Home literacy activities and their influence on early literacy skills.

Abstract

The relationship between the home environments of 66 children and their language and literacy development was examined. After accounting for child age, parent education, and child ability as indexed by scores on a rapid automatized naming task and Block Design of the WPPSI-R, shared book reading at home made no contribution to the prediction of the literacy skills of letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten. In contrast, home activities involving letters predicted modest and statistically significant amounts of variance. For the areas of receptive vocabulary and phonological sensitivity, neither shared book reading nor letter activities were predictive. Follow-up to mid-Grade 2 underscored the importance of letter name/sound knowledge and phonological sensitivity in kindergarten in accounting for individual differences in later achievement in reading comprehension, phonological spelling, and conventional spelling.

The relationship between home literacy practices and developmental trajectories of emergent literacy and conventional literacy skills for Korean children

“…In other words, once the frequency of home reading and children's background characteristics were held constant, children whose parents taught them more frequently at home tended to have lower average scores at the end of the study in phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, and pseudoword reading in Korean. These results differ from previous findings with Englishspeaking and French-speaking families (Evans, Shaw, & Bell, 2000;Sénéchal 2006a;Sénéchal et al, 1998) and from the results of a meta-analysis of home teaching intervention studies, which revealed positive effects of parent teaching on children's emergent literacy and conventional literacy skills (Sénéchal, 2006b). …”

The Home Literacy Environment Is a Correlate, but Perhaps Not a Cause, of Variations in Children’s Language and Literacy Development

“…The predictive role of parental teaching of literacy on children’s reading/spelling skills at or around school entry has been reported in numerous studies from various countries (Evans et al, 2000; Foy & Mann, 2003; Manolitsis et al, 2013; Martini & Sénéchal, 2012). This “formal” aspect of home literacy has also been reported to be independent of informal home-based literacy activities (Phillips & Lonigan, 2009; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002).…”

“…Furthermore, once young children have begun to acquire the alphabetic principle, shared storybook reading can provide a facilitative context for the development of code-based emergent literacy skills (Mol, Bus, & de Jong, 2009). Together these sorts of findings may explain inconsistencies in the literature, which reports both positive (Evans, Shaw, & Bell, 2000; Hood, Conlon, & Andrews, 2008; Senechal & Lefevre, 2002) and negative (Sénéchal & Lefevre, 2014; Silinskas et al, 2012) associations between parental teaching and children’s early literacy skills.…”

The role of the home environment in phonological awareness and reading and writing ability in Tanzanian primary schoolchildren

“…Significant factors were parents' education and occupation, house building material and domestic facilities. In earlier studies, parents' education and occupation have also been significantly related to children's literacy skills (Bowey, 2005;Evans et al, 2000;Ortiz, 2000). It is obvious that parents engaged in professional jobs have attained a good level of education and income to support their children's literacy development.…”

“…Studies indicate that children's exposure to literacy-related activities at home (e.g. story book reading, visits to the library, parental involvement in teaching children to read and write etc) is important for children's phonological awareness and reading and writing ability (Burgess 2002;Evans et al, 2000;Foy, 2003;Neumann et al, 2009;Roberts et al, 2005). Moreover, parents' education, and especially mothers' education, has been shown to significantly contribute to children's reading and writing ability (Jariene & Razmantiene, 2006).…”