Early Literacy Intervention Program

Abstract

A child's early literacy experiences have a long-term impact on reading and writing ability and academic success. Children with more and diverse literacy experiences are at a clear advantage to do better in school. Given that socioeconomic adversity is negatively correlated with children's language development, rich literacy experiences become even more relevant in this population. Children who enter primary school with fewer emergent literacy skills often continue to struggle to achieve academic success and are more likely to be unemployed as adults, hence the need to act from a prevention perspective by universally promoting these skills in preschool children is fundamental. The authors present as an intervention proposal, an emergent literacy program especially targeted to socially disadvantaged pre-school age children. In this program, mediated through storytelling, several emergent literacy skills will be worked on, namely vocabulary, conventions about print, narrative structure, phonological awareness, the child's concept as a reader, and motivation for writing.