Literacy for Young Children

A Guide for Early Childhood Educators

Priscilla L. Griffith, Sara Ann Beach, Jiening Ruan, A. Loraine Dunn

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781452294711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per la prima infanzia

This research-based guidebook offers PreK and kindergarten teachers easy-to-implement activities to develop oral language, phonological and print awareness, emergent writing, and comprehension skills in diverse classrooms.

1

Children’s Development and Literacy Learning

From the time that they are born, children begin to learn about language, both oral and written. They learn how language is used. They learn what written language looks like as it surrounds them in the environment in the form of signs, billboards, labels on food, newspapers, magazines, and junk mail and on computers and television. Children also see adults using print in their daily lives to make lists, read recipes, read books and magazines, and write notes. The use of print is so wide-ranging in our society that children begin to learn about how it works from a very early age. We call this early learning emergent literacy.

Emergent literacy means that literacy learning begins at birth and unfolds throughout a child’s early years. It also means that to become literate, children develop and bring together complex subsystems of resources. Specifically, children use linguistic, cognitive, social, and cultural experiences as they interact with print and make meaning from print (Clay, 2001). Each child follows a unique developmental path as he or she develops these resources and learns how to bring them together. Thus, emergent literacy is the developmental process of becoming a proficient reader and writer. It includes the skills and knowledge that children develop and the behaviors that they demonstrate before they are able to read and write like adults. This knowledge and these skills are the resources children use and build on as they have interactions with and around print. They then build up an understanding of what it means to read and write as well as develop listening and speaking abilities. Children’s literacy development is not necessarily evident in how conventional or adult-like their reading and writing appear. Instead, it is evident in the literate behavior they exhibit. Literate behavior is what children do when they exhibit an action or performance that, on the surface, looks like something an adult engaged in a literacy activity might do. Examples of literate behaviors demonstrated by preschool children include holding a book and turning its pages, talking about a book, or pretending to write.

Emergent literacy is the developmental process of becoming a proficient reader and writer.

HOW CHILDREN DEVELOP AND LEARN

Literate behavior emerges through normal child development and learning. The experiences young children have at home and at school can either facilitate or slow the literacy learning process. Experiences that allow children to construct their own ideas or theories about how the world works are an important part of the process. Knowledge construction is the essence of learning—personally making sense of the world. Current views of learning and development describe children as active meaning-makers rather than as sponges that absorb information (Miller, 2002). In early childhood education, this process is often called active learning.

This view of children as active participants in the learning process is known as constructivism. The theories of both Piaget and Vygotsky are considered constructivist although each approaches the learning process in different ways (Shapiro, 2002). Short descriptions are provided here to show how the practices advocated in this book help children construct their own knowledge.

Piaget’s Adaptation Process

Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, stated that development and learning occur through an interactive process between the child and the environment with both influencing each other (Miller, 2002). As the environment provides experiences, the child responds and in so doing has an impact on the environment. Specifically, as children have experiences in the world, they try to make sense of these experiences through their existing knowledge. Sometimes they can fit a new experience into their existing knowledge, allowing the new information to be assimilated. An example is three-year-old Joshua on a field trip to a local arboretum. He tromps along intent on making “giant steps,” not paying attention to the teacher asking him to look up at the banana trees. Finally he looks up and discovers them himself saying, “Look at those big leaves!” Joshua has assimilated the huge banana leaves into his existing knowledge of trees and leaves.

In other cases, the new experience simply does not fit and so children must change or adjust their knowledge to accommodate the new information. The experience of one of the authors at age two provides an example. Loraine was with her mother in a city park. She ran up to a fence to pet the pretty swan on the other side. She thought the swan would be happy to be petted, just like her neighbor’s dogs. Instead the swan honked and tried to bite her fingers, forever changing Loraine’s conception of swans from nice to mean. This change in understanding illustrates accommodation. Piaget said that the processes of assimilation and accommodation always occur together and comprise the process of adaptation or learning.

Vygotsky’s Social Interaction

Another prominent theory that gives the child an active role in her own development is that of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky. While Piaget concentrated on the individual experiences of children and an internal process through which knowledge is actively constructed, Vygotsky described development as a social process. While interacting with others, children create understanding, or knowledge, that is shared between them. Thus, active knowledge construction occurs in the social world. As children become sure of their knowledge, it becomes their own and they are able to use it independently.

Vygotsky says that children construct this shared understanding in the zone of proximal development or the ZPD (see Box 1.1). The ZPD represents the difference between the child’s actual, or achieved developmental level, and her potential developmental level. The actual level of development includes knowledge and skills the child has mastered and can do independently. Potential development refers to things the child can do or achieve with the help of someone with a higher skill level. This helper is often called “the more skilled other” and may be either another child or an adult. The more skilled other helps the child move forward by supporting or scaffolding his learning process (Miller, 2002). For example, a teacher might help three-year-old Jacob who is working on a new, difficult puzzle by turning a piece around and saying, “try it this way,” or suggesting he look for yellow pieces to match the yellow of the sun in the corner, or even by moving some pieces away and others closer. These strategies all provide a scaffold to help Josh solve the problem of what piece goes where. Thus, for Jacob, the skills for completing the puzzle are part of his social interactions with the teacher in the zone of proximal development. He will need many experiences like this to master puzzle problem-solving strategies, but over time, Josh will eventually be able to use these strategies independently, making them part of his actual developmental level.

Box 1.1 Theoretical Terms

Theorist	Concept	Definition
PIAGET	Assimilation	Making new information fit into existing knowledge and understandings
	Accommodation	Changing existing knowledge and understanding to fit new information
	Adaptation	How learning occurs The simultaneous processes of assimilation and accommodation
VYGOTSKY	Shared Understanding	Knowledge shared between interaction partners Knowledge developed in social situations
	Zone of Proximal Development	The distance between what a child can do independently and what she can do with the help of someone who has greater knowledge and skills
	Scaffolding	Providing assistance to help a child perform or understand at a more advanced level

CHILD DEVELOPMENT: THE FOUNDATION FOR LITERACY

While the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky explain how children learn, child development research provides information on children’s competencies in various developmental areas. Three areas of development are particularly important for children’s emerging literacy: language development, cognitive or intellectual development, and physical-motor development. Physical motor development will be addressed first, followed by language development and then finally cognitive development.

Physical-Motor Development

Development of the small muscles, or fine motor development, and maturation of the brain, affect children’s ability to manipulate writing tools and to focus their eyes on printed material. At birth, babies wrap their fingers tightly around anything that touches their palm, often an adult’s finger. This reflex action quickly fades away around three to four months, allowing for purposeful grasping. Eye-hand coordination remains crude during the first year of life though, so babies often miss the object they reach for. While toddlers can use a pincer grasp—their thumb and forefinger—to pick up objects around the end of the first year, crayons are still held in a fist-like grip. In fact, writing remains a challenging task for toddlers as it involves both controlling the writing tool and keeping the paper still (Berger, 2006). There is wide variability in the age at which children demonstrate a mature pencil grasp. Most children master it toward the end of the preschool years but a few others continue to struggle into elementary school. However, by age four, eye-hand coordination is sufficiently developed for easy writing and drawing—although the writing does not look like adult writing (Trawick-Smith, 2006).

By age four, eye-hand coordination is sufficiently developed for easy writing and drawing.

Language and Communication

Because literacy includes speaking and listening, children’s learning of oral language and the conventions of speech are important to their literacy learning. Language development begins earl...