Emergent literacy consists of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are developmental precursors to reading and writing. This article offers a preliminary typology of children's emergent literacy skills, a review of the evidence that relates emergent literacy to reading, and a review of the evidence for linkage between children's emergent literacy environments and the development of emergent literacy skills. We propose that emergent literacy consists of at least two distinct domains: inside-out skills (e.g., phonological awareness, letter knowledge) and outside-in skills (e.g., language, conceptual knowledge). These different domains are not the product of the same experiences and appear to be influential at different points in time during reading acquisition. Whereas outside-in skills are associated with those aspects of children's literacy environments typically measured, little is known about the origins of inside-out skills. Evidence from interventions to enhance emergent literacy suggests that relatively intensive and multifaceted interventions are needed to improve reading achievement maximally. A number of successful preschool interventions for outside-in skills exist, and computer-based tasks designed to teach children inside-out skills seem promising. Future research directions include more sophisticated multidimensional examination of emergent literacy skills and environments, better integration with reading research, and longer-term evaluation of preschool interventions. Policy implications for emergent literacy intervention and reading education are discussed.

We experimentally assessed a 1-month, home-based intervention, designed to optimize parental reading of picture books to young children. Parents in the experimental group received instructions to increase their rates of open-ended questions, function/attribute questions, and expansions; to respond appropriately to children's attempts to answer these questions; and to decrease their frequency of straight reading and questions that could be answered by pointing. Control-group parents were instructed to read in their customary fashion. All families audiotaped their reading sessions at home. Analysis of these tapes demonstrated that the experimental-group parents complied with the intervention instructions. Children in the experimental group scored significantly higher than children in the control group on standardized posttests of expressive language ability. On the basis of analysis of audiotapes, children in the experimental group also had a higher mean length of utterance (MLU), a higher frequency of phrases, and a lower frequency of single words. Follow-up 9 months after the completion of treatment disclosed continued, although statistically diminished, differences between the two groups.Picture book story time offers a potentially rich opportunity for young children to learn language. Wells (1985a) found that approximately 5% of the daily speech of a sample of 24-montholds occurred in story-time settings. In addition to being a setting in which children are prone to talk, story time also appears to evoke tutorial behavior from mothers that varies across dimensions such as social class. Ninio and Bruner (1978) studied a single middle-class mother-child pair over a 10-month period, with no special instructions given with regard to book reading. The mother labeled objects most frequently during picture book reading, with 75.6% of all instances of labeling occurring in that context. In addition, the mother provided consistent and informative feedback for the child's attempts at labeling (all incorrect labels were corrected, and 81% of the child's correct labels were reinforced). Similar effects have been found in case studies by Snow and Goldfield (1983) and Moerk and Moerk (1979). Ninio (1980) examined social class differences and found that lower-class mothers were less likely than middle-class mothers to engage in a number of potentially instructive behaviors during story time. Correspondingly, lowerclass children had smaller productive vocabularies than middle-class children.As one might expect, the focus of the speech that parents direct to their children (child-directed speech) during picture book reading changes with the age and linguistic sophistication

Although research has identified oral language, print knowledge, and phonological sensitivity as important emergent literacy skills for the development of reading, few studies have examined the relations between these aspects of emergent literacy or between these skills during preschool and during later reading. This study examined the joint and unique predictive significance of emergent literacy skills for both later emergent literacy skills and reading in two samples of preschoolers. Ninety-six children (mean age = 41 months, SD = 9.41) were followed from early to late preschool, and 97 children (mean age = 60 months, SD = 5.41) were followed from late preschool to kindergarten or first grade. Structural equation modeling revealed significant developmental continuity of these skills, particularly for letter knowledge and phonological sensitivity from late preschool to early grade school, both of which were the only unique predictors of decoding.

Emergent literacy consists of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are developmental precursors to reading and writing. This article offers a preliminary typology of children's emergent literacy skills, a review of the evidence that relates emergent literacy to reading, and a review of the evidence for linkage between children's emergent literacy environments and the development of emergent literacy skills. We propose that emergent literacy consists of at least two distinct domains: inside-out skills (e.g., phonological awareness, letter knowledge) and outside-in skills (e.g., language, conceptual knowledge). These different domains are not the product of the same experiences and appear to be influential at different points in time during reading acquisition. Whereas outside-in skills are associated with those aspects of children's literacy environments typically measured, little is known about the origins of inside-out skills. Evidence from interventions to enhance emergent literacy suggests that relatively intensive and multifaceted interventions are needed to improve reading achievement maximally. A number of successful preschool interventions for outside-in skills exist, and computer-based tasks designed to teach children inside-out skills seem promising. Future research directions include more sophisticated multidimensional examination of emergent literacy skills and environments, better integration with reading research, and longer-term evaluation of preschool interventions. Policy implications for emergent literacy intervention and reading education are discussed.

Beziehungen häuslicher Schreib-und Leseumgebung (HLE) zur Entwicklung lesebezogener Fähigkeiten: Eine einjährige LangzeitstudieDie häusliche Schreib-und Leseumgebung (HLE = Home Literacy Environment) ist ein wichtiger Faktor bei der Gestaltung einer Anzahl entwicklungsbedingter und erzieherischer Folgeergebnisse; dennoch bleiben viele Fragen in Bezug auf ihre Konzeptualisierung und Relationen zu verschiedenen Auswirkungen unbeantwortet. Diese Studie untersucht die Relationen von sechs verschiedenen Konzeptualisierungen der HLE zur gesprochenen Sprache, phonologischen Sensitivität und früher Schreib-und Leseentwicklungen in einem Langzeitbeispiel mit 115 Vorschülern. Mehrfachregression und Korrelationsanalysen zeigten, dass jede der HLE Konzeptualisierungen mit den untersuchten Ergebnissen übereinstimmte. Jedoch variierte das Ausmaß der Beziehungen beträchtlich quer durch die Ergebnisse und sobald andere Entwicklungseinflüsse in Rechnung gezogen wurden. Diese Ergebnisse zeigen, daß zukünftige Untersuchungen der HLE und deren Rolle in der Entwicklung von Sprache und Schreib-bzw. Lesefertigkeiten die Umstände in Rechnung ziehen müssen, in der die häusliche Umgebung konzeptualisiert ist.

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This study examined phonological sensitivity in 238 children from middle-to upper-income families and 118 children from lower-income families across different levels of linguistic complexity. Children ranged in age from 2 to 5 years. Overall, the results indicated that as children increased in age, phonological sensitivity both increased in absolute terms and became more stable. Significant social class differences in growth of phonological sensitivity were also obtained. Phonological sensitivity at different levels of linguistic complexity (e.g., syllables, phonemes) was substantially interrelated at each age and predicted word reading ability in older children independently of language skills and letter knowledge. These results indicate that phonological sensitivity can be assessed in young preschool children and that lower levels of phonological sensitivity may serve as developmental precursors to higher levels of phonological sensitivity.

Although there is evidence that young children's inhibitory control (IC) is related to their academic skills, the nature of this relation and the role of potential moderators of it are not well understood. In this meta-analytic study, we summarized results from 75 peer-reviewed studies of preschool and kindergarten children (14,424 children; 32-80 months old [M = 54.71 months; SD = 9.70]) across a wide range of socioeconomic status. The mean effect size (r) across studies was .27 (95% confidence interval [.24, .29]), indicating a moderate and statistically significant association between self-regulation and academic skills. The association between IC and academic skills was moderated by type of IC behavior task (i.e., hot vs. cool behavior task), by method of assessing IC (i.e., behavior task vs. parent report), and by academic subject (i.e., literacy vs. math), but not by other methods of assessing IC (i.e., behavior task vs. teacher report, parent report vs. teacher report) or by grade (i.e., preschool vs. kindergarten). The results of this meta-analysis suggest that there are preferred methods for assessing IC (i.e., cool behavior tasks, teacher reports) that should be considered when examining the relations between IC and academic skills in young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).