Chapter 2. Foundations of Early Literacy
Sohyun Meacham
“No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.” – Rebecca Solnit
Keywords: print concepts, phonological awareness, oral language development, phonemic awareness, phonics
Children need to know so much more than the ABCs in order to read books in English (Schickedanz & Collins, 2013). Many caregivers and teachers tend to focus too much attention on letter names and letter sounds when it comes to teaching their children to read. Even in countries where they do not speak English as their first language, they often start with teaching the ABCs to their young children if they want to teach them English as a second language. However, knowing the names and sounds of the letters is just part of learning how to read in English. Let’s say children successfully decode the word don, a fairly easy word to decode. It is entirely possible that they do not understand what it means, as it is not a frequently used word among young children. The word don, which means “to put on,” is known by fewer than 40 percent of American children by the end of grade six in the United States (Biemiller, 2010). The bottom line of reading is comprehension (Shea, 2016), understanding what you read. The most important foundation for reading is oral language development, because it can help children make meaning out of reading in English.
The emergent literacy stage
You might observe children pretending to read, even before they start formal reading instruction. Perhaps they might hold a favorite book like Hush Little Baby by Sylvia Long upside down while making up their own story. Before children are able to say recognizable words, they might hold a book just like you do while cooing or babbling. These pretend behaviors with books are considered by educators to be part of emergent literacy. Sulzby and Teale, who first used the term emergent literacy, explained the concept:
“Emergent literacy is concerned with the earliest phases of literacy development, the period between birth and the time when children read and write conventionally. The term emergent literacy signals a belief that, in a literate society, young children – even 1- and 2-year-olds – are in the process of becoming literate” (1996, p.728).
Therefore, you can observe the process of children’s literacy emerging, including the aspects of oral-language development, phonological awareness, the print concept, and alphabet knowledge.
Before reading is taught formally, children have to know the language that they are trying to decipher. Oral language is not just knowing the meaning of words. It involves the grammar that combines the words correctly. It means having appropriate language for different social contexts, such as school or a party. Let alone understanding the meaning of a word, just being able to say its smallest part, like the phoneme /m/ in Mom, is something that takes a newborn baby a long time, hearing it repeated by caregivers, siblings, and neighbors. It is a long journey to acquire the sounds used for the first language and learn to distinguish them from foreign-language or animal sounds. Oral language is an important foundation for future reading development.
- Alphabet Knowledge: The knowledge of letter names and sounds. It involves recognizing, writing, and identifying the names and sounds of the letters in the English alphabet.
- Print Concepts: The awareness of how print works to convey a message
- Phonological Awareness: The awareness of how various sound structures of speech work in a language
- Oral Language Development: The development of skills and knowledge used for listening and speaking. It is an important foundation for reading comprehension and writing.
- Phonemic Awareness: A subcategory of phonological awareness which focuses on the individual phonemes
- Phonics: An instructional approach that teaches the letter-sound relations
- Fluency: The ability to read with accuracy, automaticity, natural prosody, and stamina
- Vocabulary: The words that are understood and used
- Comprehension: The understanding of what is read by decoding and meaning making
Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is “the ability to pay attention to, identify, and reflect on various sound structures of speech… Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of phonological awareness and refers to the ability to identify and reflect on the individual phonemes” (Johnston et al., 2015, p.58). A phoneme is the smallest audible unit of any language, not only English. Simply explained, phonemes refer to individual sounds. For example, pen consists of three phonemes: /p/, /e/, and /n/. Phonological awareness is an important foundation for future formal reading instruction, in which children will decode all of the individual sounds in a word and blend them together to make meaning out of the word.
Making compound words is a fun phonological-awareness activity that you can do with the children when you are driving in the car for a short distance.
Say, “What word do you get if you put the words sun and flower together?” If the children answer, “Sunflower,” you affirm them and ask another question: “That’s right, the word sunflower consists of the words sun and flower.
How about the words air and plane together?” There are many compound words such as basketball, cowboy, doughnut, and inchworm. Whenever you bump into compound words in a book that you are reading aloud with the children, you can use the opportunity as a teachable moment.
Inch by Inch, written by Leo Lionni, would be a good context for you to talk about inchworm as a compound word.
Rhyming words
Attention to rhyming words also contributes to phonological awareness. When two different words end with the same sound, as in school and cool, we call them rhyming words. Dr. Seuss’s classical children’s book Hop on Pop presents a great number of pairs of rhyming words. Pairs such as cup-pup and house-mouse with humorous illustrations give you and the children fun moments to laugh together. Mouse and house are written in phrases: “Mouse on house,” on the verso page, is natural and not so surprising; however, “House on mouse,” on the recto page, is unnatural, impossible, and surprising. The illustration is humorous. The spelling patterns of these word pairs (cup-pup, hop-pop, and mouse-house) have identical endings. There are other rhyming words that end with different spellings. For instance, fox and socks are rhyming words whose endings are spelled differently. Reading Dr. Seuss’s book titled Fox in Socks would be a good context for mentioning this fact.
Learning Activities
Syllable counting by clapping and identifying words with the same beginning (or ending) sound are other ways for you to assess and train children in phonological awareness.
Ask them, “Which word sounds longer, caterpillar or ant?” Then you can clap four times for caterpillar, as there are four syllables. Ant needs only one clap because there is one syllable in the word.
When you count syllables in words, do it only by listening and talking, not by looking at the spellings.
Phonological awareness training should not be based on visual images or spelling but on sound. You can use some clip-art images, though, when you do syllable counting or identifying words with the same sound. For example, display images for mop, hop, and top; then show the children a map. Ask the children which word in the first group (mop, hop, and top) has the same beginning sound as map.
Print concepts
Oral language development and phonological awareness do not necessarily require written texts. However, print concepts, alternatively called concepts about print or print awareness, do involve them. They do not necessarily refer to sound and letter correspondences. Print concepts refer to the awareness of how print works to convey a message. The directionality that the written text flows is one of the print concepts for a language. English text is read from left to right, whereas Arabic and Hebrew flow in the opposite direction. The concepts of spaces between words and knowing the roles of authors and illustrators belong to print concepts. There are many more print concepts, such as how to hold a book and turn a page correctly. Basically, print concepts are acquired over time through all of the read-aloud experiences that children have from the first day of their lives. While you might not need to explicitly teach them all of these concepts, during a read-aloud you can say something like, “The author of this book is Donald Crews. The author is the person who writes the words. Donald Crews actually drew the pictures too, so he is also the illustrator.”
Alphabet knowledge
Alphabet knowledge includes both letter names and letter sounds. Knowing what sound each letter makes is essential for decoding, as children will need to blend the component sounds to say a word. However, knowing the letter names can help children communicate with their caregivers and teachers who are giving them formal reading instruction. There are many alphabet books of different types which can help you teach letter sounds and names. One type just identifies words that start with each letter, accompanied by illustrations for them. Elizabeth Doyle’s (2015) A, B, See! and Suse MacDonald’s (1986) Alphabatics are great examples of this type. In Alphabatics, the letters do acrobatics on the verso pages. Then the letters turn into things that start with those letters on the recto pages. For example, the lowercase n turns upside down in four steps on the verso page. Then it becomes a nest on the opposing recto page. You can simply say the name of the letter and explain the word that begins with the letter. Then add what sound that letter makes. “The name of the letter is N (pronounced ‘en’). The word nest starts with the letter N, which sounds like /n/.” There are other types of alphabet books that have more narrative, with themes or information, such as Miss Bindergarten Takes a Field Trip with Kindergarten by Joseph Slate (2004), Tasha Tudor’s (2012) A is for Annabelle, and David McLimans’s (2006) Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet. You and the children can create an original alphabet book as a project. As reading and writing are developed simultaneously, you don’t need to wait until the children master reading to make one.
This section has discussed the emergent literacy stage, which is the one before formal reading instruction takes place. In the next section, the early literacy stage will be explained as the one that follows the emergent stage. During formal reading instruction in the early literacy stage, concepts such as phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency become more important than alphabet knowledge or print concepts. Vocabulary and comprehension are still important, though, and are taught more explicitly.
- What can you do to promote young children’s emergent-literacy development?
- How can your oral language support young children’s literacy development?
The early literacy stage
Downlaod The Big 5 Overview Video Transcript [DOC]
Comprehension is the bottom line of reading
Once children start formal literacy instruction at school, they learn to pay attention to the sounds in a word. They analyze the individual sounds, then they put the sounds together to make the word. Once children understand this system, we try to help them automatize the process so they can read fluently. Fluent reading with adequate speed can help children focus more on the meaning of the text. Since the bottom line of reading is comprehension, all of the discrete skills emphasized in formal literacy instruction (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary) should have the child’s meaning-making success as their aim. Therefore, this chapter will show you how to focus on meaning-making and comprehension while you tutor them in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary.
Vocabulary
Let’s start with vocabulary. There are three kinds: receptive, productive, and sight-word. Receptive vocabulary is the words whose meanings are understood. When you read a sentence or listen to someone speaking, you can make sense out of it because you have an adequate receptive vocabulary. Productive vocabulary is the words that can be readily used to generate speaking and writing. Even if you understand some difficult or fancy words when you see them, you may never use them for your own speech or writing: so they are not in your productive vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary develops earlier than productive vocabulary. Sight-word vocabulary is the volume of printed words that are recognized without a decoding effort. A large sight-word vocabulary would seem to be helpful for reading fluency, but it’s useless if the reader doesn’t know what the words mean. Early literacy development is comprised of teaching children to understand and use vocabulary words in reading and communicating.
Word selection for vocabulary teaching should be intentional. Sometimes there are words in children’s picturebooks that adults don’t even know. Words like lackadaisical and languid in Eric Carle’s (2002) Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth could be unfamiliar to caregivers, particularly to non-native speakers. It might not be a good idea to focus on your own difficulties in selecting the words to teach. Instead, focus on the words that are useful for the children you teach. When you pre-read a book before introducing it to the children, choose just two or three vocabulary words, because you don’t want to spend the whole read-aloud time teaching vocabulary.
While vocabulary teaching can be fun, there are many other fun conversations that you can have with the children about other aspects of a book. When choosing the words to teach, then, think about three points. First, consider the usefulness of the words in the children’s everyday lives. See if the children can use them easily in a conversation. See if you can also increase their exposure to these words in other contexts. Driver would be a good vocabulary-word choice from Mo Willems’s (2003) Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. While it might not be a difficult word for you, it might be new to the children whom you teach, and it is a useful word for the children’s everyday conversations. Second, consider the concreteness of the words.As a general rule, focus on more concrete ones, which will be more useful to the children. Third, consider the amount of repetition in the book of the target words. If they appear multiple times, the child will see them in different contexts, which is helpful for learning nuances. You can also look for opportunities to teach some important homonyms (e.g., the verb hide meaning “keep out of sight” and the noun hide meaning “animal skin”).
Reading aloud is a great context for children to learn vocabulary in. They can see the words and hear them when you read them aloud and when you talk about the story. Then you can explicitly teach child-friendly definitions for the target words, asking the children to repeat the words and use them in sentences, or act out their meaning.
Fluency
Fluency is reading with accuracy, automaticity, natural prosody (e.g., intonation), and stamina. More succinctly, fluency means reading like you talk. When you hear children reading “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” with good fluency, brown should have a higher tone than bear; and the children will take a short breath before saying “…what do you see?” On the other hand, reading with several awkward pauses and unnecessary repetitions like, “Brown…brown bear, brown,…brown bear, what do…ya,…you see?” does not sound like how you talk in English.
Making connections between oral language and reading is significant for fluency development. When you or another fluent reader reads a book to the children, it is an opportunity for them to perceive connections between oral language and the text. They can hear you demonstrating the intonation, rhythm, and flow of the sentences written in the book. Another important way to develop children’s fluency is to let them read easy books lots of times. For instance, if a child’s Guided Reading Level for instruction is H, books at levels C and D would be good fluency builders.
Again, reading aloud is a great context for building children’s fluency. You can informally assess their ability when they read aloud to you. They can hear their own reading, which is immediate feedback to their ears. When a book is relatively easy according to the children’s reading ability, they can feel the rhythm and flow of the language better, which reinforces the connection between oral and written English. So, if you see 7-year-old children grab The Very Hungry Caterpillar once in a while, you don’t need to discourage them just because their instructional level is at the Junie B. Jones books. Encourage them to read the text aloud. You can use some prompts for dialogic reading to talk about topics like healthy eating or the life cycles of different insects and animals.
Phonics
Phonics relates sounds to letters. It relates phonemes, the smallest sound units of a language, to graphemes, the letters or letter combinations that produce those sounds. For instance, f is the grapheme (symbol) for the phoneme /f/ (sound), as in the word fat. While this letter-sound connection is straightforward, many grapheme-phoneme relationships are more opaque. For instance, the letter c (not k) is the grapheme for the phoneme /k/ in the word cat. Moreover, there are multi-letter graphemes, such as the 2-letter grapheme “ph” for the phoneme /f/ in the word phone, and the 3-letter grapheme “igh” for the phoneme /ai/ in the word night. As there are many difficult letter combinations like this found in English phonics, it makes little sense to say phonics instruction should be completed in a short period of time. Rather, it should take place over a long time, so children can observe patterns in how sounds correspond to letters in simple/short words as well as complex/multisyllabic ones.
The simple letter-sound correspondences in themselves are insufficient to enable children to grasp the meanings of long words. Multisyllabic words usually consist of multiple meaningful parts. In terms of understanding, it is less useful for a beginning reader to break a long word like unrealistic down into phonemes than to break it into meaningful chunks like un-real-ist-ic. Perhaps a child below 2nd grade might not need to deal with too many multisyllabic words in their process of learning to read. However, observing patterns within words and sorting words into different families, like the -um family (hum, chum, gum, and glum), and the -am family (ham, jam, and clam), can help children process parts of words in bigger chunks and later deal more easily with longer words with multiple meaningful parts.
Children gradually become aware of the smallest parts of their language having meaning, called morphemes. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. A stand-alone word such as apple is a free morpheme. When free morphemes appear with other morphemes attached to them, they are the base or root word. Bound morphemes serve grammatical morphemes or derivational morphemes. Grammatical morphemes signal grammatical information such as number (e.g., cat vs. cats), tense (e.g., walk vs. walked), and possession (e.g., Xavier vs. Xavier’s). They are always suffixes in English. Derivational morphemes make a new word by being attached to root morphemes, which change the meaning (e.g., from happy to unhappy; from sing to singer) or can change the syntactic category (e.g., from beauty to beautiful). They can be prefixes or suffixes. Most grammatical morphemes are mastered during early childhood, whereas derivational morphemes are studied in the later school-age years (Pence Turnbull & Justice, 2016). Learning these morphemes during early and later childhood substantially increases vocabulary size. How excited the children are to figure out the meaning of a word they never saw before by deciphering the meaning units that they already know!
Phonemic awareness
To explain phonics, I used the term phoneme several times. Again, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. It does not bear any meaning itself. However, it can make a huge difference when you replace one phoneme in a word with another. When you replace /k/ in the word cat with /b/, you make a totally different animal. Replacing c with b in the word cat relates to phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness was briefly explained under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Phonological-awareness training on bigger word parts (at least syllable-size) should take place earlier than phoneme-level training. For instance, door and knob make the new word doorknob, which is an example of phonological awareness at the word level. This is easier than putting the phonemes /p/, /e/, and /t/ together to make the word pet. Perhaps children might even be able to skip phoneme-level instruction in learning to read long words if they know how to analyze patterns within words. The focus of reading instruction should be on meaning-making, which is the big picture of literacy development.
- Alphabet knowledge, print concepts, phonological awareness, and oral language development are foundational skills to develop at the emergent literacy stage.
- Oral language development at early ages is the most important foundation for later reading comprehension.
- Vocabulary, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics, and comprehension are five pillars for the early literacy stage.
Resources for teacher educators
- Resources for Oral Language Instruction from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
- Information about Phonics and Decoding
- Phonics resources
References
Biemiller, A. (2010). Words worth teaching: Closing the vocabulary gap. SRA.
Carle, E. (2002). “Slowly, slowly, slowly,” said the sloth (E. Carle, Illus.). Philomel Books.
Doyle, E. (2015). A, B, see (E. Doyle, Illus.). Little Simon.
Dr. Seuss. (1963). Hop on pop (Dr. Seuss, Illus.). Random House Books for Young Readers.
Dr. Seuss. (1965). Fox in socks (Dr. Seuss, Illus.). Random House Books for Young Readers.
Johnston, F., Invernizzi, M., Helman, L., Bear, D., & Templeton, S. (2015). Words their way for PreK-K. Pearson.
Lionni, L. (1995). Inch by inch (L. Lionni, Illus.). HarperCollins.
MacDonald, S. (1986). Alphabatics (S. MacDonald, Illus.). Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
McLimans, D. (2006). Gone wild: An endangered animal alphabet (D. McLimans, Illus). Walker.
Pence Turbull, K. L., & Justice, L. M. (2016). Language development from theory to practice (3rd. Ed.). Pearson.
Schickedanz, J. A., & Collins, M. F. (2013). So much more than the ABCs: The early phases of reading and writing. National667 Association for the Education of Young Children.
Shea, M. (2016). Where’s the glitch? Heinemann.
Slate, J. (2004). Miss Bindergarten takes a field trip with kindergarten (A. Wolff, Illus.). Penguin.
Sulzby, E., & Teale, W. (1996). Emergent literacy. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamel, P. B. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Vol. II (pp. 727-757). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Tudor, T. (2012). A is for Annabelle: A doll’s alphabet (T. Tudor, Illus.). Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Willems, M. (2003). Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus! (M. Willems, Illus.). Hyperion Books.