Early Literacy: Domains, Development, and Instructional Activities

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Early Literacy Domains, Development, and
Instructional Activities

• Christopher J. Lonigan, Ph.D.
• Florida Center for Reading Research
• Florida State University
• January 18, 2007
• Los Angeles County Office of Education
• California Preschool Instructional Network,
  Networking Meeting

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Early Childhood Education

• What is preschool for?
• Shift in recent years from focus on custodial
  care to educational preparation
• Need to balance educational goals and
  developmental goals
• Need to provide teachers with resources and
  training to best serve children

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Early Childhood Education

• Recent Focus
• Standards and accountability in education for all
  age groups
• Attention to Evidence Based Practices
• Passage of UPK Legislation in Many States

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Early Childhood Education

• Teachers in many settings have limited advanced
  education or experience
• Turnover among preschool teachers is very high
• Programs and teachers can benefit from the
  stability, common understanding, and organization
  of a curriculum

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Early Childhood Education

• Evidence shows that many children arrive at
  school without the skills necessary for success
  in later grades
• Evidence shows that children who start
  behind--stay behind without targeted help
• Evidence shows that these skills are related to
  child background and experiences

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Early Childhood Education

• Before children arrive at preschool their lives
  have varied greatly in their exposure to
• Poverty
• Nurturance and Language input from Parents
• Home Cognitive Enrichment Literacy Environment
• Experiences Outside of the Home

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Early Childhood Education

• Although we can not control the childrens home
  environments
• We can control their preschool environments
• We can try to level the playing field for
  children who arrive at a disadvantage
• We can focus on providing educational activities
  or a curriculum that is educational, enjoyable,
  and enriching.

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Early Childhood Education

• Within early childhood education, one goal is to
  help children develop the skills needed to help
  make school a successful and rewarding experience
  for them.

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Early Childhood Education

• What to do?
• What are the key areas that we should attend to?
• Not all children have the same needs.
• Some children have well-developed skills in some
  areas and less well developed skills in other
  areas.

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Early Childhood Education

• What to do?
• How do we know whether an area is a strength or
  weakness for a particular child?
• What level of skill in an area should be
  expected?
• If we identify an area in which a child has less
  well developed skills, what can be done?

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• Key Areas of Early Development Related to School
  Success

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Key Areas of Early Development

• Early Language Skills
• Emergent Literacy Skills
• Early Math Skills
• Socioemotional Skills
• School Environment Skills

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Key Areas of Early Development

• Emergent Literacy
• Basic idea that literacy starts well before
  actually learn how to read
• Set of skills and experiences that are
  developmental precursors of learning to read
• Develops throughout infancy and early childhood
  through interaction with adults involving
  language and print

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Key Areas of Early Development

• Skills Related to Emergent Literacy
• Oral Language
• Phonological Awareness
• Print Knowledge
• Print Motivation

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Summary of NELP Predictive Analyses
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• Understanding the Components of Emergent Literacy

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• Defining the Components of Oral Language

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Linguists typically divide oral language into
  five categories
• Phonology
• Semantics
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Pragmatics

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• Phonology

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Phonology the ability to produce the sounds in
  ones language.
• 41 phonemes in Standard American English
• By the age of 4-years, 75 100 of childrens
  speech is intelligible.
• However, all children make predictable
  pronunciation errors when they are learning to
  talk like adults.

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Phonology
• These errors are called phonological processes,
  or phonological deviations.
• Many of these phonological processes are
  age-appropriate for preschoolers.

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Examples of Phonological Processes
• Cluster reduction (e.g., spoon ? poon, train ?
  chain, clean ? keen) 40
• Stopping 'ch (e.g., chair ? tare) 46
• Stopping voiceless 'th (e.g., thing ? ting) 50
• Stopping voiced 'th (e.g., them ? dem) 50
• Gliding of liquids (e.g., run ? one, leg ? weg,
  leg ? yeg) 50

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• Semantics

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Semantics Understanding the meaning of words
  (vocabulary, synonyms, definitions).
• Around 18 months, language changes in two ways
• (a) Vocabulary growth increases. A typical child
  begins to learn words at a rate of one every two
  waking hours and will keep learning that rate or
  faster through adolescence and
• (b) primitive syntax begins, with two-word
  strings.

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Semantics
• Preschool is a time of rapid vocabulary
  development.
• A typical 2-1/2-year-old knows 450 words
• A typical 3-year-old knows gt1,000 words
• A typical 5-year-old knows gt 5,000 words
• On average, school-age children add 2,0003,000
  words a year to their vocabularies.

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Semantics
• Types of Vocabulary
• Nouns (including categories)
• Verbs
• Attributes
• Pronouns
• Spatial (positional) terms

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• Do children with different levels of risk for
  later school difficulties differ significantly in
  oral language skills prior to school entry?

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Growth in Expressive Vocabulary During Preschool
for Children At-Risk and Not At-Risk (Standard
Scores)
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Growth in Expressive Vocabulary During Preschool
for Children At-Risk and Not At-Risk (Raw Scores)
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• Morphology

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Morphology Understanding the different
  variations of words (e.g., suffixes, affixes).
• A morpheme is the minimal meaningful unit of a
  language.
• In a word like independently, the morphemes are
  in-, depend, -ent, and ly. Depend is the root and
  the other morphemes are, in this case,
  derivational affixes.

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• Syntax

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Syntax Putting words together to form larger
  meaning units (e.g., grammar).
• Use of increasingly complex (longer) phrases.
• Use of correct morphosyntax (e.g., plurals, past
  tense)

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• Pragmatics

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Pragmatics Appropriate use of language in
  context (e.g., audience, situation, meaning).
• Pragmatics involves three major communication
  skills
• Using language for different purposes -- such as
  greeting, informing, demanding, promising, and
  requesting.

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Adapting or changing language according to the
  needs or expectations of a listener or situation
• talking differently to a baby than to an adult
• giving enough background information to an
  unfamiliar listener
• talking differently in a classroom than on a
  playground.

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Defining the Components of Oral Language

• Following rules for conversations and narrative
  (e.g., telling stories, recounting events of the
  day)
• rules for taking turns in conversation
• rules for introducing topics of conversation
• rules for staying on the topic, rephrasing when
  misunderstood
• rules for appropriate use of nonverbal signals
  (e.g., distance between speaker and listener,
  facial expressions, eye contact)
• Rules may vary depending on language and culture.

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• Defining Phonological Awareness

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Defining Phonological Awareness

• Definition Phonological awareness is the ability
  to detect, manipulate, and use the sound
  structure of spoken language independent of
  meaning.

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Defining Phonological Awareness

• The most common cause of early reading
  difficulties is a weakness in childrens
  phonological awareness skills.
• Children with poor phonological awareness skills
  have difficulty cracking the alphabetic code
  that connects the graphemes in written alphabetic
  languages to the phonemes in spoken language.

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Defining Phonological Awareness

• Examples of tasks requiring phonological
  awareness
• Detection Tasks
• Blending Tasks
• Elision Tasks
• Counting Tasks
• Reversal Tasks

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Most research suggests a developmental
  conceptualization of phonological awareness in
  which phonological awareness manifests in
  increasingly complex ways as children mature.
• Phonological awareness develops along two
  dimensions
• linguistic complexity
• cognitive operations.

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Linguistic Complexity development follows a
  progression in which children are sensitive to
  smaller and smaller units of sound.
• This stage-like development, progresses from
  sensitivity to larger linguistic units that are
  based on the concrete physical characteristics of
  an auditory stimulus (words, syllables) to
  smaller abstract linguistic units that have only
  a psychological reality (phonemes).

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Cognitive Operations development allows
  increasingly complex operations and an increasing
  number of operations on phonological information.

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Using data from 1,000 2- to 5-year-old children
  from diverse backgrounds who had completed
  multiple measures of phonological awareness
  across dimensions of linguistic complexity and
  cognitive operations, analyses, Anthony, Lonigan,
  Driscoll, Phillips, and Burgess, (2003) provided
  direct support for this developmental
  conceptualization of phonological awareness.

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Children were able to perform
• word-level phonological skills before
  syllable-level phonological skills
• syllable-level phonological skills before
  onset/rime-level phonological skills
• onset/rime-level phonological skills before
  phoneme-level phonological skills.

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Children could
• detect manipulations of phonological information
  before they were able to perform manipulations of
  phonological information
• blend phonological information before they could
  elide phonological information.

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Development of Phonological Awareness

• Rather than acquiring these skills in a
  stage-like fashion in which acquisition occurs in
  temporally discrete sequential stages (mastery of
  one level before development in the next level),
  childrens acquisition of these skills followed a
  temporally overlapping sequence (multiple levels
  simultaneously).

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• Do children with different levels of risk for
  later school difficulties differ significantly in
  phonological awareness skills prior to school
  entry?

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• Defining Print Knowledge

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Defining Print Knowledge

• Print Knowledge (knowledge about print and
  letters)
• Letter Names
• Letter Sounds
• Print Conveys Meaning

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• Defining Print Motivation

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Defining Print Motivation

• Print Motivation
• Value of Reading
• Reading as Enjoyable
• Reading as Instrumental (i.e., can be used to
  learn about things)

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• Helping Children Toward Success in School

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Helping Children Toward Success

• Select appropriate assessment instruments
• Identify children who, for whatever reason, may
  not be on a developmental trajectory to ensure
  early success in school.
• Identify and select appropriate instructional
  strategies
• Identify aligned curricula

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• Some Specific Skills to Look for and Some
  Potential Instructional Strategies

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• Oral Language

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Oral Language Vocabulary

• Instructional Strategies
• provide and read to children a variety of
  concept-related books (e.g., farm animals,
  vegetables, the body, transportation)
• model using a wide variety of rich vocabulary
  words including varied nouns, adjectives, and
  verbs
• define new words for children when reading aloud
  and encourage discussion on word meanings
• create category lists of words (e.g., zoo animals
  we saw on the field trip, tools we use in the
  classroom)

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Oral Language Vocabulary

• Instructional Strategies
• provide numerous daily opportunities for children
  to talk with peers and adults in the classroom
• encourage childrens verbal input during shared
  book reading, such as in response to questions or
  to relate the book to their own experiences
• teach children to play go fish and similar card
  games that require verbal labeling of and request
  of picture cards

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Oral Language Vocabulary

• Instructional Strategies
• call attention to category labels that appear in
  story books and other written text
• model use of and teach children category group
  labels such as vehicles, clothing, and furniture
• provide opportunities for children to make
  category collages of items and have children
  share their collages by verbally labeling each
  item and the category name

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Oral Language Syntax

• By the end of the preschool period, most children
  use
• 4- to 6-word sentences
• regular and irregular plurals
• regular past tense
• personal and possessive pronouns
• appropriate subject-verb agreement

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Oral Language Syntax

• Instructional Strategies
• model and help children describe pictures of
  multiple and single objects to practice the use
  of correct subject-verb agreement
• use picture prompts to encourage children to say
  phrases and sentences with irregular plurals
  (e.g., foot/feet, mouse/mice, ox/oxen,
  child/children)
• demonstrate how to tell about ones own picture
  and about the next childs picture beginning with
  the words my picture, his picture, or her
  picture

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• Phonological Awareness

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Phonological Awareness What can children do?

• By the end of the preschool period, most children
  can
• Manipulate large units of sound (words,
  syllables) using a verbal stimulus only
• Manipulate smaller units of sound (onsets, rimes)
  using picture prompts

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Phonological Awareness What can children do?
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Phonological Awareness What can children do?
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Phonological Awareness Early on the
developmental continuum

• Instructional Strategies
• provide and demonstrate use of compound word
  puzzles and picture cards for children to use
  when practicing blending and taking apart
  compound words they say aloud
• say compound words and then leave off first or
  second half (e.g., say hotdog, then say hot)
• play a word game, saying the first part of a
  compound word and asking children to provide a
  variety of second halves that make real compound
  words (e.g., say sun and encourage responses
  such as flower, shine, and burn)

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Phonological Awareness What can children do?
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Phonological Awareness What can children do?
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Phonological Awareness Early on the
developmental continuum

• Instructional Strategies
• play a clapping game, clapping once while saying
  each syllable in childrens names, and encourage
  children to join in
• provide pictures of familiar two-syllable words
  cut into two pieces and first model then
  encourage children to practice putting together
  while saying the word aloud
• say the first syllable in a familiar two-syllable
  word and have children provide the second
  syllable

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Phonological Awareness What can children do?
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Phonological Awareness Later on the
developmental continuum

• Instructional Strategies
• say familiar words with clear separation between
  the onset and the rime (e.g., say, Lets read
  the b ook or Go get the c up)
• provide pictures of familiar one-syllable words
  cut into two pieces for children to put together
  and apart while orally blending together and
  taking apart the words into onset rime segments
• give children sets of four picture cards and have
  them find the one that does not start with the
  same sound as the other three and help children
  to say each picture name aloud

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• Print Knowledge

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Print Knowledge What can children do?

• By the end of the preschool period, most children
  can
• Recognize almost all letters by name (e.g., when
  shown a group of letters, can accurately identify
  the letter that is named)
• Correctly label the names of most letters
• Correctly identify the sound associated with a
  few letters

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Print Knowledge What can children do?
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Print Knowledge Letter names

• Instructional Strategies
• give children frequent opportunities to say aloud
  the name of letters when shown them on cards,
  posters, or alphabet manipulatives
• ask children to name the first letter in a word
  or to find a target letter when reading books
• have children match magnetic letters to an
  alphabet array attached to a magnetic board and
  have them say each letter aloud as it is matched

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Print Knowledge Letter sounds

• Instructional Strategies
• instruct children in matching letter sounds to
  the letter name and the printed letter shape
• play a game matching children to the first sound
  in each of their names
• provide a variety of familiar objects for
  children to sort into first sound piles

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• Print Motivation

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Print Knowledge What can children do?

• By the end of the preschool period, most children
  can
• ask questions and make comments about a story
• enjoy listening to books and guessing what might
  happen next
• propose different possible endings to a story
• show interest in writing

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Print Motivation

• Instructional Strategies
• model getting meaning from text in books and
  other print in the classroom
• encourage children to ask questions about meaning
  and purposes of written language
• discuss meanings of words and passages prior to
  and after reading text

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• Identifying Curricula That Target Key Areas of
  Development and That Likely Have Effective
  Instructional Techniques

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Curriculum Evaluation

• Two areas to look at
• Content Alignment
• Empirical Evidence of Positive Impact
• Preliminary example for some curricula reviewed
  by FCRR
• Example is illustrativeIt is not an endorsement
  of any of these curricula

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Content Coverage Overall
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Content Coverage Literacy Language
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Curriculum Evaluation

• Content Alignment Results
• Most Curricula Very Recently Developed or New
  Versions
• Many Meeting Most Domains
• Most Frequent Miss Physical Health
• Lots of Variability in Style Depth of Content
• Choices ultimately limited by practical concerns
• match to needs
• Costs
• Required level of expertise

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Curriculum Evaluation Findings

• Content Alignment Results
• Important to note that these reviews are more
  quantitative than qualitative
• Elements that met criteria in two different
  curricula could vary greatly in quality and depth

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Curriculum Evaluation Findings

• Evaluation Evidence of Effectiveness
• What Counts as Evidence?
• Want to Have High Standards for Evidence
• Want Standards Comparable to K-12
• Want to Promote New Research
• Want to Promote Informed Consumers
• Many Studies May be Informative
• But only a Special Kind of Study Can tell You if
  Something Works!

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Curriculum Evaluation Findings

• Evaluation Evidence of Effectiveness
• These DO NOT Tell you Something Works
• Anecdotal Reports
• Growth Across Time
• Comparison to Inappropriate Control
• These CAN Tell You Something Works
• Some Well-Controlled Comparison Studies
• Randomized Study

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Curriculum Evaluation Findings

• Evaluation Evidence of Effectiveness
• Outcome Research Ratings
• Rating Scale of Research Quality Quantity
• Rated each Curriculum in 7 Domains
• Separated Language Literacy
• Rating Scale Gives Credit to Curriculum
  Components as well as Total Curriculum
• Highest Ratings for Total Curriculum Studies
• No Credit given for Studies that do not have
  Comparison Group

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Curriculum Evaluation Findings

• Evaluation Evidence of Effectiveness
• Scoring
• 0 No Evidence or No Comp. Grp. Study
• 1 Quasi-Exp. Study of Components
• 2 Randomized Study of Components
• 3 Quasi-Exp. Study of Total Curriculum
• 4 Random Exp. Study of Total Curriculum

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Curriculum Evaluation Findings

• Evaluation Evidence of Effectiveness
• VERY LIMITED RESEARCH!
• About 3/4 Have No Research Credit at All
• All 0 in all 7 Domains
• Others range from Very Strong Research to Ok
  Research
• Only 2-3 with Literacy or Language Support
• None with Research in more than 3 Domains

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