Enhancing Literacy in the Early Childhood Setting Language and Literacy Enhancing Literacy in the Early Childhood Setting

Principles of Literacy Development 1. Literacy Develops as a Social and Cultural Practice Many kinds of literacy, not just reading and writing, but also speaking

Principles continued 2. Literacy develops through hypothesis testing. Social internal forces that influence literacy (Vygotsky,1978) Internally, children generate hypothesis based on what they know so far about the written language, but their hypotheses are continually influenced by their physical (print) and social environment.

Principle 3. Literacy develops idiosyncratically. Each child’s progress is unique to that child. Growth does not proceed in a steady forward manner. Growth can be recursive moving back and forth depending on the learner and the circumstances

Principles 4. Literacy Concepts Develop Simultaneously Children develop many of these concepts simultaneously through their experiences with the world.

Written Language Features Early feature-related discoveries Letters can be named but they believe that the letters are just pictures, rather than something that can represent meaning Early discovery is that those letters can mean something. Learn the difference between drawing and letters and will begin to differentiate between their pictures and their attempts at writing.

Early Feature Discoveries Letters can be named Print carries meaning There is a difference between drawing and writing Print proceeds in a linear fashion Letters in a string must vary. Children make these observations in their environment.

Print as a way to label objects Primary function is to label objects. They read it as if the one word can only say the name of what is in the picture but not other words.

Print as a Physical Representation of Objects Make up hypotheses about how the word looks. They don’t yet understand that the letters are making the individual sounds of the word, they judge the word based on how large the object is. For example an ocean would have a larger word than pond. Capital letters to signify adult, little letters for children.

The Arbitrary Nature of Letter Strings Eventually they realize that written symbols (letters) are not physically related to the objects they represent, after they are arbitrary. Once they learn the first letter of their name, all words beginning with that letter are their name Also words need to look different.

The Relationship between Speech and Print This is evident as children try to match their vocalizations with print. Pointing to the words on a page as they attempt to “read” the words on a page in a book, being sure to end at the end of the page.

The relationship between letters and speech sounds Children will learn the “alphabetic principle” the notion that there is a relationship between the letter patterns and sound patterns. This allows them to transition from the visual to sound based hypothesis. Letters correspond with spoken syllables rather than sounds.

Move from using initial and final consonants to incorporate interior consonants and vowels. (sr for star) Begin to spell short vowels conventionally Use vowel markers (more than one vowel)to spell other vowel sounds conventionally.

Spelling Progress Spell past tense endings conventionally Use double consonants consistently Internalize spelling patterns such as –ing, -ate and –ain. Increase their visual memory and repertoires of words they can spell automatically Recognize when words are misspelled Continue to invent words as necessary

Word Spacing Spaces are the first form of punctuation that children will use. Initially they do not include spaces, because the words all flow and children are not aware of the need for spaces.

Other forms of punctuation Can be very tricky to teach.