Early Literacy Development Research Articles

Prosodic Transfer in English Literacy Skills among Chinese Elementary-Age Students: Controlling for Non-Verbal Intelligence.

Building upon the prosodic transfer hypothesis, the current study aims to examine the intermediary effect of English stress on the relation between Chinese lexical tone awareness and English word-level literacy (reading and spelling) as well as the moderating effect of English oral vocabulary proficiency on the cross-linguistic association. Grade 4 Chinese learners of English (N = 224) participated in this study and were assessed for their tone and stress sensitivity, English oral vocabulary, English word reading, and English word spelling. Mediated multivariate analyses with moderation were used to explore: (1) whether the influence of lexical tone perception on L2 word reading and spelling was mediated by English stress as posited in the prosodic transfer hypothesis; (2) whether the effects of tone on English word reading and spelling performance varied as a function of oral vocabulary levels. The findings revealed a direct positive relationship between Chinese tone and English word reading and spelling, and the relationship was mediated by English stress awareness. Furthermore, the direct pathway from tone to English word-level literacy skills were moderated by oral vocabulary and the relationship between tone and English word-level skills became stronger as oral vocabulary levels increased; however, such strength reached a plateau among children without adequate oral vocabulary skills. These findings suggest the necessity to incorporate word spelling as an outcome in the cross-suprasegmental phonological transfer models of early literacy development. Additionally, the current study endorses the complexity of cross-language prosodic transfer. It points to a precise threshold for sufficient L2 oral vocabulary skills to enable tone transfer in English word-level literacy attainment.

Well Played! Promoting Phonemic Awareness Training Using EdTech-GraphoGame Brazil-During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Early literacy skills such as alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness are made up the foundation for learning to read. These skills are more effectively taught with explicit instruction starting inpreschool and then continuing during early elementary school years. The COVID19 pandemic school closures severely impacted early literacy development worldwide. Brazil had one of the longest school closure periods, which resulted in several children having no access to any educational activities. Education Technology (EdTech) tools can leverage access to pedagogical materials and remediate the consequences of school closure. We investigated the impact of using an early literacy EdTech, GraphoGame Brazil, to foster learning of early literacy skills during the height of COVID19 school closures, in Brazil. We carried out a quasi-experimental, pretest and posttest study with elementary school students who were taking online classes. Participants were pseudo randomly assigned to (1) an experimental group, who played GraphoGame Brazil, and to (2) an active control group, who played an EdTech that focuses on early numeracy skills. The results show a significant positive training effect on word reading accuracy associated with the use of GraphoGame for the children in the experimental group, relative to the control group. We also found statistically significant negative effect in lowercase naming for the control group. We address the consequences of COVID19 school closures, the promise of EdTech and its limitations, and discuss the issue of fostering successful early literacy instruction in countries that have struggled with teaching children to read even before the pandemic.

Factors associated with early literacy and numeracy development among children under five years in Bangladesh: multivariate two-level mixed effect approach

PurposeEarly literacy and numeracy development among children may be the best measure of a child's well-being. The purpose of this research was to examine the impact of child factors, quality of care and household factors, and community factors in early childhood on the development of literacy and numeracy skills of children in Bangladesh.Design/methodology/approachFor this study, the authors used data from Bangladesh's 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. The association between response variables and selected covariates was examined using the chi-square test. To determine the risk factors for early child literacy and numeracy development, the authors applied two-level logistic regression models.FindingsAmong the total of under five children (n = 9,449), in general, 29.1% of the children were growing in the development early childhood literacy and numeracy in Bangladesh. Children (36–47 months), male children, children with moderate stunting, children with severe and moderate underweight status, mothers without education and primary education, and mothers from the poorest, poorer, middle and richer households were less likely than their counterparts to develop children's early literacy and numeracy skills. In contrast, women from the eastern and central regions, children who read at least 3 books, and early childhood education had higher odds of children's literacy and numeracy skills development than their counterparts.Originality/valueThe results from this study suggest that children's, community, quality of care and household level significant factors should be considered when trying to improve children's literacy and numeracy skills development in Bangladesh.

Early Childhood Literacy Development Through The Baca Corner (Literacy Development at TK Tunas Rimba I Purwokerto)

Reading corner is an alternative to developing literacy in early childhood institutions. When in the reading corner children are very excited and increase their great curiosity. This happens because the reading corner can improve children's ability to develop literacy. This study aims to describe through a reading corner can develop children's literacy skills. This research method uses a congruent embedded that applies one stage of descriptive qualitative data collection at a time. The results of this study found that the development of early childhood literacy can be stimulated through a reading corner that can be a reference for every class in early childhood education institutions. Some results show that the advantages of children who are often in the reading corner include: increasing children's imagination power in playing projects; the increasing vocabulary of each student; and children's social-emotional development getting better because of the interactions carried out in the reading corner.

Investigate Chinese Immigrant Parent’s Perceptions of Their Children’s Literacy and Numeracy Acquisition and Development in Australia

Literacy and numeracy are the fundamental elements that need to be developed in early childhood to enhance children's skills and future personal attainment. This research study focuses on investigating how Chinese immigrant parents think of conducting literacy and numeracy learning in early childhood as well as what they would like to do to promote their children's early literacy and numeracy acquisition and development. The findings present that Chinese traditional Confucianism values and learning beliefs are deep-rooted in Chinese immigrants parents' minds. Created favourable and supportive learning environments and various traditional activities are used to support their children's literacy and numeracy learning from an early age. Understanding Chinese immigrant families' learning beliefs and traditional cultural values could contribute to supporting children's personal development and future achievement within the Australian context for both Chinese and Australian educators.

Continuities, discontinuities and transition in early childhood literacy education at digital time

Introduction. This paper reports the results of a study concerning the views and the expectations of primary teachers for the transition from kindergarten to primary school. Goal. In a recently new educational environment, in which all educators “forced” to continue their educational practices as to ensure for their students a smooth transition from one level to another, two transitions processes implemented. The first one concerns the move from in-person to virtual delivery of the language classroom and the second one concern the preschoolers’ transition from kindergarten to primary school. Methods of the Research. In this context, 16 Greek first grade primary school teachers' views about their (previous preschoolers) students' literacy development and elements of literacy knowledge after remote teaching (in a preschool setting) were collected with semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. The Results. The results showed that support for the transition of young children from preschool to primary school settings and literacy development was inevitably affected into this new educational environment. Therefore, teachers propose the continuity between early childhood and primary school literacy programmes as the key for a smoother transition. Based on evaluations of experiences, a smooth transition and continuity from one level to another could be also facilitated and intermediated by collaboration of preschool and primary school teachers and other stakeholders. Furthermore, discontinuities in early childhood literacy education and development could be disappeared if policy makers try to bridge and sculpt “distances” via effective transition programmes. Conclusions. The knowledge of current practice, priorities, challenges, and opportunities will help language educators to adjust their education offer, their syllabi, expectations, or pedagogical approaches to facilitate a more positive and smooth transition process for each and every learner.

From stories at bedtime to a love of reading: Parental practices and beliefs About reading with infants

Although it is well established that reading with young children supports early language and literacy development, few studies have focused on the importance of parental beliefs about reading with infants. The current study, which sheds light on parental beliefs had three main aims. The first was to examine practices of shared reading in infancy (birth to 1 year old), while the second, sought to examine parents’ views on benefits of and potential barriers to reading with infants. The third aim was to explore how parents’ beliefs about reading, and their own enjoyment of reading, may influence the early home literacy environment they create for their infants. Drawing upon a mixed methods approach, comprising surveys and interviews with parents of infants ( n = 31), this paper highlights the importance of parents’ own enjoyment of reading. The findings, which are considered from a bioecological perspective, indicate that parents’ enjoyment of reading was significantly and positively associated with the number of children’s books in their home, and the frequency of reading with their infant, as well as their hope for their child’s future enjoyment of reading. Parents noted that one of the main benefits of reading with their infants related to socio-emotional development and the one-to-one time, rather than the language and literacy benefits, which constitute the focus of much research in this area. The findings further point to an intergenerational transfer of a love of reading.

“Mix Learning with Everyday Moments”: A Virtual Recipe for Early Literacy Development at Home

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when educators and guardians/parents collaborated as community compañeres, they supported literacy learning experiences that honored children’s home lives.

Knowledge Management and Technology Management: The Use of YouTube among Preschool Teachers

Knowledge management is the term used to describe approaches that knowledge workers employ in fulfilling their assigned tasks. The use of technology eases the process of completing their work because it provides systematic methods of managing the process of applying knowledge. Therefore, the current study seeks to find answers on the use of YouTube regarding the type of content selected by the teachers when using the platform and the kind of activities that require them to use the channel for teaching and learning purposes. The study uses qualitative data inquiries to collect responses from 23 preschool teachers. Four themes are formulated as findings in the current study. They are “YouTube consolidates teaching and learning,” “use of YouTube for educational songs,” “use of YouTube to improvise teacher-made songs,” and “nonusage of YouTube.” It concludes that knowledge is transferred explicitly when preschool teachers use the platform as a resource for teaching and learning. The technology, that is, YouTube, has somewhat assisted them in teaching the preschoolers in their early literacy development by watching entertaining yet educational materials. The study implied that YouTube could be an educational resource that teachers can use in teaching young learners. Also, it suggested that it could be a source of information that teachers may use to find relevant materials for their classes.

Read‐Alouds: A Case Study of Two Preschoolers on the Autism Spectrum

AbstractThis study examines the types of interactions and early literacy development that occur when non‐verbal 4‐year‐old children on the autism spectrum engage with family members in read‐alouds using authentic children's literature. Findings indicate the importance of quality children's literature for read‐alouds. A key implication of the study is that teachers of young children with autism need to form partnerships with family members to encourage them to engage with their children in authentic read‐alouds.

Purposes, Places, and Participants: A Systematic Review of Teacher Language Practices and Child Oral Language Outcomes in Early Childhood Classrooms

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Early childhood teachers’ talk is a key ingredient in children’s early language and literacy development, but there has been little systematic synthesis of observational studies that examine relationships between teacher talk and child oral language. In this systematic review of 54 studies, we investigate and synthesize the kinds of teacher language practices and children’s oral language outcomes that have been studied to date. We identify four key strands of teacher language practice types: 1) conceptual talk, 2) interactive talk, 3) linguistic features, and 4) management and literal talk, and find that the majority of studies use vocabulary assessments as a proxy for assessing children’s oral language development. Next, we apply the idea of language registers, drawn from systemic functional linguistics, to identify the patterns of teacher language practices used for particular purposes, in particular places, and with different participants that were associated with growth in children’s oral language development. Practice or Policy: Findings indicate that early childhood teachers can support children’s oral language development using strategies tailored to specific settings, including the use of conceptual talk during shared book-reading and the use of elicitations during play and small group settings.

Extratextual talk in public library storytime programs: A focus on questions

Shared book reading in which children actively participate in the reading of a text via discussion or extratextual talk has been well-established as an activity to advance children’s literacy and language learning, and it is a characteristic practice of public library storytime programs. This study scrutinized the extratextual talk that occurred within the shared reading episodes of 15 public library storytime programs. Findings from this study confirm prior assertions that storytime programs hold the promise of advancing children’s early literacy development. With more than two-fifths of librarians’ extratextual utterances at an abstract level of understanding, storytimes serve as a favorable setting for advancing children’s inferencing skills and symbolic understanding. Results also point to areas that librarians might target for improvement including integration of questions requiring extended responses and attention to vocabulary.

Early literacy curriculum and its journey to kindergarten classroom

Abstract Implementing new school reforms in school practice is extremely challenging mostly because of teacher resistance to change, or uncertainty, fear, or nostalgia for the previous curriculum. Since 2016 a new preschool curriculum including a new early literacy curriculum has been in force in Slovakia. The aim of the study is to assess how well teachers follow the requirement to use a variety of texts in the classroom to promote early literacy development. The analysis is performed on 138 observations out of a total of 215 structured observations, in which teachers used a text as part of an educational activity. The predominant use of narrative texts is linked to more traditional early literacy activities; however, the employment of different text genres relates to the use of different sources of text presentation, engagement with different ways of working with the text and is accompanied by different reading activities.

Relation between executive function and early language and literacy development in Bengali, Chinese, and Hindi

Relation between executive function and early language and literacy development in Bengali, Chinese, and Hindi

Teachers’ perception towards early childhood literacy development methods in ‘aisyiyah bustanul athfal (ABA) kindergarten

The literacy ability of early childhood is inseparable from their teacher’s role in teaching literacy for children. The knowledge and methods used by the teacher are expected to be able to improve children's skills to comprehend the content of text and become active readers in the future. This research aims to find out teacher's perception towards early childhood literacy development methods in ‘Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal (ABA) Kindergarten in Depok Sub-district. The research method employed in this research is qualitative descriptive. The sampling technique is purposive sampling in order to obtain 8 participants out of 4 kindergartens in Depok Sub-district. The research data were analyzed by thematic analysis technique using NVivo 12 software. The findings revealed that: (1) teachers’ perception towards early childhood literacy development is mostly defined as the skill to reading and writing. (2) Teacher implementation on the early childhood literacy is carried out through activities involving printed learning media. (3) The development method for early childhood literacy learning is still limited to storytelling and writing. (4) School support for early childhood literacy development methods consists of providing facilities and infrastructures, and supporting teachers create published story books. However, the problems and obstacles faced by teachers are the lack of availability of reading books and inadequate infrastructure.

Contextual Support in the Home for Children's Early Literacy Development

Home literacy environment (HLE) refers to the physical, interpersonal, and emotional / motivational factors in the home that have been found to be important for children’s literacy development. In this paper, the emergence of HLE research, its conceptualizations, and the effects of HLE factors, will be reviewed with an emphasis on the relations between HLE and children’s early literacy skills. Challenges faced by HLE researchers are also considered, and three aspects of issues are identified: privacy sensitivity, measure validity, and intervention fidelity. Apart from what is already known, this paper will also provide a summary of possible goals for future research.

Validating Scliar’s early literacy system: A grapheme-phoneme relation

The main purpose is discussing Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System (SSA) first validity evidence. Method: Sixteen subjects (10 girls and 6 boys) comprised the Experimental Group, EG (mean age 6.02) and 16 subjects (7 girls and 9 boys) formed the Control Group, CG (mean age 6.10). At the experiment beginning, the EG was submitted to an intervention program based on SSA. Two master degree students developed the experiment, guided by Scliar-Cabral, during 2011. They visited the EG’s school twice each week. After this intervention, both groups read aloud a list of 38 pseudo-words with four or five graphemes, one of the tasks composing the Battery of Reception and Production of Verbal Language (Scliar-Cabral, 2003b, 119-250). Each pseudo-word was signaled by the experimenter. The task was designed to assess children’s ability to convert a grapheme into its correspondent phoneme. Results: Using the confidence level of 5% (α = 0.05), with freedom (df) degree 30, we obtained a p- value of 0.01 as a result of a t test (independent samples, two-tailed test, equal variances). This value is below the limit for the null hypothesis acceptance, that is p > α = 5%. Thus, there is no more than 1% chance that the differences between the data averages from the two classes are randomly determined. The effect size was large, with a Cohen’s d value of 0.97. Test results indicate that SSA application influenced the experimental group performance

Environmental influences on early language and literacy development: Social policy and educational implications.

A growing body of literature suggests strong associations between environmental factors and young children's early language and literacy development. In the United States, large socio-economic differences are evident in children's skills when they enter Kindergarten, differences that persist through schooling and can be explained by children's early communicative environments. Here, I highlight three themes that characterize the features of children's communicative environments that are found to promote language learning: (1) Talking with children helps more than talking to children, (2) Linguistic input should increase in diversity and complexity during early childhood, and (3) A gradual transition from contextualized to decontextualized conversations is helpful. There are many reasons for the large variability in early communicative environments within and across social class groups. Two primary reasons include parents' knowledge of child development and parenting stress. Social policies that reduce parenting stress and increase parental knowledge have the potential to improve early language environments and lead to better educational outcomes for all children.

The importance of the executive function of the brain in early literacy development

South African learners struggle with reading regardless of all the interventions and workshops presented to preschool and the foundation phase teachers. Lately, literature emphasises the role of neuropsychology in successful learning and reading but teachers seem to be uninformed about this. The aim of this investigation was to provide a view of the role of the EF in laying the foundation for early literacy and the reading process. Experts from the field of Early Child Development assessed the researchers’ views on the basis of the following research question: Do the suggested early literacy activities contribute to the development of the EF? The authors suggest a number of pre-reading activities and indicated their view of the role of the EF in the activities. The authors’ found that various aspects of the EF play in a role to a greater or lesser extent in mastering the selected activities. An explorative pilot study was done in a qualitative research approach to test the authors’ view of the role of the EF in the selected activities. Although the participants mostly agreed with the authors’ view suggestions by the participants were made to expand the role of the EF in some of the activities. The EF plays an important role in the understanding and completion of preschool activities for mastering of early literacy skills. The authors suggest a change in teachers’ approach to enhance pre-school children’s emergent literacy giving special attention to the development of the EF. Keywords: Anticipation, early literacy, executive function of the brain, form consistency, grouping, pre-school child, relations, schema matching, sequence and pattern completion, sound consistency, thinking

O impacto do desenvolvimento da consciência fonológica na aprendizagem da leitura de jovens e adultos

The article presents results of a research about the infl uence of a teaching phonological awareness skills and grapheme phoneme correspondences program and its impact over adults and young people who where in diff erent stages of learning skills acquirement proposed by Linnea Ehri. Nine students, from an early literacy class at a Youth and Adult Education Center in the city of Rio do Sul – SC - Brazil, were subjects of this study. The intervention research, methodologically applied, was the application of a teaching program which aimed to contribute to the development of the aforementioned skills and knowledge, and two assessments applied at the program beginning and when fi nishing. The qualitative and quantitative analysis data results found shows that after the intervention the research subjects experienced a performance boost on phonological awareness skills, graphemes recognition and reading at all learning stages, especially those who were in transition from the partial alphabetic phase to the alphabetic phase complete. These results suggest that pedagogical practices that promote the graphophonemic correspondences and the phonological awareness development, especially phonemic awareness teaching, can be benefi cial for the reading in young people and adults in the early literacy development process