Literacy Learning

Kindergarten teachers are already getting their classrooms ready for the first day of school. They are arranging furniture, decorating bulletin boards, and carefully preparing center activities. Books are being selected to help students on their way to being readers. Teachers are preparing for a classroom of children who they see as needing literacy instruction. But what do children know about literacy before they begin school and why is it important to know?

Emilia Ferreiro and Ann Teberosky, researchers whose work is based on Piagetian theory, conducted a qualitative study on how children come to know written language. They explored the developmental processes of learning to read and write and published their findings in the book Literacy Before Schooling. The researchers focused on print awareness, environmental print, and writing development.

In their early years, children find a variety of ways to express their literacy knowledge. Children draw, write and pretend play to communicate meaning. Children role-play literacy events that they observe in their daily lives. For example, children often play restaurant using a notepad and pen to take orders. Through these efforts to communicate, children are demonstrating their knowledge about reading and writing. Does print in children's environment help them construct knowledge about reading and writing? Ferreiro and Teberosky explored preschoolers' literacy knowledge before receiving formal reading instruction. They found that children had constructed knowledge about print before they came to school and that they continually test that knowledge through interaction with print. The researchers found that the children in the study had precise ideas about the number of characters needed for something to be readable. They also had the idea that repeated letters were not something to read. The researchers found that young children imitated reading behaviors such as holding the book in a certain way, using page turning gestures, and eye movements and body language of reading.

In Ferreiro and Teberosky's study, they found that children reinvent writing for themselves. Children actively model what they see in the adult world. As they experiment with writing, children construct and refine their knowledge of written language. Children's names are a springboard in writing development. Children see their names written frequently and begin to use the letters in their names in their writing. This can be used as the basis for further learning in writing.

The work of Ferreiro and Teberosky is important in the field of education and the implications from their research should empower teachers and parents to help their children in their literacy development. In the next blog post we will look at the implications of this study and offer suggestions for what parents and teachers can do to further children's literacy development.