Abstract
When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence children's early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies (Robins and Treiman, 2009; Robins et al., 2012, 2014) of parent–child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about similarities and differences in parent–child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the child's name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names (monograms), but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences (digrams). Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the child's name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent–child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to children's early literacy skills and school readiness.
Highlights
The early years of formal schooling are devoted to teaching children how to read and write
The overall difference in proportion of questions is consistent with previous studies that suggest there are socioeconomic status (SES) differences in the kinds of conversations parents have with their young children (e.g., Farran and Haskins, 1980; Heath, 1983)
The further discovery that lower SES families have a smaller percentage of elaborative questions than higher SES families do tempers our previous finding (Robins et al, 2014) that, across the preschool years, the questions that parents ask their young children change from simple questions such as Where is the I? to more complex ones such as Dog starts with D—what letter comes next? While some parents do this, a change toward more elaborate questions may not happen for all children
Summary
The early years of formal schooling are devoted to teaching children how to read and write. Previous studies have found some SES differences in the early home literacy environment of U.S children. Even when book reading does occur between lower SES parents and children, there are differences in the quality of parent behavior during this activity (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998; Phillips and Lonigan, 2009). A range of activities—beyond book reading—contribute to the home literacy environment and could contribute, in turn, to children’s ability to benefit from the reading instruction that is provided at school. 147) recommended that measures of the home literacy environment be expanded to include “literacy artifacts, functional uses of literacy, verbal references to literacy, library use, parental encouragement and value of reading, parental teaching of skills, child interest, parent modeling of literacy behaviors, parental education, and parental attitudes toward education.”. We select one of those recommended activities—verbal references www.frontiersin.org
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