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 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 must develop the understanding that 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 self-teaching 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 (low-match) 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 re-read 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