Young Children's Literacy Research Articles

Family Literacy: Exploring Family Practices

For many decades, research has supported the family's influence and their children's acquisition of literacy. Family literacy theories have been generated and challenged, while studies have been conducted on the family's application of literacy interactions, experiences, strategies, materials, influential factors and programs in a variety of context and both inside and outside the home. Most studies suggest that family literacy contributes to young children's literacy development.

Developing literacy concepts in young children: An instructional framework to guide early literacy teaching

With more children spending the greater part of their waking hours in preschool settings today than they did years ago, teachers play an even more critical role in providing daily literacy experiences that many children of earlier generations received at home. The article focuses on the critical role that preschool teachers play in supporting children's early literacy development and presents an instructional framework to help guide early literacy teaching. The framework is based on Vygotsky's learning theory, which emphasizes the nature and importance of social interactions in instruction, particularly between adult and child. We present activity‐embedded assessments that preschool teachers can use to observe and document children's emerging literacy concepts and skills, and describe key teaching actions that scaffold learning of new concepts. In closing, we offer five principles to guide preschool teachers in planning and implementing appropriate activities to promote young children's literacy development. Sample documentation forms are included in the appendices.

A pleasurable way to acquire literacy and social skills

Book-based reading games are a fantastic way to support young children literacy and social skills, says Helen Bromley. So why not give them a go?

Family Literacy: Schools and Families of Young Children Working Together

This paper examines ways in which schools and their communities might work together to support young children's literacy development as they make the transition from home to school. Recent research in the area of family literacy is discussed and the terms ‘literacy’ and ‘family literacy’ defined. Implications and recommendations for schools are discussed in terms of a participatory, empowering model of family literacy. This model is illustrated by examples from a recent family literacy initiative conducted by the author. Jenny Jayatilaka completed this research as part of her Masters degree at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. She has been an early childhood educator for more than 20 years.

Constructing Literacy in the Kindergarten: Task Structure, Collaboration, and Motivation

This ethnographic study explores kindergarten children's emergent motivation to read and write, its relation to their developing concepts of reading and writing (Guice & Johnston, 1994; Johnston, 1997; Turner, 1995), and to their teachers instructional goals and classroom norms. Teachers and students together constructed legitimate literate activity in their classrooms, and this construction framed the motivation of students who were at risk for developing learning disabilities in reading and writing. Specifically, the kinds of reading and writing activity that were sanctioned in each class and the role of student-student collaboration colored students' views of the purposes of literacy and their own ability to learn. Findings extend our understanding of how young children's literacy motivation influences, and is influenced by, their classroom literacy culture. Implications for early literacy instruction for children with learning disabilities, and for their continuing motivation to read and write, are discussed.

Meeting the challenges: ICT, early literacy and the role of the educator

ICT can make a useful contribution to the development of early literacy but exploiting this potential in developmentally appropriate ways requires early years educators to meet the challenge of outlining the ways and means this process requires. As early years professionals we need to think not only about the ways in which ICT can help to enhance our current practices in literacy but also about how our concept of literacy itself might need to change. Clarifying our view of our role and responsibilities in relation to technological change and young children's literacy experiences in a rapidly changing world of communication could be one way of ensuring that at least some of these changes meet our needs and those of the children we work with.

Unsettling the Bedtime Story: Parents' Reports of Home Literacy Practices

This interview-based study on middle-class Australian parents' involvement in young children's literacy found that reading to children (particularly in the pre-school years) is a routine part of family life, a task shared between mothers and fathers. However, there were patterns of gender difference in the accounts. Mothers were more likely than fathers to emphasise the importance of the child's early exposure to books. They were also often reported to take a supervisory role in relation to their partner's story reading. Men were more likely to undertake reading at bedtime than at any other time and also more likely to report using various strategies to shorten the time spent on story reading. Fathers reading to sons appeared to take on a special significance related to masculine bonding and modelling.

Don't Expect a Story: Young Children's Literacy Learning in South Africa

In this article, I provide an overview and analysis in the domain of initial literacy learning of young South African children. I first give a sense of historical background and outline some of the extreme challenges faced in this area. I discuss the importance of understanding the multilingual nature of South African society for education, and describe some of the enabling policy shifts for language and early childhood development which have been developed since the change of government in 1994. I also describe how understandings about early literacy learning in South Africa are progressing, and relate these to international trends. I discuss how despite the positive nature of the developments in policy, little has changed as yet in practice for most young children, their families and teachers, who all suffer to varying extents from shortages of appropriate resources and information. I end by describing some of the initiatives underway in the country which are working to ensure that the trajectory is one of steady and positive change.

Teacher Predictions of Young Children's Literacy Success or Failure

Research into professional decision-making indicates that judgements tend not to be made on a rational, systematic basis, but are often formed rapidly and intuitively from a limited set of cues. This study addresses the issue of whether and how teachers assess the literacy competencies of young children prior to starting formal schooling in a UK context. Seven Reception teachers from four primary schools were asked to make literacy predictions for the incoming cohort of children aged 4 to 5 years. Data are presented based on interviews with the teachers, completion of baseline literacy assessments, and the scrutiny of daily reading records. The study explores the factors which influence teacher predictions for 30 children, including 17 for whom literacy success was predicted and 13 for whom literacy difficulties were anticipated. The study shows that teachers do indeed form early judgements about children based on pragmatic factors, with a strong link between teacher predictions and families' socioeconomic status. Importantly, initial representations of children as 'likely to fail' tend to become more permanent over time, whilst teachers are also inclined to provide less support for children expected to perform poorly. Implications for professionals are discussed in relation to the Code of Practice for identifying children with special educational needs and new guidelines for baseline assessment of children at school entry recently issued to UK headteachers.

Home Background and Young Children's Literacy Development

Research on the nature of home literacy experiences point out that such experiences are more embedded in family social events than reading and writing itself. Studies on the social and cultural differences among families indicate that the interaction patterns among parents and children, the amount of literacy events that occur inside the family as well as the values and attitudes towards literacy are mainly responsible for children's later academic achievement. Suggestions are being made on how early childhood setting can build bridges between home and school for achieving the utmost of young children's literacy development.

A Comparison Between Informational and Narrative Picture Books as a Context for Reasoning Between Caregivers and 4‐year‐old Children

It is widely recognised that adult/child interactions surrounding the sharing of picture books are significant for young children's literacy understandings (De Temple & Beals, 1991; Snow, 1993). Recently Pappas (1993) has challenged the traditional view that narratives or stories are the most appropriate vehicle for learning in young children. To date, little research has focused on whether and how the interactions surrounding picture books vary according to the genre of the book. In this study, two picture books, one narrative and one informational in style, were read to 12 four‐year‐old children. The study found that the discourse surrounding the informational book was greater in quantity, contained more cognitively demanding questions, more conditional clauses and more interactions involving reasoning and technical terminology. These findings suggest that the informational picture book has distinctive features which encourage and support children in their construction of new knowledge and patterns of reasoning.

Mothers’ Perceptions of their Young Children's Literacy Development

There has been increasing interest shown by researchers in those children who attain an obvious understanding of reading and writing before attending school. It has been indicated that those children are not necessarily otherwise precocious (Smith, F. 1984; Harste, J., Burke, C., Woodward, V. 1984). Talking with mothers about their perceptions of their preschoolers’ literacy development, revealed how sensitive they are and how perceptive in their observations of what their children are doing. Following, is a report on research carried out to investigate the phenomenon of natural learning of literacy among 50 preschoolers.

The impact of early metalinguistic competencies and memory capacity on reading and spelling in elementary school: Results of the Munich Longitudinal Study on the Genesis of Individual Competencies (LOGIC)

This paper reports on a longitudinal study dealing with the development of literacy in young children. A total of 163 children were first tested during their last year in kindergarten using a variety of tasks that tapped phonological processing, memory capacity, early literacy, and intelligence. Children’s word decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling skills were assessed in elementary school several years later. As a main result, all of the predictor domains had a significant impact on the acquisition of literacy in elementary school, although the contribution of each domain differed as a function of the criterion measure. An attempt to identify children-at-risk using a kindergarten screening test provided encouraging results. Nonetheless, it was shown that whereas group predictions of reading and spelling performance can be quite accurate, the individual prognosis of school problems is far from perfect.

Descriptive observations of adults' facilitation of literacy in young children's play

Using a qualitative research approach, this article examined adults' literacy-assisting behaviors, roles, and role taking during the spontaneous play of 3- and 4-year-old children in three literacy-based play settings. Six early childhood caregivers participated in the study as informants. Based on ethnographic interviews with them, their journal entries, and observations of their behaviors (actions and language) during free playtime, characteristic behaviors and roles supportive of literacy in play were identified and described. Qualities of the adults' role taking in the flow of children's literacy-related play were also observed. The descriptive observations point toward commonalities among adults' facilitation of literacy in play, accepted play intervention techniques, and adult behaviors in storybook-reading contexts. Implications for further research and practice are also discussed.

What teachers can learn from parents' perceptions of young children's literacy learning

Research in the last ten to fifteen years has provided a strong knowledge base for understanding how children learn to read and write in naturally developing ways. *These findings and conclusions are drawn from the wealth of early literacy research. The research provides a keener understanding of how the learning environment contributes enabling children to construct their own personally meaningful rule systems for making written language work for them, even at very young ages.

Sensitive Observation and the Development of Literacy

Abstract Over the past 20 years Marie Clay has made important contributions to our understanding of the development of literacy in young children. Her sensitive observations and comparisons of children who are making high and low progress in the early stages led her to develop a Reading Recovery Programme which has also made an impact on practice in a number of countries. In this paper her publications will be considered set in their historical context.

Using the newspaper to support children's emerging literacy

Young children's literacy development involves emerging knowledge, skills, and attitudes about both written and oral language. However, until relatively recent years, children's oral language development has received the lion's share of attention in most early childhood programs. What young children know about written language and their natural ability to learn about writing and reading have been underestimated and misinterpreted and so have received little developmentally appropriate support from early childhood program administrators, teachers, parents, and the public.

Peers as literacy informants: A description of young children's literacy conversations in play

From an interactionist perspective, children's learning is influenced by the social context, through their collaboration with adults and more capable peers as well as their interaction with culturally developed “tools.” To examine these influences, this study reports on the functions of preschoolers' literacy-based verbal exchanges in a print-enriched play environment. Play settings in two preschool classrooms were reorganized and enriched with print materials and literacy-related props. Children's play behavior was recorded through extensive observations over a 2-month period. From these data, 67 literacy-related conversational episodes were isolated and systematically content analyzed. Three types of discourse about literacy were identified in the play context: children's conversations focused on designating the names of literacy-related objects, on negotiating meaning related to a literacy topic, and on coaching another child in some literacy task in order to achieve a goal in play. Results suggest that children's collaborative engagement in literacy through play may have an important influence on their developing understanding of written language.

The Relationship between Parental Literacy Level and Perceptions of Emergent Literacy

The study examined parental perceptions of young children's literacy development and explored the relationship between parental literacy level and perceptions of the importance of literacy artifacts and events/experiences in preschoolers' literacy development. One-hundred-eight parents of beginning kindergartners were interviewed and given a test of literacy level. The interview had two open-ended items asking about why some children are successful in reading and writing in school and others are not and about what parents of preschoolers might do to help them learn to read and write better later in school. Likert items gauged views of the importance of literacy artifacts and events and interactions in the home during preschool years for later success in reading and writing. Statistical as well as interpretive analyses were used. On the whole, parents were very positive about the notion that literacy learning can begin during the preschool years. There was, however, a significant negative relationship between parental literacy level and perceptions of the importance of literacy artifacts and events; parents with lower literacy levels thought literacy artifacts and events were even more important than did parents with higher literacy levels. Further, low-literacy and high-literacy parents tended to have different perceptions of what is important for early literacy development.

“Once Upon a Time” Reconsidered

This article traces the evolution of “Once upon a time” in a child's classroom story writing, drawing upon data collected in a three-year study of writing development in an urban magnet school. The developmental literature on young children's literacy has treated story language as a set of structural routines that children learn from being read to, routines that serve the function of representing imaginary worlds. In contrast, this article assumes that stories are cultural discourse forms that serve multiple functions and that to internalize those forms, children must transform them into tools that are functional within their own social world. Moreover, children's discourse forms and functions are in a dialectical relationships: The initially awkward forms children produce may have limited social meaning—but those forms may elicit social responses that embue them with new functional possibilities and thus lead children to further grappling with forms. In brief, the story forms young children learn from others are not the end products but the catalysts of development.