Emergent Literacy: English Learners

Beginning to Write and read

READING AND WRITING IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION

SEMESTER 2021-1
E. NORA PAMPLON IRIGOYEN
1. What are the “emergent literacy” and “reading readiness” perspectives, and how do
they influence early literacy instruction?
2. How can teachers and parents work together to enhance home-school relationships
and promote early literacy development?
3. How can you organize your classroom to maximize early literacy development for all
students?
4. What classroom strategies can you use to provide a firm foundation for English
leaners’ early literacy development.
5. How can you assess early literacy development?
 Reading Readiness vs Emergent Literacy
Reading Readiness (1900-1950+)
Underlying theory: Maturation (Skinner, Piaget)
Standardized testing
Premise: Children are not ready to start r/w until they have
mastered certain auditory, psychomotor, visual, and linguistic
sub-skills which are usually acquired by age 6.6
Where: at school: 1st. Grade. Kindergarten was for
socialization, subskills & oral language NOT Literacy.
Who: By educators (experts) with minimal home environment
How: Skills approach phonics, basal readers
View of Writing: Concentrate on proper letter formation at
first, then work with ‘composing’.
View of Orality: Oral language development precedes the
development of literacy.
Emergent Literacy (1960’s to date)
Underlying theory: Whole Language (M. Clay 1975, New Zealand;
Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982 Latin America)
Premise: Children begin to construct knowledge about the forms and
functions of print from the moment they are first exposed to reading
and writing and before formal schooling.
Where: At home, in the community through exposure to written/oral
language.
Who: By family members, caregivers, other readers and writers
How: By doing what they saw “significant others” do;
comprehensible input; social interaction and approximations to
conventional reading and writing.
View of Writing: Compose in unconventional manners
View of Orality: It is parallel to literacy.
 Development of Alphabet Writing: Connecting
Symbols and Sounds

SIX Categories (Sulzby, 1985)

1. Writing via drawing

2. Writing via scribbling
3. Writing via letter-like forms
4. Writing via reproducing well-learned units or letter strings.
5. Writing via invented spelling.
6. Writing via conventional spelling

When children create invented spelling, they are demonstrating advanced emergent literacy.
A Continuum of Developmental Scripting Strategies
(Peregoy & Boyle, 1990)
 Print Concepts that Emerge in Emergent
Literacy
1. Print carries meaning. It conveys a message.
2. Spoken words can be written down and preserved.
3. Written words can be spoken, that is read out loud.
4. In English, words are read from left to right, top to bottom.
5. In English and other languages that use alphabets, the speech stream can be divided into
sounds, and these sound are represented by letters or groups of letters. Phonemic awareness
6. The speech stream has a linear sequence in time that corresponds to written language’s linear
sequence on the page.
7. Sound/symbol correspondences are consistent, but in English there are many exceptions.
The importance of Family Interactions: Early
Literacy (Stage 0)
 Talk whenever and wherever you can. Seize every moment to engage in conversation.
 Get close to children to engage them with what you say
 Really listen by giving full attention. Look them in the eye and get down to their level.
 Ask open-ended questions to solicit more complex answers than simply “yes” or “no”.
 Tell everyday stories about what happened at home, at work, funny things about growing up, and so on.
 Tell children what the need to do and then explain why they should do it.
 Sing songs and read nursery rhymes.
 Use rich vocabulary (judiciously) to expose children to new words.
 Provide prompts that promote oral language such as puppets or microphones.
 Encourage back and forth discourse and turn taking.
 Stage 0 and Stage 1

 Modeling a variety of day-to-day literacy uses

 Answering children’s questions about print and its meanings
 Providing children with literacy materials, including paper, pencils, books and magazines
that allow them to play with reading and writing. (Literacy Centers)
 Telling stories and reading aloud to children.
 Classroom Strategies to Promote Early Literacy (p. 176-)

EARLY LITERACY GOALS:

1. Awareness and appreciation of the variety of purposes of reading and writing
serve in everyday life.
2. Understanding of relationships between print and oral language, including the
alphabetic principle
3. Knowledge of print conventions, such as left to right, top to bottom sequencing.
4. Knowledge of specific sound/symbol correspondences, o phonics.
5. Ability to recognize a growing number of sight words.
 Creating a Literacy-Rich Classroom Environment
 Clear, meaningful, and interesting contexts provide
settings in which new language is understandable, and
familiar language becomes more memorable and useful.
 Context creates an environment that allows the brain
to identify patterns and make connections, and to link
new information to existing knowledge for effective
storage and recall.
 Literacy Centers and Props allow students to play with
language.
 Literacy Rich Environment: Books, Books, Books

 Individually written, child  Alphabet books

made books  Recipe books
 Published trade books  Photo-album books
 Children’s journals  Collection of songs or poems
 Poetry books children have made or learned
 Holiday books at school
 Big Books
 Dictionaries and encyclopedias
Trade Books
Alphabet Books Poetry Books
 Classroom Early Literacy Instructional Strategies

 Morning Message – to preview the day or event/activity

(video)
 Classroom rules and procedures-large chart of rules for
daily duties & behavior established together at the beginning of
the year
 Wall dictionary- awareness of alphabet & sound/symbol
correspondences
 Read Aloud to children from Day 1; model reading for
enjoyment, the reading process, literary notions about plot &
characters.
 The Hungry Caterpillar
 Frog and toad are friends
 Morning Message

A large group, teacher directed activity which, when used daily introduces and reinforces the basic skills necessary
for vocabulary development, oral language, reading and writing.
STEPS
 Determine a daily 20 minute period for this activity.
 Print message on board, or chart paper
 Read message line by line asking students to repeat after you.
 Elicit volunteers to read all or parts of message.
 Students, in turn, identify and mark specific language elements you want to cover or practice.
 Students punctuate the last line of the message.

This creates a risk free environment where children can make errors and as a whole group the message is created.
Some ideas: Hello! Today is … Who is wearing ?... Did you know that…? Would you like to,,,
Final Assignment for Emergent Literacy Topic

 Develop an instructional strategy (lesson plan with activities and

materials) to promote the emergent literacy goals covered in
this part of the course.
 You will present / demonstrate the activity and materials in
class, as well as explain the underlying early literacy concepts.
You can do it live in class or record yourself.
 A written description and rationale will also be handed in.
 Language Experience Approach-Shared writing
and reading based on student dictation of stories &
dialogue journals
 Activity to highlight sight word vocabulary
development-frequently occurring words after
book reading
 Bulletin board to support literacy from a Phonics
or Whole language Perspective.
Phonics Bulletin Board
Language Experience Approach
Whole language: FOCUS WALLS
 Assessment

 Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize that speech is made up of sentences

that can be broken into sentences or phrases, sentences that can be divided into words,
and words that can be further divided into smaller units of sound, such as syllables,
onsets, and rimes, and individual sounds or phonemes (Johnson & Roseman, 2003).
 Phonemic awareness, the final stage in phonological awareness, is the ability to
recognize that a spoken word consists of a sequence of individual sounds or phonemes, to
distinguish between different phonemes, and to manipulate phonemes in words to change
their meaning ( Yopp, 1992; Yopp & Yopp, 2000b).
How do we assess?

 Auditory discrimination Example: short and long vowel sounds

 Phoneme blending, segmentation and awareness
 Emergent Text Concepts assessment
 Reading attitude Surveys

 Examples