Virginia Wilson – ENGED 370 – Chapter 4 – Foundations of Language and Literacy

Emergent Literacy is a term used at the preK level and is a concept that supports learning to read as a result of a home environment where children begin learning about reading and writing from birth by observing and interacting with adults and other children as they use literacy in their everyday lives in meaningful ways.

Oral language development includes critical skills that allow children to communicate, to understand words and concepts they hear, to acquire new information, and to express their own thoughts and ideas.

How to promote Oral Language Development Every Day – parent and other caregivers should talk to their children throughout the day. Talk about what the child is doing and things of interest. Conversation should be frequent and meaningful.

1. Use rich as abstract vocabulary
2. Ask questions that require children to use language to express themselves
3. Repeat, extend, and restate what the child says so the child can hear his or her own ideas.
4. Give full attention and eye contact while listening and speaking
5. Provide explanations for why a child needs to do something.
6. Read books an nursery rhymes aloud.

How Reading Develops – most children may be the same age when they attend school but their stages of reading development vary widely. There are five stages to learning to read:

• Phase 1: Awareness and Exploration – This phase begins at birth and progresses through preschool years. This marks the time when children become curious about print and print-related activities. They demonstrate logographic knowledge by identifying labels, signs, cereal boxes, and other types of Environmental Print. Environmental Print is everything we see with written language on it and its everywhere. (ex. books, supermarkets, signs, fast-food restaurants, television) Children also begin to pretend-read and engage in paper-and-pencil activities that include scribbling and written expression. Children also begin to identify some letters and letter-sound relationships.
• Phase 2: Experimental Reading and Writing – This takes place around Kindergarten. This phase reflects their basic understanding of basic concepts of print, such as left-to-right , or top-to-bottom. Children love being read to at this stage and continue to recognize letters an letter-sound relationships, become familiar with rhyming, and begin to write letters of the alphabet and high-frequency words.
• Phase 3: Early Reading and Writing – This usually occurs around First Grade when instruction becomes more formal. Children begin to read simple stories and can write about topics they have much prior knowledge and strong feelings about. Their comprehension strategies become more prevalent such as predicting. they are beginning to develop accurate word identification skills, their ability to read with fluency is more evident, they can recognize an increasing number of words on sight, and they are aware of punctuation and capitalization.
• Phase 4: Transitional Reading and Writing – This takes place during second grade. Students make the transition from early reading and writing to more complex literacy tasks. They are reading with greater fluency and using cognitive and metacognitive strategies more efficiently when comprehending and composing. They demonstrate increased facility with reading and writing, including word identification, sight-word recognition, reading fluency, sustained silent reading, conventional spelling, and proofreading what they have written.
• Phase 5: Independent and Productive Reading and Writing – This is the lifelong process of becoming independent and productive readers and writers. The third grade marks the beginning of their journey into independent and productive learning as they use reading and writing in increasingly more sophisticated ways to suit a variety of purposes and audiences. Research has show that when siblings engage in literacy together, both benefit from the interaction. There is no better way to help a child make the connection that print is meaningful than to let them respond to the question “What does say?”

How Writing Develops – depends on those “paper-and-pencil kids” strong desire and need to show some self expression and communication. Young children learn writing through exploration. Young children write all over the paper in peculiar ways, turning letters around and upside down and letting the print drift over into drawing and coloring from time to time. We should be relaxed about this exploration of spaces and how print can be fitted into them.

• Scribbling – is one of the primary forms of written expression for young children. Early Scribbling is characterized by random marks on paper. It is comparable to babbling in oral language development. Individuals should encourage a child to make markings on paper without pressure to finish a piece of work or to tell what it’s about, unless the child is eager to talk about it.
• Controlled Scribbling – movement away from early scrawls become evident in children’s scribbles as they begin to make systematic, repeated marks such as circles, vertical lines, dots, an squares. It occurs between the age of three and six.
• Scribble Drawing – Scribble writing stands in contrast to scribble drawing, which is more pictographic in expression. Drawing is important because it assists both writing development and eye-hand coordination. This occurs between 4 and 6. Often when a child draws a pictures, it’s open to interpretation – that is, until we have the child use words to tell us about the picture; then the picture takes on a much richer meaning.

Providing the opportunity for the child to talk about the picture, expand on the experience, and convey meaning is just as important as writing the dictated words near the picture.

Invented Spelling – name scribbling underscores this differentiation and results in the formation of valuable concepts about written language – namely that marking or symbols represent units of language such as letters and words, which in turn represent things and objects that can be communicated by messages. In this phase, there is no knowledge of the need to select and order letters to represent the order of sounds heard in spoken words. The intent is merely to make their writing look like words, and in fact they do believe they are words.

Oral language comprehension, the ability to listen and speak with understanding, is very important to later reading comprehension. As children’s vocabularies increase, they demonstrate specific cognitive skills such as classification and categorization. Generally children’s receptive (listening) vocabulary – hearing and understanding the language or languages of an environment – is larger that their expressive (spoken) vocabulary, which involves making and using the sounds of a child’s language or languages for communication.

Phonological Awareness involves hearing the sounds of language apart from its meaning. Young children learn phonological awareness through interactions with such things as nursery rhymes, books with repetitive patterns, songs, and clapping syllables.

Alphabet Knowledge is the ability to name, write, and identify the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Print Knowledge is the ability to recognize print and understand that it works in specific ways and carries meaning and motivates the learn-to-read process. This includes concepts about print such as how to hold a book, how to turn a page, and to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. It also includes that the text, not the illustrations, carry the message. Concepts about words is the consciousness that words carry meaning, and stories and text are built from words.

A Literate environment for young children is one that fosters interest and curiosity about written language and supports children’s efforts to become readers and writers. Children must learn how print functions in their lives and reading aloud to children is one of the most important contributing factors in the learning environment of early readers.

Children need to become aware of the many purposes of reading and frequently become involved in different kinds of reading activity. Years of research confirm children who read early have the following conditions in the home environment:

1. parents provide access to a wide variety of print, such as books, magazines, and newspapers.
2. parents demonstrate uses of written language for various purposes.
3. parents are supportive of literacy efforts, assisting early attempts at literacy, and are willing to respond to questions about print.
4. parents and siblings read to their child, which is positively related to outcomes such as language growth, early literacy, and later reading achievement.

Design of the Classroom Area for a Literate Environment – in a classroom that promotes literacy development, children feel free to take risks because errors are expected an accepted. Effective teachers plan the environment so that children are engaged in interpreting and using print in meaningful ways. The environment in these classrooms is rich with print, representing language familiar to children and resulting from daily activities and thematic inquiry.

Literacy Play Centers provide an environment where children may play with print on their own terms. Play centers are usually based around the classroom topic of student and change with each study. Teachers can join the play in strategic ways to nudge children toward the literacy props.

Big books with their simple, repetitive refrains, colorful illustrations, and cumulative plot endings allow children to make predictions and participate immediately in shared reading experiences. In addition to the pleasure and enjoyment that children get when they participate in shared readings, and re-readings of big books, big-book formats are versatile in helping to achieve all the instructional goals for beginners.

Language experience activities in beginning reading instruction permit young children to share and discuss experiences; listen to and tell stories; dictate words, sentences, and stories; and write independently. They are an account that is told aloud by a child and printed by another person.

A good plan of instruction for teaching the alphabetic principle is to:

1. Teach letter-sound relationships explicitly; don’t assume that children will just pick it up.
2. Provide opportunities for children to practice in meaningful written language contexts.
3. Review previously taught relationships often and cumulatively
4. Plan opportunities daily to apply letter-sound relationships to the reading of phonetically spelled words that are familiar in meaning.

Phonological Awareness includes knowing that:

• sentences can be segmented into words
• words can be segmented into syllables
• words can be segmented into their individual sounds
• words can begin or end with the same sounds
• the individual sounds of words can be blended together
• the individual sounds of words can be manipulated (added, deleted, or substituted)

Phonological Awareness includes:

• Rhyming
• Alliteration (producing groups of words that begin with the same initial sound (two tall trees)
• Sentence segmenting (the… pig… is… fat.)
• Syllable blending and segmenting – /mag/ /net/
• Phonemic awareness – /c/ /a/ /t/; /sh/ /i/ /p/

Phonemic awareness tasks:

• Phoneme isolation – dog starts with /d/
• Phoneme identity – same sounds can be in different words (ex. sat, six, sun.. /s/)
• Phoneme categorization – What word doesn’t fit/sound like others? (dot, big, doll)
• Blending – /k/, /a/, /t/ makes cat
• Segmenting beginning and ending sounds in words (what do you hear at the beginning or end of ….)
• Segmenting separate sounds in a word
• Phoneme deletion, addition, and substitution.

Phonemic segmentation using elkonin (sound) boxes.

Classroom application:

There was so much information in this chapter! I really like the idea of using Elkonin boxes to segment sounds out better. I could see reading a book and setting my students up with a sheet that has two, three, and four elkonin boxes on them and then listing some of the harder words on the board so that after we could go over them using phonemic segmentation. We could sound them out together and students could write these sounds in the boxes accordingly to show what they have learned. (the video with the dry erase sheet was a wonderful idea. Saves paper, and is fun for students) I also like using big books. I think reading aloud first, then having the students read the sentences after I do is a great idea. The more repetition of words in different forms, the easier those words will become for my students.

The Videos –

Invented Spelling: She gives students the opportunity to write their own lists of what they would want at a party. (fun, and something students will love to write about!) Then she works with each of them individually while they correct, change and make letter/sound correlations. Super fun way to work on phonemic awareness!

Key Links Shared Reading – There was a ton of information in this one.

• Day 1: read story using expression and character voices, ask questions, let students role play characters
• day 2: re-read story and ask students to read with you. Start a word chart with hard words.
• day 3: flow, fluency, phrasing. Look at aspects of the book that tell students when it’s a quote, or the end of a sentence. Take note of books textual cues during reading. Have students re-read book with you using cues.
• Day 4: phonic knowledge and phonemic awareness aspects of story.
• day 5: fun ways to respond about the book.

Shared Reading – First Grade: she reads, then has students read same sentence after her. She stops and asks students to talk about hard words. She then has students read book with her. She uses phonemic awareness to talk about different sounds in the book and has students use Elkonin boxes to write out sounds.