Understanding print: Early reading development and the contributions of home literacy experiences

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Abstract

This study explored the development of children’s early understanding of visual and orthographic aspects of print and how this is related to early reading acquisition. A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, completed standardized measures of phonological awareness and early reading skills. They also completed experimental tasks that tapped their understanding of what constitutes “readable” print. The parents of participants completed a questionnaire regarding their children’s home literacy experiences. The data showed systematic development in children’s understanding of print conventions and English orthography and spelling. Regression analyses indicated that print knowledge was related to early reading skill, even after accounting for variance due to age and phonological awareness. Furthermore, parents’ ratings of the extent of their children’s involvement in activities that led to practice in reading and writing most consistently predicted the development of emerging literacy skills, including understanding of the conventions of the English writing system. Little relation between print knowledge and the frequency of storybook reading by adults was observed.

Introduction

Although most children begin to read only with formal instruction in elementary school, experiences during the preschool years are believed to set the stage for children’s literacy development. Studies of emergent literacy have highlighted the importance of the early literacy environment and experiences (for a review, see Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998) in developing children’s knowledge and skills related to reading acquisition. In this study, we explored young children’s understanding of print concepts and orthography. Our main interest was in tracing the developmental trajectories of several aspects of print knowledge, from visual/graphic aspects of print to early orthographic information. We then related development of these print concepts to the children’s early reading skill. Finally, we explored aspects of the children’s home literacy environment, relating these to the development of print concepts and early reading.

In the domain of early reading acquisition, the major focus has been on the development of early phonological sensitivity in young children. Bradley and Bryant, 1983, Bradley and Bryant, 1985 found a strong relation between young children’s ability to respond to sound units within words and their later reading acquisition. Rhyming ability measures, as well as syllable and phoneme deletion tasks, have become standard tools in detecting children who are at risk for reading problems. There is now fairly broad agreement that early sensitivity to the sound structure of spoken words is a strong predictor of reading success and that interventions that improve phonological sensitivity are related to reading achievement (e.g., Ball and Blachman, 1988, Foorman et al., 1997, Wagner and Torgesen, 1987).

However, to learn to read, a child must understand more than the phonological structure of the language and its grapheme–phoneme correspondences. Writing systems have specific conventions that govern the visual and orthographic aspects of print. For example, although English has only 26 letters that are combined to form words, there are orthographic constraints that determine what letter combinations can constitute words. There must be at least one vowel, and words normally contain both vowels and consonants; the exceptions are single-letter words such as a and I. Our spelling system not only is influenced by spelling to sound regularities but also encodes some morphological consistencies. Furthermore, there are orientation and spacing constraints for printed language. Letters are not printed backward or upside down, there are spaces between (not within) words, and in English one reads left to right along linearly arranged lines of letters. Before a child can begin to read, he or she must acquire considerable knowledge about the visual/orthographic aspects of the English writing system. The current study explored the development of these aspects of early literacy and some of the home literacy experiences that may influence their development.

The literature contains fewer quantitative studies that focus on the early development of visual/orthographic knowledge than those that focus on the development of phonological knowledge. Yet the former is an important aspect of emergent literacy that is linked to reading acquisition (Lomax & McGee, 1987). Clay (1993) emphasized that printing conventions (e.g., direction rules, spatial formatting, punctuation) and visual patterns (word and letter clusters) are essential elements in early reading development. She argued that these aspects of printed language, although processed automatically by fluent readers, are a source of confusion for beginning readers. For example, Lavine (1977), who studied 3- to 5-year-olds’ understanding of what constitutes writing, found that 3-year-olds believed that signature-like scribbles were writing. By 5 years of age, scribbles were rejected as writing in preference to printed letters, words, and numbers. Similarly, Brenneman, Massey, Machado, and Gelman (1996) showed that the actions of 4-year-olds while drawing and writing were quite different from those of 5-year-olds. When children were asked to draw pictures, they often used continuous outlines and filled spaces with colors. The marks they made were put on the page in a random fashion. However, when they were asked to write names for objects, they often used discrete marks and arranged them in a linear fashion from left to right. This pattern for writing was more likely in older children than in younger children, indicating an increase in knowledge about the conventions of writing.

Levin and Bus (2003) reported a study of the development of drawing and writing skills in still younger Dutch and Israeli children (ages 28–53 months). They concluded that drawing and writing derive from a common notational basis, with children initially drawing print. At the earliest ages, children’s writings were indistinguishable from their drawings; however, with development writings, but not drawings, began to include writing-like features such as segmentation into smaller units that were displayed linearly. In their study with children in the same age range, Bader and Hildebrand (1991) reported improved understanding of directionality. These studies point to development in the understanding of what constitutes acceptable writing in preschool children.

Although examining children’s writing offers a window into their concepts about print, it is limited in that it does not directly tap what they believe is “readable” text. Many parents have encountered the awkward moment when their child brings his or her treasured scribbles and asks the parent to read them. These children clearly have not yet grasped what is readable and what is not. Bialystok (1995) asked 3- to 6-year-olds whether different displays, including squiggles, cursive writing, printed words, pictures, and shapes, were good for reading. She found that younger children were more likely than older children to accept nonalphabetic displays as being readable. Interestingly, all children were confused about whether pictures were readable. This may indicate that while listening to adults read, pictures and print are confused, with the children not knowing what part of the display the adults are actually reading.

DeGoes and Martlew (1983) provided further evidence for the continuous development of children’s understanding of written words. In their study of 20 4- to 6-year-olds, half of the children accepted only strings of letters as being words, and 6 of these 10 children accepted only strings of letters of a certain length as being words. DeGoes and Martlew suggested that symbol shape and string length are important criteria used by preschoolers in differentiating words from nonwords. Thus, one- and two-letter words were rejected. Landsmann and Karmiloff-Smith (1992) found that rejection of single letters as words increased with age and that 92% of 5- and 6-year-olds thought that single letters could not be words. Similarly, older children are more sensitive to the consonant–vowel structure of real words than are younger children. Pick, Unze, Brownell, Drozdal, and Hopmann (1978) reported development from ages 3 and 4 years to elementary school in children’s grasp of the specific units that constitute words. They suggested that number of letters, directionality, and meaning are aspects of words that children come to understand over the preschool to early school years. Cassar and Treiman (1997) studied children’s grasp of spelling constraints. They asked children to choose between nonwords containing consonant or vowel doublets. One choice placed the doublet in a location that was acceptable in English spelling, whereas in the alternative choice the doublet was in an illegal position. They found that as early as the first half of Grade 1, children showed evidence of knowledge about these spelling constraints.

Tolchinsky-Landsmann (2003) summarized much of this literature and pointed out that there is spontaneous development of children’s writing knowledge before the beginning of formal instruction. She suggested that the first stage of writing development is undifferentiated “because children produce similar writing patterns regardless of the word or sentence they were asked to write” (p. 96). However, during the second stage, children construct criteria for writing that is readable, usually in terms of number and variety of letters. During the third stage, children relate writing to sound, often at the level of syllables. Finally, during the fourth stage, they develop an understanding of grapheme to phoneme correspondence. Her point, then, was that children begin to construct a system of representation that determines their writing and their criteria for what is readable and that this knowledge development begins prior to formal instruction on writing or reading. Despite all of this work, there is still no clear chronology that would answer a common question from parents: “What should my child know?” at different ages during the preschool and early school years. We know of no systematic study charting a large array of visual/orthographic concepts from preschool to when children are readers with a relatively large sample for each age. Therefore, the main purpose of the current study was to systematically measure some aspects of early knowledge about print from 4 to 7 years of age. Our first interest was in tracing a developmental chronology for different concepts about print. Our second interest was in relating development of these concepts to children’s reading acquisition. Our final interest was in determining whether specific early home literacy activities were related to children’s understanding of these print concepts.

To explore the systematic development of print concepts from 4 to 7 years of age, each child completed our print knowledge tasks. There were two versions of the task: a word version and a sentence version. For each version, the child was presented a series of cards, each containing two items (two “words” or two “sentences”). Each card contained a correctly printed item and an incorrect alternative with a single print convention violation. The print violation types were chosen from the literature to ensure a broad sweep across this developmental landscape. The choices were empirically and intuitively guided rather than following from any specific theoretical view of the prerequisite skills that influence early reading. In our view, the theoretical positions provide broad categorizations of skills that do not inform well the nature of the task choices we had to make. Consequently, we attempted to sample print knowledge about figural and spatial conventions, lexical constraints, and accepted spelling conventions. Both single-item and multiple-word versions of the task were used to explore whether print concepts develop first for single words and only later generalize to sentences or whether the size of the print display is unrelated to understanding these writing conventions. In these tasks, the child was asked to choose the item on each card that “Mommy or the teacher would prefer to read,” that is, to choose which one was better for reading. The data on this two-alternative, forced-choice discrimination task were used to chart the developmental trajectories for different aspects of visual and orthographic knowledge.

Our second interest was in the relation between the development of print knowledge and early reading acquisition. There is evidence suggesting a relation between early writing and spelling knowledge and early reading ability. For example, Cunningham and Stanovich (1990) found that for Grade 3 children, orthographic knowledge (e.g., understanding acceptable letter combinations, understanding acceptable letter positions in a word, understanding homophonic discrimination) predicted significant variance in their word recognition abilities after variance due to phonological awareness, memory, and nonverbal intelligence had been removed. Cunningham, Perry, and Stanovich (2001) reported similar results for beginning readers in Grade 1. Also, Shatil, Share, and Levin (2000) examined the relation between kindergarten writing and Grade 1 literacy abilities in a large sample of 317 Israeli children. They found that children’s writing scores at the end of kindergarten predicted significant variance in decoding (7%), spelling (11%), and reading comprehension (8%) at the end of Grade 1.

Our print discrimination task is related to writing and spelling yet is not strictly either, so we examined the relation between our print task and reading ability using regression analyses. To do this, we tested each child’s phonological awareness and reading ability using standardized measures. Using regression analyses, we then examined the prediction of reading ability from our print concept measures. Because phonological awareness has been shown to be a strong predictor of reading ability, we measured this skill so that its influence could be accounted for first in examining the relation observed between reading skill and our measures of knowledge about print. This allowed us to assess unique variance accounted for by knowledge about print after the major predictor of reading skill was removed. We acknowledge that this is a conservative estimate because orthography and phonology develop in tandem and probably in a mutually supportive fashion. The regressions that take out phonological sensitivity first give the shared variance to phonology and, therefore, underestimate the total contribution of orthography. However, our interest is in showing that there is still unique variance, as well as the shared variance, attributable to visual/orthographic knowledge in determining reading skill.

To pursue our final interest in how home experience influences print knowledge, we developed a Home Literacy Experiences Questionnaire that asked about the literacy environment of the children. We were interested in the extent to which parents involved their children in various print-related activities and particularly in the importance of literacy activities that were child initiated or pursued independently, as opposed to the popular parent-initiated activity of shared book reading. Although the received wisdom is that reading to children will enhance their later reading acquisition (e.g., Ontario Ministry of Education, 2001), the research providing evidence for a direct connection between amount of storybook reading to children and their reading acquisition is contradictory. Scarborough and Dobrich (1994) concluded from a review of several decades of research that only a modest association exists between the frequency of parent–child reading and children’s subsequent written language development. In contrast, from a meta-analysis of studies of the association between parent–child reading and reading development, Bus, Van Ijzendoorn, and Pellegrini (1995) concluded that shared reading has a significant impact on raising later literacy skills. However, it must be noted that some of the studies in this meta-analysis confounded home teaching of reading skills with storybook reading. Moreover, Aram and Biron (2004) found that from 3 to 5 years of age, joint writing interventions were more effective than joint reading interventions in improving children’s performance on phonological awareness, word writing, orthographic awareness, and letter knowledge tasks. Thus, storybook reading may have less impact than expected on children’s early reading acquisition.

Recent studies have examined the influences of home experience. Sénéchal, LeFevre, Thomas, and Daley (1998) studied 168 kindergarten and Grade 1 children. They measured the children’s oral language skills (vocabulary, listening comprehension, and phonological awareness) and written language skills (print concepts, alphabet knowledge, spelling, and decoding). These measures of the children’s language skills were then related to information from parent questionnaires assessing the frequency of the children’s book experiences, to parental teaching of literacy, and to the extent of storybook reading assessed by a title and author recognition test by parents. Although storybook reading showed some prediction of the children’s oral language skills, only parent reports of how frequently they taught their children to read and print words, on a 5-point scale, was predictive of the children’s written language skills. In a similar vein, Evans, Shaw, and Bell (2000) found that storybook experience did not predict children’s written literacy ability but that activities with letters accounted for variance in the children’s language skills. In their 5-year longitudinal study, Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002) concluded, “The finding that exposure to storybooks failed to predict children’s emergent literacy skills suggests that informal literacy experiences may not be sufficient to foster children’s specific emergent literacy skills such as alphabet knowledge and early decoding” (p. 456). The need for maternal teaching was also echoed in the findings of Aram and Levin, 2001, Aram and Levin, 2004 with lower socioeconomic status children in Israel. They concluded that the quality of maternal mediation influenced literacy development (spelling, reading, comprehension, and linguistic knowledge) through the early school years.

All of this literature suggests that not all home experiences affect children’s literacy development in the same fashion. Interestingly, Meyer, Wardrop, Stahl, and Linn (1994) reported a negative relation between the amount of time kindergarten teachers spent reading to children and the children’s reading achievement. In Grade 1, there was no relation between frequency of teacher reading and child reading scores. Evidence from parent questionnaires indicated positive relations between the children’s active engagement with print (e.g., reading to the parents) and their reading achievement. The authors suggested that there might be an unfortunate trade-off between passive language experiences and more effective active print engagement in the classroom. In the current study, we examined the relations among different aspects of early literacy experiences and children’s understanding of the visual/orthographic aspects of print measured in this study. We focused particularly on the children’s active involvement in early literacy activities, in contrast to passive listening to parents’ story reading.

In summary, then, we measured children’s understanding of a broadly selected set of print concepts that spanned the domain from visual/graphic aspects of print to correct spelling. We looked at the development of this knowledge from 4 to 7 years of age, using a sample of 474 children selected to ensure a minimum of 50 children in each 4-month interval across this age span. The purpose was to trace systematic developmental trajectories in children’s understanding of aspects of the writing system. We then used regression analyses to examine the relation between this print development and early reading ability. Finally, we examined the home literacy activities as these related to knowledge of print concepts, with a focus on children’s active participation in the literacy activity versus their passive participation, particularly in listening to stories read by their parents. Our interest here was in what experiences best lead children to learn about the writing system that underlies the language they are learning to read.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, participated in the study. Three-year-olds were not included because a pilot study by Hessels and Levy (1999) indicated that this age group had little understanding of any of the concepts studied here. All but 14 participants were students in junior or senior kindergarten or Grade 1 classes of local schools in a midsized industrial city. The additional 14 children, who were available for testing during the summer months, consisted of 10

Results

The presentation of the results is organized to address the main questions of interest in this study. In the first section, the results of the print discrimination task are analyzed to show the developmental trends across the age range from 4 to 7 years. The second section presents the data on the standardized measures and the regression analyses that examined the influence of print knowledge on early reading skill. The final section outlines the results of the Home Literacy Experiences

Discussion

The study reported here addressed several questions. Are there systematic early developmental trajectories for children’s understanding of print concepts? Is this development related to reading acquisition? Are there home literacy experiences that relate to this development? The data show clear development of print concepts from 48 to 83 months of age. This development begins with an understanding of figural and spatial aspects of writing (word shape). Next, or in conjunction with the first

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by operating grants to Mary Ann Evans and Betty Ann Levy from the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network as well as by an operating grant to Levy from the Social and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The pilot work that developed an early version of the visual/orthographic test (Hessels & Levy, 1999) was supported by an operating grant to Levy from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank Bryan Lee, Vincenz Lombardo, and

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