Development
in the Content Domains
Chapter 10
Beginning Kindergarten Students’ School Readiness Skills by SES
(From Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2,
Dickinson & Neuman (Eds); Neuman, 2006, p. 30)
Low
SES
High
SES
Recognizing letters of alphabet
39%
85%
Ident. Beginning sounds of words
10%
51%
Identifying primary colors
69%
90%
Counting to 20
48%
68%
Writing own name
54%
76%
Amt of time read to prior to
Kindergarten
25 hrs
1000 hrs
Accumulated experience with
words
13
million
words
45 million
words
Emergent Literacy
(from Dickinson, McCabe & Essex, 2006)
• “Language plays a prominent role in organizing
cognitive and other affective-behavioral systems
that support literacy-related activity” (p. 12)
• Importance of syntactic complexity and rich
vocabulary of preschool teacher’s language
(teachers tend to speak simply and use few use
rare words)
• High correlations between kindergarten
vocabulary knowledge and later reading
comprehension in 4th and 7th grades
• Importance of early intervention…once children
reach 3rd grade, reading difficulties are far less
amenable to remediation
• Children who are read to during the preschool
years learn to read more easily
• Children must develop the understanding that
– print has meaning and conveys information
– Spoken language is represented through written
language
Phonological awareness
• Hearing specific syllables within words
• Dividing words into discrete word sounds, or
phonemes
• Blending separate phonemes into meaningful
words
• Identifying words that rhyme
• Early signs of p.a. seen in most children by the
age of 4, through age 7 when they can identify
individual phonemes in words
• Phonological Recoding works well as a selfteaching device when encountering unfamiliar
words
• Languages differ in how closely the
spoken language maps onto the written
system
• Children acquiring reading in
orthographically consistent languages
(Greek, Finnish, German, Italian,
Spanish) could read “pseudowords” by
the middle of first grade (whereas English
speaking children performed extremely
poorly on this task (Ziegler & Goswami,
2006)
• Even in bilingual Canada, French-speaking
children learning to read in French were farther
ahead than English speakers--in the same
socio-cultural setting
• English is at the farthest end of the
orthographic consistency continuum (lowmatch)
– Through, though, cough
– Meat, head, sweater
• For English, children have to use multi-level
strategies, phoneme-by-phoneme and reading
at a higher grain of analysis (considering
“orthographic neighbors”, e.g., 90 members of
the -ight neighborhood)
Word Recognition
• Recognition of words in logos (STOP,
Cheerios) without analyzing the internal
letters
• Begin to learn letter-sound relationships
• Develop sight vocabulary (automatized) and
use letter-sound relationships, common
spelling patterns, & context clues to decipher
less familiar words
Reading Comprehension
• Reading comp. is influenced by topic
knowledge
• Learn about structures used in fiction and
nonfiction texts: Story schema
• Younger readers tend to take material at face
value, paying less attn to quality of ideas or
contradictions
• Older readers (adolescence) begin to read
material with a more critical eye
• Individuals with less working memory
capacity have difficulty understanding what
they read
Metacognition
• Older readers develop ability to identify
main ideas in text, backtrack and reread when they don’t understand
• Children use more sophisticated
metacognitive strategies when they
read text that is high-interest
Writing
• First children distinguish between drawing and
writing
• Learn properties of writing without necessarily
using letters; “pseudowriting”
• Insight that writing represents an object,
“name” for something; start to see some letter
incorporation by age 5
• Invented spelling
• 1st/2nd grade incorporate common letter
sequences -ight, -ound, -ing
• See p. 372 for Developmental Trends
Diversity in Writing
Development
• Writing development is correlated with
general intelligence
• Girls tend to write and spell somewhat
better than boys