How Children Learn to Read and Write:

Emergent Literacy

How Children Learn to Read and Write:

Emergent LiteracyDr. Linda Akanbi

ARS Educational Services LLC

Definitions of Emergent Literacy

• Children’s development of reading and writing before schooling, without direct instruction (Perez, 1998).

• The reading and writing behaviors that precede and develop into conventional literacy (Sulzby & Teale, 1991).

Beliefs about Emergent Literacy

• Is acquired through informal as well as adult-directed home and school activities.

• Listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities develop concurrently and interrelatedly, rather than sequentially.

Categories of Emergent Literacy Knowledge

• Awareness of the functions of print• Comprehension of text structures• Letter name knowledge• Relationship to print to sounds• Phonological awareness

Emergent Literacy Development

• Children progress through different developmental phases in learning to read words (Frith, 1985; Mason, 1980; Ehri, 1996).

• Children go through developmental phases in learning to write and spell (Ruddell, 1999; Danielewicz, 1984).

Emergent Literacy Behaviors

• Notice environmental print• Show interest in books• Pretend to read• Show interest in writing• Write letters and letter-like forms

or scribble randomly on the page

International Perspectives

• In most of the countries surveyed, including the United States, the term emergent reader is generally used to refer to children from birth to age 9. However, there were also some different findings.

• In Nigeria, the term emergent reader is used to refer to two groups, children from birth to age 9 and adults learning to read.

• In Hong Kong, the term is interpreted as applying to children from birth to age 9; second-language learners; adults learning to read; and students experiencing reading difficulties, delays, or disabilities.

International (cont’d)• In Argentina, emergent reader is

a term used to refer to second language learners in that it is applied strictly in the context of instruction in English, a foreign language in Argentina.

International (cont’d)• In Italy, emergent literacy is not an area that

is emphasized in literacy instruction.

• Children learn to read in grade 1 and become technically proficient quite rapidly.

• Preliteracy activities that occur are devoid of any attempts to teach children to read and write.

International (cont’d)• All of the countries in the

European Union (EU), except Luxembourg have emergent literacy goals as a framework for early literacy (ages 4-6). Luxembourg still uses the reading readiness concept.

International (cont’d)• The two major goals in early

literacy in the countries in the European are (1) print awareness and (2) phonological awareness.

• Ten European countries out of the 15 in the EU have national curricula in literacy.

Learning Theories• Behaviorism• Interactive Theory• Constructivism• Sociocultural Theory

Behaviorism• Students learn through direct

instruction.• Learning is the result of stimulus-

response action. (Behavior can be learned or unlearned.)

• Information is presented in small steps and reinforced through practice.

Interactive Theory• Emphasizes that readers construct

meaning from what they read using a combination of information from the text and their prior or background knowledge.

Constructivism: An Active Process

• Children contribute to their own literacy development.

• Children create their own theories about language.

• They are in a constant state of re-organizing as they search for meaning (Manning, 2007).

Constructivism (cont’d)• As children are sorting out the

differences between drawing and writing as separate forms of expression, they make attempts at writing that looks like the writing they see in their environment (Griffith, 2007).

Sociocultural Theory• Reading and writing are primarily social

activities. They involve interaction with adults and peers in an environment designed to promote reading and writing experiences in meaningful contexts Griffith, 2007). “Literacy is thus socially constructed as children form their ideas or theories about the principles of reading and writing”(Perez, 1998, p. 26).

Sociocultural Theory (cont’d)

• All Children become literate as they actively engage with the literacy practices of their culture and community.

• Families and communities are rich in funds of knowledge that influence and affect literacy learning.

• Home languages and cultures are rich resources for children’s literacy learning (Goodman & Martens, 2007).

• .

Sociocultural Influences• Research shows that many families

from diverse cultures and backgrounds value formal education and have intact literacy patterns at home that can lead to the children’s literacy success at school whether they are provided by the parents or other family members (Akanbi, 2005).

Acquiring Concepts About Print

• Learning that print carries meaning and that people read and write for a variety of purposes.

• Learning how to hold a book and turn pages.

• Learning the orientation of print (e.g. left-to-right, top-to-bottom).

Concepts About Print (cont’d)

• Matching voice to print, pointing word-by-word as the text is read out loud.

• Noticing punctuation marks.• Distinguishing between letters,

words, and sentences as units of language.

Concepts About the Alphabet (partial list)

• The letter’s name• The formation of

upper and lowercase letter in manuscript handwriting.

• Features of the letter that distinguish it from other letters.

• The sound the letter represents.

Findings from Research• Children reading alphabet books with

accompanying examples of words illustrating the various sounds had significantly higher levels of phonemic awareness than children reading traditional storybooks or alphabet books without accompanying examples (Murray, Stahl, & Levy, 1996).

Findings from Research (cont’d)

• However, all groups of children reading different types of alphabet books and storybooks advanced in phoneme awareness and in concepts of print, and in letter knowledge (Murray, et. al., 1996).

Relation of Letter Knowledge to Reading Achievement

• Letter knowledge has been found to be one of the two main predictors of reading achievement, even though knowing the names of the letters does not directly affect a child’s ability to read (Tompkins, 2006).

Sources for Teaching the Alphabet

• Children’s own names• Environmental Print• Songs• Activities (matching, flash cards)• Games• Manipulatives (e. g., magnetic

letters, blocks)

Acquiring the Ability to Reading Words

Developmental Phases

• Logographic

• Alphabetic

• Orthographic

Logographic Phase• Refers to the use of graphic

symbols such as product label logos (e.g., the yellow double arches standing for the M in McDonald’s) to read words.

• Refers to use of other visual features to read words such as the word shape or its configuration.

Logographic (cont’)• Some writing systems are

completely logographic where a visual symbol represents not only the word, but the meaning of that word (e.g., Chinese). The word is not represented by its sounds as in alphabetic writing systems.

Alphabetic Phase• Refers to the use of phoneme-

grapheme (letter-sound) relations to read words.

• When readers begin to read words by processing letter-sound relations, which shows awareness of the alphabetic principle, they move into the alphabetic phase.

Alphabetic Phase (cont’d)

• Studies have shown that as soon as children master letter recognition, they are capable of operating alphabetically rather than logographically.

• Children go through different transitional stages before they are able to successfully apply the alphabetic principle to printed words in order to read them.

Alphabetic Phase (cont’d)

• Phonological recoding skill (applying letter-sound relations to transform printed words into pronunciations) does not take place automatically. It has to be mastered.

• Phonological recoding skill is mastered through phonics instruction.

Alphabetic Phase (cont’d)

• Phonics instruction teaches students the sounds association with different letter combinations (phonemes) and how to blend the letter-sound sequences to pronounce a word.

• Correct pronunciation is also determined by context, syntax, and meaning, as well as by stress and intonation.

The Alphabetic Phase and Sight Words

• Sight words are words that are recognized instantly as a result of being rehearsed and stored in long-term memory. A visual memory trace is established.

• Sight words are also words that are recognized instantly through applying phonological recoding.

Orthographic Phase• Refers to the use of spelling patterns to

read and decode unknown words.

• As a learning to read strategy, it was once called the linguistic method and made use of the principle of minimum contrast.

Orthographic Phase (cont’d)

• This strategy for attacking unfamiliar words is also known as decoding-by-analogy or the compare/contrast strategy for word identification.

• The reader matches a chunk of the unfamiliar word to a known spelling pattern and figures out the rest of the word through context and structural clues.

Example of the Linguistic Method (Use of Spelling

Patterns)• Fan• Man• Dan• Can • Dan can fan a man.• Can a man fan Dan?

• Wish• Fish• Dish• had• I wish I had a fish in a dish.

Orthographic Phase (cont’d)

• The orthographic units known as spelling patterns are sometimes referred to as phonograms, word families, or morphemic bases.

Orthographic (cont’d)• It has been suggested that to improve

this approach, the key words (e.g, those that appear on the word wall as exemplars) need to be scrutinized more carefully when they are initially introduced by segmenting them into their component phonemes (Gaskins et.al., cited in Juel & Minden-Cupp,1998, p. 6).

Writing Development

Theoretical Issues• Is emergent writing best viewed as

a psychogenic progression through a series of stages, or the social constructivist of literacy hypothesis based on the child’s personal experience? (Nature vs. Nurture)

Theoretical Issues (cont’d)

• What are the sociocultural and sociocognitive dimensions of children’s literacy learning? (e.g. What is the role that others play in a child’s literacy learning? What is valued in the culture?)

Writing Defined• Writing can refer to handwriting as well

as composition.

• Forms that children’s writing can take include scribble, drawings, strings of letters, copying and invented spelling (Sulzby & Teale, 1991).

Interesting Factoids• Language existed long before writing.• The first type of writing was drawing.• This early form of writing, known as

pictographs (and later, a stylized script known as Cuneiform) date back to the Sumerian culture around 4100-3800 BCE.

Interesting Factoids (cont’d)

• The pictograph for "water" pronounced nu became the symbol for the consonantal sound of N.  This practice of using a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an ALPHABET or the "One Sign-One sound" system of writing. 

Support for the “Stage” Theory

• Sulzby’s Research – Found that kindergartners employed various types of emergent writing (even moving back and forth occasionally) while gradually moving toward conventional readable writing.

Sulzby’s Research (cont’d)

• What did appear to change, however, was the language surrounding the writing – the compositional language, and, in particular, the ways in which the children read their stories.

• By the end of first grade, all the children were writing conventionally (Sulzby & Teale, 1991).

Support for Social Constructivist Theory

• Children’s early literacy experiences are embedded in the familiar situations and real-life experiences of family and community membership.

• Children begin writing at home from experiences they’ve had in their homes and social communities (Ruddell & Ruddell, 1995, p. 314).

Social Constructivist (cont’d)

• Children learn about writing by observing more skilled others and by participating with them in literacy events (Ruddell & Ruddell, 1995, p. 325).

• Peer interactions have provided need support for writing (Labbo, 1996).

Joint Position Statement of IRA/NAEYC

• “Children learn to use symbols, combining their oral language, pictures, print, and play into a coherent mixed medium and creating and communicating meanings in a variety of ways.

IRA/NAEYC Statement (cont’d)

• “From their initial experiences and interactions with adults, children begin to read words, processing letter-sound relations and acquiring substantial knowledge of the alphabetic system.

IRA/NAEYC Statement (cont’d)

• “As they continue to learn, children increasingly consolidate this information into patterns that allow for automaticity and fluency in reading and writing.

IRA/NAEYC Statement (cont’d)

• “Consequently, reading and writing acquisition is considered better as a developmental phenomenon. . .

• “But the ability to read and write does not develop naturally, without careful planning and instruction” (IRA/NAEYC, 1998, pp. 7-7).

Georgia Pre-K Writing Standards (excerpts)

• Experiments with a variety of writing tools, materials and surfaces.

• Uses scribbles, shapes, pictures and letters, or other forms of writing

• Understands that print is used to communicate ideas and information.

Stages of Writing• Pictures • Scribbles• Letter-like forms• Copies letters/words from the environment

• Uses letters to represent sounds in words• Labels objects in drawings• Connects words to form sentences• Creates stories with a B, M, & End. (GA Dept.

of Education)

How the Teacher Can Support Emergent Writing• Shared Literacy Activities (e.g.,

writing the morning message as children watch).

• Providing an abundance of markers, unlined paper, pencils and other writing materials in a writing center.

Supporting Emergent Writing (cont’d)

• Writing Workshop (Children write stories, letters and other compositions independently).

• Modeling correct letter formation.