Section Editor:	Monique Sénéchal, Ph.D. (monique_senechal@carleton.ca) Department of Psychology Carleton University 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6 Canada
Articles:	Assessment Sequence of Acquisition Fostering Early Literacy at Home Fostering Early Literacy in Preschool and Kindergarten
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What do we know?
 
Literacy development begins long before children enter school or even preschool. Early experiences in the home can have a significant impact on children’s reading success later in life. The following early literacy skills are related to later literacy learning:

1. ABC knowledge – the ability to recognize and identify either the name or the sound of an upper or lower case letter, presented at random;
2. Phonological awareness – the ability to recognize different sounds of oral language and to separate meaning by word, syllable or sound;
3. Concepts about print – the awareness of print concepts, ability to differentiate between pictures and text and understand the direction of the given alphabet;
4. Rapid naming – the ability to quickly name letters, numbers, and pictures; and   
5. Oral language – the ability to understand and communicate in spoken words.

The process of learning these skills is not a linear one (e.g., children can gain sensitivity to sounds without knowing the letter names), but all of these skills will need to be closely integrated to achieve functional levels of literacy.
 
Parents play a key role in helping their children develop preliteracy skills. There are a number of activities that parents can do at home with their children to promote these skills. Research shows that one particular instructional strategy appears to be most effective in helping children improve their comprehension skills and verbal expression, namely dialogic reading. Both teachers and parents are encouraged to engage children in dialogic reading, an approach to shared reading in which the adult, instead of just reading and the child listening, facilitates the child’s active role in telling the story. This can be done by asking the child “what” questions, asking open-ended questions, and expanding upon what the child says. It can be described as an adult and a child having a conversation about a book.  
 
Research suggests that when assessing children’s early literacy skills, it is important to have a clear understanding of the following behaviours:

1. why we read and write;
2. how we read and write;
3. what we know about the structure of the language; and
4. how we communicate orally.

Some researchers believe that behaviours 1 and 2 above (print knowledge) should be differentiated from behaviours 3 and 4 (meta-awareness of language). This stems from the fact that all children enter school with the ability to communicate orally, however, not all children have functional literacy skills (i.e., the use of print). In order to design appropriate interventions for children at risk for reading difficulties, it is important to understand how different experiences that occur at home, day care, or school can affect the development of different child behaviours. For example, shared reading can help young children increase their vocabulary. However, it is not clear if it can help improve print knowledge and phonological awareness.
 
What can be done?
 
Parents and Educators

• Parents and other caregivers can teach children the alphabet, including what sound a printed letter stands for. An effective and fun way to practice ABC knowledge is through alphabet recognition games, such as by using flashcards (a combination of pictures and letter symbols), pointing out letters in the child’s environment, or drawing a child’s attention to sounds of letters in day to day conversation.
• Parents and other caregivers can also use rhyming games (e.g., ‘wet’ rhymes with ‘net,’ ‘wig’ rhymes with ‘big,’ etc.) with children to support the development of phonological awareness.
• Parents play an important role in developing children’s oral language skills. They can engage children in frequent conversations about a range of topics (e.g., about past events and future plans, about emotions, and about explanations).
• Parents also play a key role in helping children develop good narrative skills. Since children might not be able to make up fictional stories in the early preschool years, they should be encouraged to begin talking about past events in their lives, as early as age 2. The following types of parental behaviours have been shown to foster good narrative skills in children:

1.    frequently talking with children about past events in the children's lives;
2.    asking wh- questions (who, where, what, etc.);
3.    elaborating on what children say by adding more information themselves;
4.    prompting children to provide causal and temporal links (why did that happen? when was that? what happened next?); and
5.    encouraging children to provide narrative accounts that have beginnings, middles, and ends (provide context for the events, tell the sequence of events that occurred and then how it all ended).

Those children who enter Kindergarten with more complex narrative skills tend to have better literacy skills in school, even up to Grade 7.

• In addition, one of the best activities that parents and other caregivers can engage in is reading books with children. Exposure to books not only improves children’s vocabulary, but helps them become better readers, especially in later elementary school.
• Parents and early childhood educators can encourage children to become more active participants in the reading process by using the dialogic reading strategy. This approach can be used with children as young as ages two to three by posing questions to children about the story, the pictures, what children think will happen, and so on. Children’s oral language skills can improve dramatically if this strategy is used regularly.      

 Policymakers

• Many of the instructional interventions in the relevant literature were designed and implemented by researchers. Thus, studies of these interventions delivered by traditional early childhood educators in typical early childhood settings will be needed to ensure that the effects translate to typical early childhood practice.
• There is a need for more research on identification, development, and validation of effective strategies for promoting children’s oral language, particularly for research concerning the more complex aspects of oral language. Whereas current effect sizes are large, they may not be large enough to overcome the delays often present in children at-risk of later academic difficulties.
• There is a need for intervention research designed to test whether improving children’s emergent conceptual knowledge about literacy is beneficial or necessary for children who have limited procedural knowledge about literacy.
• Further, there is also a need for intervention research designed to test whether targeting children’s procedural knowledge about literacy (e.g., their invented spelling) is effective in improving children’s phonological awareness and subsequent reading acquisition.
• Future research needs to clarify the nature of key preliteracy skills and to identify how these skills work together to support early literacy learning.
• There is also a need for more research about the role of oral language in learning to read; the precise role of early oral language development as it relates to literacy skills and behaviours remains unclear. 
• Likewise, the role of additional variables, such as the potential for teaching rapid naming, and the role of print knowledge and concepts in learning, should be further explored. As we gain further awareness of the interplay of these variables in language and literacy learning, we will be better equipped to understand the acquisition of early literacy skills.