Home grown for reading: Parental contributions to young children's emergent literacy and word recognition.

Abstract

This article provides an integrative review of key aspects of emergent literacy and specific home activities that empirical research has shown to support their development. Given the importance of word recognition in development, home contributions to word recognition as well as to four areas of emergent literacy that contribute to word recognition are highlighted. These include phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print concepts, and vocabulary. Particular attention is devoted to the activity of shared book to outline its different facets, changing nature, and potential impact on emergent literacy and word recognition skill. About a half a century ago—a phrase that conveys just how much our conception has changed— children were given reading readiness tests at school entrance to assess whether they were ready for the new initiative of learning to read. About 20 years ago, in concert with views of child development as a constructivist process, this conception began to change toward an understanding of learning to read as a process that starts much earlier in life and that is based upon a variety of foundational skills acquired before children enter formal schooling. The term emergent literacy, launched by Teale and Sulzby (1986) in their edited volume, and brought to life in Clay's (1993) observational studies of young children, was introduced to refer to this conception. More recently, it has come to refer to the skills and reading-like behaviours that are developmental precursors to their conventional and more ad- vanced counterparts. The view that the home environment in which children grow plays a substantial role in their literacy development is nicely illustrated by a large-scale study of twins completed by Petrill, Deater-Deckard, Schatschneider, and Davis (2005). Here, family environment characteristics were associated with children's read- ing outcome beyond what could be explained by genes shared by parents and children. The purpose of this review article is to detail key activities of the home environment provided by parents to young children that are predictive of development in general and, more specifically, of aspects of emergent literacy skills contributing to word recognition skill—phonological ability, alphabetic knowledge, concepts of print, and vocabulary. Given the salience of shared book as a home activity, a separate section is devoted to its different facets, changing nature, and potential effects. To provide a background for why these specific topics have been selected, a brief outline follows directly below of what is meant by emergent literacy and of the transition from emergent literacy to conventional word recognition.