Emerging Literacy: Young Children Learn to Read and Write

Contributors to this award-winning book share practical ideas for day-care workers, classroom teachers, and curriculum specialists. Special illustrated format features "Ideas You Can Use" with 2- to 8-year-olds in classrooms from prekindergarten through second grade.

Chapter 1: Emergent Literacy: New Perspectives

In December, when he was five, Esteban presented to his parents the piece of paper shown below. He had, as he told them, listed what he wanted for Christmas. As further insurance that nothing would go wrong in obtaining his presents, Esteban also numbered the items on the list and indicated who was responsible for getting what, first by writing "Mommy" or "Daddy" beside each item and also by drawing pictures of Mom and Dad atop the two columns of toys. This child was leaving nothing to chance.

From the time Jennifer was a year old, she was read to regularly by her mother. At three years, three months of age, Jennifer was visited by a researcher, who asked her to read Are You My Mother? (Eastman, 1967), a book that had been read to her many times. In an enthusiastic manner and with a reading intonation, she read the entire book.

From Aaron, age fourteen months, we have data of a different sort. Aaron's mother made audio tape recordings of his vocalizations in a variety of activities. The tape recordings contain babbling, not words or sentences. But even in Aaron's babbling, one hears distinctive differences in intonation patterns between occasions when he is turning the pages of a book and those when there is no book present.

During the past decade or so, an intense interest has arisen in the early literacy behaviors of typical children like Esteban, Jennifer, and Aaron. When we observe children who have grown up with reading and writing around them, we see that they know about literacy and exhibit literate behaviors. Results of many studies of children from birth to six years of age have caused teachers and researchers to change some of their ideas about young children's reading and writing development from what was commonly believed as recently as the 1970s. A new perspective on early reading and writing has developed; it has come to be known as emergent literacy. In this chapter, we examine the concept of emergent literacy for the new insights it provides on young children's literacy learning. We explore what young children do with literacy, what they know about reading and writing, and how they develop literacy knowledge and literate practices. We conclude the chapter by considering what an emergent literacy perspective implies for how young children should be taught in day care, preschool, or school classrooms.