Using Environmental Print to Enhance Emergent Literacy

Abstract

Environmental print in the form of product labels and signs provides children with their earliest print experiences. The present research examined the role of environmental print in early reading and writing development and the ways in which parents and early childhood educators can best utilise it to foster emergent literacy and print motivation. This involved (a) case study and observational methods to document how parents naturally use environmental print in the home and during play to scaffold children’s emergent literacy and print motivation and (b) experimental methods to evaluate the effects of directly using environmental print to scaffold emergent literacy and print motivation in a preschool setting. The case studies provided a detailed view of how a mother referenced environmental print words and letters using multisensory strategies and how children utilised these environmental print strategies during print interactions. A larger sample of mother-child dyads (N = 35; M age child = 4.30 years) were observed at play in a grocery shop setting and during a joint writing activity in this same setting. Two-thirds of mothers referred to environmental print words during play. However, only a small number of mothers referred to letters in the environmental print during play or used it during the joint writing to scaffold their child’s writing. When referring to environmental print, the mothers used strategies such as encouraging their child to identify letters embedded in the print by names and sounds, using directional and descriptive language to describe letter shapes, and copying the environmental print. Some mothers traced print with fingers and formed letter shapes in the air.