Articles on early literacy

Promoting Early Literacy and Fostering a Love For Reading — Better Kid Care — Penn State Extension

Learning to read is one of the most important childhood skills and can provide children with a tremendous sense of enjoyment. A wealth of research has established the importance of early literacy skills for later school readiness and long-term school success.

Children who begin kindergarten behind their peers in literacy and reading skills often have a tough time catching up as early literacy skills have been shown to predict reading ability throughout school, likelihood to graduate high school and attend college, and future career opportunities. Additionally, reading and literacy challenges often co-occur with behavioral challenges. Possessing the language skills to describe how you are feeling is a key aspect of social-emotional adjustment. As such, encouraging literacy skills early can also promote positive social-emotional development and minimize behavioral challenges.

Building literacy skills

There are multiple things that you can do as an educator to encourage early literacy skills. Think about your classroom environment. Are there letters and words easily viewable to children? Are children’s books readily available? Try your best to create an environment where children are surrounded by language in a fun and age-appropriate manner.

While teaching the alphabet and print awareness is important, what is even more essential is phonological awareness—the ability to recognize that language is made up of sounds. For example, it is important that children are not only able to identify the letter “b,” but also understand that the letter represents the specific “buh” sound. It is really the ability to string together these phonological sounds that set children up to read successfully. You can promote phonological awareness in many different ways in your classroom. Rhyming and alliterative games and stories and clapping to identify different syllables are fun ways to build phonemic awareness. Or try identifying a letter sound and asking children to find as many objects in the classroom that begin with that same sound.

Reading out loud to the children in your classroom is a great way to promote literacy and language skills; however, it is also important to think about how you are reading. Try to make the experience interactive. For example, asking children for their input on the story helps them comprehend what you’ve read and grasp that words are not just collections of letters but have specific meanings. Here are some things you could try asking: “What do you think this character is feeling here?” “Why do you think this character did that?” “What do you think is going to happen next?”

Encouraging a lifelong love of reading

The benefits of reading extend beyond language and literacy skills. Reading books can encourage children to be intellectually curious, inspire problem solving, promote empathy, increase self-esteem, and help them understand the world and connect with people around them. Here are some strategies for encouraging a love of reading:

1. Allow children in your class to select and read the books they are interested in. Because of this, it is important children have options that represent the diversity in our world. Having books with diverse characters allows children to identify and connect with the characters and promotes understanding of different experiences.
2. Try to set up your classroom with a comfortable area that is designated for reading. This could be an area with big, comfortable pillows, or maybe just a specific area on the rug by the classroom library.
3. Develop reading routines. Designate a specific time in the day that is reserved for reading. This could be individual reading or a time when you read aloud.
4. Promote connection through reading. This can be done through partner reading, encouraging interaction when you read aloud, or you showing an interest in the book a child is reading.

Ultimately, it is important that children develop a love of learning and are motivated to read on their own. This is very hard to do if we do not create an environment that encourages reading in a relaxed manner. Reading should be viewed as an enjoyable experience, not a stressful one. If a child is struggling, remain supportive, encouraging, and non-judgmental. And with many things, children in your classroom will look to you as an example. If you convey a positive relationship with reading and it appears to be something you enjoy, it is more likely that the children around you will adopt a similar attitude.

Roald Dahl’s book Matilda beautifully sums up the potential benefits that accompany building literacy skills and fostering a love of reading in this excerpt: “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea: These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone. ”

For more information on promoting early literacy skills in your classroom please check out the following Better Kid Care online modules:

• “Preschool Foundations: Environments and Routines that Work!”
• “School Readiness: Lay the Foundation in the Early Years”
• “Connecting to Military Children through Books”

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Article by Benjamin Bayly

Early Literacy Instruction Should Go Beyond the Basics

In the early elementary years, educators can sometimes “inadvertently curb a student’s enthusiasm for learning by focusing too much on grades and scores and the ‘right’ answers,” writes Fang Gao, a lecturer in the English department at Shenyang Pharmaceutical University in Shenyang, China, for ASCD’s Educational Leadership.

To inspire young children to become creative thinkers, problem solvers, and lifelong learners, teachers should lay a strong foundation in early literacy skills like vocabulary and spelling, as well as nurture a set of intangible skills like the ability to make sense of and critically analyze new information.

“The early years of learning (K-3) are an exciting time of rapid growth and cognitive and emotional development, and of building a solid foundation for independence, self-confidence, and self-reliance,” writes Gao.

Striking a Balance

In the early elementary grades in particular, Gao says teachers tend to focus too much of their instructional time on teaching students “constrained skills” like “alphabetic knowledge, phonics, and vocabulary rules,” and then executing these skills in isolation and within time limits.

While the constrained skills are necessary for students to learn to read, Gao points to research indicating that these skills alone won’t make them strong readers or “prepare students for future success with unconstrained capabilities like cognitive flexibility, critical analysis, and contextual variation.”

Striking the right balance in early literacy lessons, therefore, involves teaching a mix of essential foundational skills like sentence mechanics, for example, along with helping students develop the abstract skills they need to “engage in and concentrate on deeper learning, take on challenges, and develop effective communicative and critical thinking capabilities,” Gao writes.

Nurturing a Broader Set of Literacy Skills

Simultaneously cultivating three types of literacy skills—recognition literacy, action literacy, and reflection literacy—in students is especially important, says Gao, because it fosters their creativity and language development, while encouraging them to “see themselves in the text.”

Recognition literacy exercises can include grammar or spelling lessons that help students with their “verbal and visual recognition” through explicit instruction and demonstration, for example.

Action literacy activities, on the other hand, help students develop their “communication and construction of existing established knowledge” by explaining and describing concepts and ideas. As one exercise, a teacher could have students narrate “a story in their own words, linking language usage in certain specific contexts.”

Reflection literacy, the third type, focuses on building students’ ability to question standards and norms and create their own content, like a story or journal entry. When students “analyze their values and understandings of things in their immediate surroundings,” they learn to question “socially constructed meanings and conventions” while building a deeper, more holistic understanding of the world around them, writes Gao.

For an activity that reinforces reflection literacy skills, ask students to be “language detectives” and write down 10 words they frequently hear in different environments in their lives—at home, out shopping, or at school. “By listening to what people around them say, students will learn to look for particular word patterns and actively reflect on the connection between written and oral language,” Gao writes.

These three types of literacy education, Gao emphasizes, can be taught simultaneously, but reflection literacy skills should be developed as early as possible because they instill in children the ability to apply previous knowledge to produce something new, allowing students to become creators, rather than just consumers of knowledge.

“The ultimate goal of education is to prepare students to be independent and resourceful, to take action when parents or teachers are not around to intervene or offer help, and to find ways to handle issues or problems that they encounter in daily life,” Gao writes.

Literacy and its Impact on Child Development: Comments on Articles Tomblin and Sénéchal

Introduction

The concept of “literacy” has taken center stage in early education only in the last decade. Prior to this, experts rarely considered literacy as a critical aspect of the healthy growth and development of young children. The current level of reading problems among schoolchildren remains unacceptably high. The data show that about 40% of fourth grade students have difficulty reading even at the elementary level, and that there are a disproportionate number of poor children and children from ethnic or racial minorities among children with reading problems. ¹ A paradigm shift over the past decade, spurred by the 1998 publication Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children by the United States National Research Council, has emphasized the importance of early education as a context within which addressing the identified urgent issues is likely to be effective. Early childhood education is the period during which young children develop skills, knowledge and interest in the symbolic and semantic foundations of written and spoken language. In this paper, I interpret these abilities and interests as "pre-literacy" abilities in order to emphasize their role as precursors of traditionally understood literacy. To date, attention to pre-literacy as an integral element of early childhood education stems from two emerging areas of research that show that:

1. Individual differences in pre-literacy skills among children are meaningfully important – early-onset differences contribute significantly to longitudinal measures of reading performance; ²
2. The prevalence of reading problems is more likely to be affected by prevention than by remedial education, because if a particular child falls behind in reading in primary school, it is more likely that a return to healthy progress will not occur. ³

Research and findings

Experts Tomblin and Seneschal discuss current and important aspects of the current literature on the development of pre-literacy and its short- and long-term relationships with other age-related competencies. According to my reading of the text of their papers, there are three critical areas that require further development: decoding predictors, the language-literacy relationship, and the role of temperament and motivation.

First, the current cumulative research literature on the development of early literacy skills and the relationship of this development to later reading outcomes identifies three unique predictors of reading competence: phonological processing, knowledge of printed letters and what they are used for, and spoken language. ² While the first two aspects directly prepare children for acquiring word skills (eg decoding), the third aspect prepares them for text comprehension with little or no effect on decoding. Tomblin aptly points out that reading competence requires both decoding skills and comprehension skills, and the Seneschal emphasizes that children need to first "learn to read" before "reading to learn." It should be understood that the relationship between the two aspects of reading is multiplicative—meaning that both sides of the equation (Decoding x Comprehension = Reading) require any value other than 0 for the reading to be functional. ⁴ Both Tomblin and the Seneschal do not emphasize enough the importance of developing early decoding precursors in children. Children will never be able to read to learn (i.e. understand) unless they are able to successfully decode. Children who start learning basic reading with inadequate pre-literacy skills will not be able to keep up with decoding educational information, which will slow down the final transition to reading for the sake of understanding the meaning of what they read. Early education is a period during which educators can almost easily improve children's chances of learning to become a reader by gaining initial alphabetic skills (printing and phonological awareness) that will enable children to benefit from the process of decoding directions while learning.

Second, both Tomblin and Seneschal emphasize the importance of the role of spoken language in literacy development, although they do not emphasize the relationship between literacy and language development. Scholars are increasingly inclined to view the integrative relationship between language and literacy as interdependent. Engaging children in literacy-related activities, such as reading a storybook or listening to rhymes, requires a metalinguistic focus that focuses on spoken or written language. The continuous involvement of children in literacy classes and their growing tendency to consider language as an object of attention are becoming the first routes of language development. Once children begin to read, even at the most elementary level, reading texts becomes the richest source of new words and concepts, complex syntax, and narrative structures that stimulate further language development. In short, literacy is the most important vehicle for the development of language competencies in children, both in the preschool period and during the periods of initial and subsequent schooling. The relationship between language and literacy is more than a one-way street – language provides a platform for the exploration and experiential learning of written language, which in turn shapes children's later language competencies.

Third, further consideration needs to be given to the role of temperament and motivation in influencing children's achievement and experience in teaching pre-literacy skills, as Tomblin and Seneschal's findings are insufficient. Tomblin notes overlap between internalizing behaviors (such as anxiety and depression) and literacy difficulties, and Seneschal notes that some children may avoid reading, especially those who feel they do not read well enough. The role of early motivation, self-esteem, and temperament in the development of pre-literacy requires more attention overall, especially when we consider opportunities to stimulate other intrinsic competencies (eg, phonological processing and vocabulary) in prevention programs. Most early education educators know that motivating children to become literate is one of the most important contributions to successful pre-literacy. By trying to experience literacy on their own or in the context of interacting with others, children themselves correct the process of developing pre-literacy! A small, though largely consistent, body of research shows that children's motivation and engagement in literacy activities varies greatly for each child and is relatively related to the individual child's benefit from the activity. ⁵ Some children actively resist pre-literacy experiences, such as reading a storybook, and children with poor language skills or children who do not receive any literacy experiences at home are more likely to resist involvement in development activities. The scientific literature is still unable to explain why some children resist participation in literacy classes and how this resistance generally correlates with the child's temperament. However, approaches to encouraging young children to become involved in literacy activities and motivate them to become literate need to be considered as one of the most important characteristics of developing effective interventions.

Recommendations for policy makers and services

Modern perspectives for policy makers and services emerge from three scientific findings reported in the literature. First, children with an underdeveloped oral language base will be very vulnerable in the context of acquiring reading competence, which in turn hinders continuous language development. Secondly, it is much more difficult to correct existing reading problems than to prevent them. Third, it appears possible to increase children's chances of acquiring literacy skills through high-quality, intensive, systemic pre-literacy programs implemented in pre-schools and kindergartens before children develop reading problems.

Integrating policy, practice and research

Significant gaps remain in integrating policy, practice and research, and in producing research that can be safely applied to existing programs. Tomblin emphasizes the need for further research into the mechanisms that cause literacy problems in children with language difficulties. Research into these mechanisms is one of the most developed and well-funded areas of research in the United States, and has unequivocally shown the importance of spoken language, phonological processing, and capitalization commonly associated with a child's ability to read. What is needed now is a closer look at ways to stimulate the linkage between policymaking, practice and research to ensure that current efforts to improve literacy rates in young children, especially those who start these programs with low levels of language and literacy, are effective. The Seneschal puts forward several evidence-based proposals to encourage the development of literacy skills in young children, such as word games and book reading. Further scrutiny should be given to the extent to which these activities are effective for children with poor language proficiency, have a longitudinal positive effect, and can be incorporated into existing interventions.

Does quality matter?

Policy makers, practitioners and researchers have rarely considered the importance of the quality of interaction between adults and children in relation to literacy, whether it be word games or book reading. Theories of the development of pre-literacy skills in children suggest that the quality of the interaction is of great importance because children's skills progress faster and more easily in the course of such learning interaction, which is characterized by empathetic, responsive and under-involved adults. When implementing systematic, evidence-based remedial interventions aimed at early literacy development, the quality of these interventions by the teacher can vary significantly, and these differences, apparently, are the cause of a significant difference in the level of literacy of children. When we develop policies and services to serve young children to reduce the risk of reading difficulties through remedial programs, we must ensure that children's relationships and interactions with adults are of high quality, providing a context within which knowledge, skills and interests are developed. .

Literature

1. National Assessment of Education Progress. The Nation's Report Card. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/. Accessed February 4, 2005.
2. Storch SA, Whitehurst GJ. Oral language and code-related precursors to reading: Evidence from a longitudinal structural model. Developmental Psychology 2002;38(6):934-947.
3. Juel C, Griffith PL, Gough PB. Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade. Journal of Educational Psychology 1986;78(4):243-255.
4. Gough PB, Tunmer WE. Decoding, reading, and reading disability. RASE: Remedial and Special Education 1986;7(1):6-10.
5. Justice LM, Chow SM, Capellini C, Flanigan K, Colton S. Emergent literacy intervention for vulnerable preschoolers: Relative effects of two approaches. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 2003;12(3):320-332.

Note:

Comments on original research published by Monique Seneschal in 2005. To access this article, please contact us at [email protected].

Publications on the key word “Early career guidance”

Date of publication: 01/27/2023.

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Gravivoronskaya Oksana Ivanovna , teacher
Podgornaya Natalya Vladimirovna , educator
MBOU "Primary school - D / S No. 8" , Belgorod region

Khalponina Marina Sergeevna , teacher
Vereshchagin Olga Dmitrievna , Natalia Yakovlevna Zagorulko , Physical Instructor, instructor for physical physical culture
MDOU "TsRR - D / S No. 4" , Belgorod region

"Early vocational guidance for younger preschool age in preschool"

The article discusses the tasks and directions of early vocational guidance in preschool educational institutions. Technologies used in kindergarten, as well as pedagogical technologies of early career guidance as technologies that realize educational goals that correspond to the specifics of younger age and are focused on creating a positive social situation for the development of children.

Date of publication: 10/31/2022.

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Ermakova Marina Nikolaevna , teacher
Makoveeva Svetlana , educator
MBDOU "D / S No. 55" , Belgorod region

"Formation of early career guidance for preschool children through role-playing games"

In the article, the authors prove that the game, especially role-playing, should be given the first role in career guidance activities with preschool children, since it is in the game that children reflect their experience in a particular profession, as if trying it on themselves. The game develops the personal qualities of the child.

Publication date: 05/24/2022

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Tkacheva Marina Anatolyevna , teacher
MBDOU “D/s No. 53” , Belgorod region
Zelenskaya Anna Ivanovna , teacher
MBOU “Secondary school No. 36”

“Development pledge of early vocational guidance for preschoolers»

The article considers the relevance of the development of engineering and technical thinking in kindergarten, which allows children to develop initial technical skills, which contributes to the future vocational guidance of preschoolers.

The authors note that the problem of vocational guidance is a public one, since the state of society, the development of the labor market, employment of the population, the ability to identify talents and direct them to the most suitable areas of activity depend on it.

Publication date: 01/27/2022

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Zagrebina Victoria Georgievna , bachelor, educator
MBOU "NSh-DS No. 58" , Irkutsk region

"Project activity as a means of familiarization with the work of adult children of senior preschool age"

The article presents the results of scientific and methodological justification for the application of project activities as conditions for the formation of preschoolers' ideas about professions.

Publication date: 12/23/2021

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Donetsk Larisa Vasilievna , teacher
Tatyana Aleksandrovna Pechegina , teacher
Blessbina Julia Aleksandrovna , teacher
MBDOU "Mosaika" Mosaika "Mosaica" , Belgorod region

"Formation of ideas about professions in the course of early career guidance for preschoolers"

The formation of preschoolers' ideas about professions is associated with enriching their knowledge about the features of professional activities of adults and developing an emotionally positive attitude towards work. The article is devoted to the consideration of the forms of pedagogical influence on children in the course of early career guidance and the algorithm for the formation of a holistic view of children about professions.

The article is devoted to the topic of introducing preschool children to career guidance. The authors describe the system of work with preschoolers on early career guidance.

Date of publication: 12.12.2020. Kindergarten №70 "Child Development Center "Firefly" , Belgorodskaya obl.