been mixed studies of how a child's narrative skills are related or correlated with other emerging literacy skills such as decoding skills. Additionally, the evidence has not been concluded about how these skills affect early reading development for children.In a longitudinal study over two years, 243 children between the ages of 3 and 5.5 were tested to see if there was a concurrent association between narrative, emergent and early literacy skills. These tests included: narrative skills, receptive and expressive language skills, letter knowledge, concepts of print, early word reading, phonological awareness, and letter sound correspondences. They were retested again two years later measuring early word reading skills. The findings concluded that there was a significant and positive correlation between narrative skills and the other emergent literacy skills tested. While this was the case, the study also concluded that emergent literacy skills had stronger correlations with each other than with narrative skills.
Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is another component of emergent literacy. It is the ability and skills to manipulate sounds in words without the use of print. For example, manipulating and identifying sounds in words such as syllables, rhymes, and individual sounds including blending them together are phonological awareness skills . This component relates to being able to hear and play with the smaller sounds in words as well, known as phonemic awareness. Types of phonological awareness include: phonemic awareness, syllable awareness, word awareness, and sentence awareness. Students may have to identify or produce these skills when they are working with words. Many studies have shown that children who are proficient at learning to read and can read new words have developed a strong phonological awareness. Students who have difficulty with reading often have poor phonological awareness skills. If a child has strong phonological awareness skills, they will likely have less difficulty with learning to read than a child who doesn't. Phonemic awareness is under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Only the phonemes or individual sounds in words are being used. These could be letter sounds /c/ /a/ or digraph /ch/ /sh/ or even trigraphs /tch/. The amount of letters does not matter, it is the fact that only one sound is being produced. Skills in this category include identifying, blending and manipulating these phonemes or individual sounds. Phonemic awareness has been argued to be the most important aspect of phonological awareness when learning to read.Due to its importance, many preschool, kindergarten and higher grade levels have phonological awareness programs. Specific and explicit phonological awareness instruction is the most effective way for children to learn. This is when a teacher will teach the different skills directly to the students versus incorporating them into the literacy instruction but not directly teaching them. For example, teachers can read lots of rhyming books like but if the children are not specifically taught what rhyming is and how to rhyme they are less likely to know how to do it. However, incorporating these skills into literacy instruction on top of explicitly teaching them could reinforce the skills already taught. It is believed that phonological instruction could be taught from the larger parts of the words such as rhyming and syllables first, to the smaller parts such as the individual phonemes and then to writing them.