Early literacy: Knowledge, concepts and skills needed by the child

Knowledge about the uses of print: A child from a family of literate background has already some idea about the uses of print. When the parents make a list of grocery items on a sheet of paper and read out for the store keeper it is obvious that the child gets some vague idea that activity of writing down served as a mnemonic. When it handles currency to buy toffees or ice creams it knows that print on the currency helps it distinguish between its lower and higher worth. The print on the bat that she uses to play cricket and on the toy cars helps the child to distinguish and discriminate among those of herself and her friends. The name of the child written on its birthday cake and greeting cards that it receives with printed wishes all convey to the child some sense of the uses of print. A child with such a sense of the purpose of print adapts to the print rich world of reading and writing easily. The sense of purpose of the print holds some meaning to its activities of reading and writing. It will be very effective for early literacy if the child is consciously exposed to the uses of print.

Narrative skills: Children with narrative skills in oral language find it easier to adapt themselves to the demands of written language. Written language is expressive in nature. It is also different from the language used during conversation. Written language conveys the meaning beyond time and context. When a child is narrating, he or she is trying to do the same, conveying the meaning of events that might have happened in the past or that are going to happen in the future. The child may also be describing something that is no more in front of it. When the child starts experiencing the reading of print material it easily realizes that someone is narrating the story to her just like she does to her parents, siblings and friends. So it is very important to encourage the child to speak up. Adults paying attention to child’s narration apart from just engaging the child in conversation help develop skills that aid the child further in the early literacy development.

Motor skills: Development of fine motor skills in children helps them in early literacy effort. Reading and writing demand visual tracking, ability to make refined movements of fingers, hand-eye coordination and tongue movements. Children should be encouraged perform tasks like coloring the image with boundary lines, solving maze by tracing lines, dressing themselves, tying shoe laces, buttoning etc to improve these skills. Singing rhymes aloud helps with refining the tongue movements. Children’s environment should be rich with play materials and tools that demand fine motor skills like modelling clay, jigsaw puzzles, beads and threads, craft paper etc. A child who has developed fine motor skills does not easily get frustrated when it has to use tools like piece of chalk or pencil to write. Visual tracking too becomes easy and less tiring while reading and writing.

The child should also get skilled in listening and paying attention when others are speaking or narrating. Children who have been told stories are getting their minds trained to pay attention to others’ words for a longer time than they would usually do in conversation. This helps the child to easily track and comprehend when it is being read something.

Phonological awareness: Children who have developed the phonological awareness -- that is, the knowledge that the spoken word is made up of smaller sounds and that each alphabet corresponds to a particular sound -- become proficient in reading and writing. The familiarity of the child with a rich variety of spoken words aids in the development of phonological awareness. Children who had lots of opportunity to interact with adults and other children will be more familiar with large number of spoken words when compared to children who had less interaction. With increasing interaction children learn to make distinctions between spoken words both on the basis of meaning and also the basis of sounds. This in turn helps them in reading comprehension. Phonological awareness further increases the rate of acquisition of vocabulary in the children. Thus a strong base of oral language skills helps children to quickly acquire the ability to read and write.

Knowledge of letters: The knowledge of the letters of the alphabet and the ability to distinguish letters based on their visual form is an essential factor in determining the children’s ability to read and write. Children should be familiar with the naming of the letters which further aids them in remembering the sounds associated with each letter. The variety of visual forms of letters like upper case, lower case, written and printed form poses a real challenge to the child in recognizing a particular letter. There has to be sustained effort in the form of shared reading and writing to expose the child to the complexity of the visual forms of the letters. Shared adult-child writing activities will have a major influence in child acquiring the letter knowledge rather than just shared reading.

Conventions of print: Conceptual understanding of the conventions of print is one of the important aspects that help children to become proficient in early literacy. Things as simple as knowing how the book has to be held, recognizing the front cover of the book, and knowing the direction and sequence in which the words and sentences have to be read or written and the direction in which the pages has to be turned all play an important role in determining the proficiency of the child in early literacy. Not all these aspects are learnt by children themselves. Children have to be consciously trained in these aspects over the time. Adults engaging in shared reading and writing with children help strengthen these behaviors. The behaviors like children moving their finger down the words and sentences, pausing for a moment at the end of each sentence and recognizing the punctuation marks while reading are all good signs of developing reading habits. The ability to differentiate words like ‘saw’ and ‘was’, ‘on’ and ‘no’, ‘read’ and ‘dear’ etc shows the development of healthy reading habits. In the case of English, the child being able to distinguish between upper case and lower case letters also matters a lot. While writing, a child should be aware of the aspects like leaving space after writing each word, writing in short paragraphs, using an upper case letter at the start of each sentence and ending each sentence with a period. Children achieve familiarity with the rules of writing during their shared reading with adults but the conceptual understanding of rules has to be strengthened by making them realize the meaning and context in which they are used. Conscious efforts through repeated demonstration of the rules rather than outright discussion with the children help them become proficient in writing.