Laura M. Justice

Promising Interventions for Promoting Emergent Literacy Skills: Three Evidence-Based Approaches

The decade of the 1990s saw a tremendous increase in research studying the value of emergent literacy intervention, particularly for meeting the needs of children at risk. Such studies have documented the positive effects of adult—child shared storybook reading, literacy-enriched play settings, and structured phonological awareness curricula for enhancing the emergent literacy skills of young children. This article defines emergent literacy, discusses the meaning of evidence-based practice, and describes three promising evidence-based approaches for emergent literacy intervention.

Enhancing Phonological Awareness, Print Awareness, and Oral Language Skills in Preschool Children

The preschool years are critical to the development of emergent literacy skills that will ensure a smooth transition into formal reading. Phonological awareness, print awareness, and oral language development are three areas associated with emergent literacy that play a crucial role in the acquisition of reading. This article presents an overview of these critical components of emergent literacy. The overview includes a brief review of recent research and provides strategies for developing phonological awareness, print awareness, and oral language in the preschool classroom.

That's My Letter!: What Preschoolers' Name Writing Representations Tell Us about Emergent Literacy Knowledge

This study explored the extent to which preschool childrens name writing representations reflected their more general emergent literacy knowledge in print and phonological awareness. As part of a preschool literacy screening program, 3,546 4-year-old children were administered a name writing task and additional indices of emergent literacy. Children were placed into four groups based on the level of their name-writing representations. The four groups were compared for performance on alphabet knowledge, concept of word, print knowledge, rhyme awareness, and beginning sound awareness tasks. The four name-writing groups significantly differed from one another on each of these dependent measures. Additionally, a regression analysis showed the linear combination of the five emergent literacy indices to significantly predict level of name writing representation, accounting for 36% of the variance in outcome. Print-related skills (alphabet knowledge, print concepts), in addition to age, accounted for 34% of this variance. While findings suggest that name writing representations can differentiate children in both phonological and print awareness, name writing representations appear to predominantly reflect print-related knowledge.

Word and print awareness in 4-year-old children:

Word and print awareness comprise key elements of young children’s emergent literacy development. There are currently few assessment instruments for examining preschool children’s skills in these areas. This article describes two informal measures that may be used to examine word and print awareness in preschool children. Results of administering these measures, referred to as the Preschool Word and Print Awareness assessment, to 30 typically developing preschool children are presented. This protocol as well as the developmental observations presented may be useful to early childhood educators and speech-language pathologists who wish to examine young children’s emergent literacy knowledge.

Educators' Use of Cognitively Challenging Questions in Economically Disadvantaged Preschool Classroom Contexts

Research Findings: This study investigated the complexity of teacher questions in 14 preschool classrooms serving economically disadvantaged 4-year-olds. The purposes were to explore the frequency and complexity of teacher questions and to determine the extent to which question types varied for different classroom contexts. Using teacher utterances from 24-min transcripts of videotaped classroom observations, we used a logistic regression framework to determine the frequency of teacher questioning and the extent to which this related to classroom context. Results indicated that questions characterized 33.5% of all teacher utterances, with management questions occurring most frequently (44.8%), followed by more cognitively challenging questions (32.5%) and less cognitively challenging questions (22.7%). The frequency of use for the different question types varied by classroom context; specifically, management questioning occurred most frequently in teacher-directed and child-directed contexts, whereas more cognitively challenging questions occurred most frequently during shared storybook reading. Practice or Policy: This study has implications for the professional development of early childhood educators, particularly with respect to the use of questions as a language stimulation technique for preschoolers at risk for language- and literacy-related difficulties.

Written Language Awareness in Preschool Children from Low-Income Households: A Descriptive Analysis.

This study examined written language awareness in preschool children from low-income households. A total of 38 preschool children (mean age = 53 months) participated. All children resided in households with incomes that fell at or below federal poverty guidelines; in addition, all children were currently enrolled in a Head Start program. A battery of six measures was individually administered to each child to examine skills in the following areas: print awareness, word awareness, graphic awareness, and metalinguistic awareness. Descriptive analyses of the childrens performance on the battery revealed significant gaps in knowledge across all four dimensions of written language awareness. The highest levels of performance were observed with respect to these childrens ability to attend to the visual details of letters. The lowest levels of performance were observed with respect to the childrens ability to identify contextualized print within illustrations (print recognition) and their understanding of the concept of word as it pertains to written language. This information may be useful for designing early literacy programs to support written language awareness in children from low-income households. Clinical implications are discussed.

Early Literacy Screening in Kindergarten: Widespread Implementation in Virginia

Early success in reading is predicated on a childs ability to accurately and effectively master core literacy constructs (e.g., phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, concept of word, and grapheme-phoneme correspondence) and to exercise these understandings in a comfortable sociocultural context. In recent years, educators, legislators, and policymakers have shown great interest in creating an effective and instructionally useful diagnostic screening tool for identifying children at risk for early reading difficulties. In response to this charge, the Phonological Awareness and Literacy Screening-Kindergarten (PALS-K) was developed. Through Fall 2003, more than 430,000 kindergarten students in Virginia had been screened using PALS-K. The purposes of this paper are to (a) describe the PALS-K instrument, (b) examine its effectiveness in screening for poor beginning literacy skills, and (c) discuss the educational and policy implications of the results of statewide literacy screening efforts.

Closing the Gap between Research and Practice: Case Study of School-Wide Literacy Reform.

This case study of one elementary school describes an ongoing effort to close the gaps between literacy research and practice in order to promote the successful literacy transitions of all students. Jefferson Elementary Schools reading program is a research-driven, school-wide program emphasizing prevention-based instruction, early identification, intensive intervention, and ongoing staff development. For emergent and beginning readers, these efforts are coordinated through the consistent use of instructional diets to guide teachers in curriculum decisions and their allocation of classroom literacy time. We identify assessment-based decision making, curricular coordination, small group instruction, efficient management, ongoing data analysis, knowledgeable leadership, and persistence as essential ingredients in this effort.

The effect of book genre in the repeated readings of mothers and their children with language impairment: a pilot investigation

This pilot investigation compared the language use of mothers and their four children with language impairment during in-home readings of two storybook genres. Mother-child dyads repeatedly read two book genres, narrative-only and narrative + manipulative storybooks. The language output during the repeated readings was transcribed and analysed for utterance and discourse features. Mother language output did not vary across book genre, whereas the children demonstrated greater mean length of utterance and increased percentage of question use during the narrative + manipulative book interactions relative to narrative-only interactions. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Parental Scaffolding of Children's Phonological Awareness Skills Interactions Between Mothers and Their Preschoolers With Language Difficulties

This study examined mother—child verbal exchanges during phonological awareness (PA) tasks embedded into storybook reading sessions. The aims of the research were (a) to determine how mothers scaffolded their childrens task performance, (b) to characterize the stability of maternal scaffolding over four sessions, and (c) to study the relation between maternal scaffolds and childrens developing PA competencies. Five mothers and their 4-year-old children with language difficulties read a storybook four times during a 1-week period. The storybook included nine questions (e.g., What sound does bear start with?) for mothers to ask their children to help them develop PA. Coding of maternal scaffold quantity and type, as well as childrens task performance, was conducted to characterize scaffolding over time and to measure childrens developing PA competence. Results showed that mothers used a variety of directive and responsive scaffolds to help their children perform the PA tasks but preferred phonological cues, which provided models of phonological concepts, and praise, which provided affirmation of performance. The three children of mothers who used more scaffolds overall and who decreased their scaffolds over sessions (including directives) were able to perform independently and accurately on more PA tasks at the end of four sessions than the other two children. We hypothesize that both directive and responsive scaffolds serve complementary purposes when used by mothers to scaffold childrens PA learning. Clinical implications and future research directions are discussed.