Janet Fellowes
Edith Cowan University
Early Childhood
Language and Literacy
Development
Child Development
The process of growth from Infancy – early
childhood –middle childhood – adolescence
Orderly transition through stages
There are regularities and continuities but there is
always individual difference
Occurs across many dimensions
• Physical Development
• Cognitive Development
• Language and Literacy Development
• Personal and Emotional Development
• Social and Moral Development
Spurred by internal factors and shaped by external
factors
Literacy Developmental
• Emergent
• Early
• Fluent
• Children progress through the stages of
literacy learning in different ways and at
different tempos
• Individual children take a variety of routes
to reading and writing competency
• Children can move forward in some areas of
literacy learning at different times and at
different rates than in other areas of
learning
• Learning all the aspects of reading and
writing does not happen evenly
• Within each stage their will be learners at
different places of development.
Oral Language Development
• Comprehensive oral language
development is fundamental to reading
and writing development
• Phonology (speech sounds)
• Morphology (word formation)
• Syntax (sentence formation)
• Semantics (word and sentence meaning)
• Prosody Intonation and rhythm of
speech)
• Pragmatics (effective and functional
use of oral language)
Development of Phonological
Awareness
• Phonemic Awareness is an important
to determining the success of
learning to read and write.
• Hear words in a sentence
• Hear rhymes
• Onset rhyme (separate starting
letter from the rhyming part)
• Hear syllables in words
• Phonemic awareness
Story and expository
text comprehension
• Understanding of the narrative
structure of a text.
• Understanding of various structures
of expository texts
-predict and expectations for making
meaning
The alphabetic principle
• The knowledge that writing is oral
language written down
• The knowledge that we use a symbol
or symbols to represent sounds
within a word
The Emergent Literacy Stage
Developmentally Appropriate Practice
• Emergent literacy experiences are essential for a
child to experience maximum success in gaining
literacy skills and competency in early primary
grades.
• Emphasises real life situations and social
experiences for the development of literacy.
• Emphasises problem solving rather than direct
instruction of sets of skills.
• Literacy learning activities are embedded
purposefully within content areas such as
art, music, play, social studies and science –
to ensure there is meaning involved.
• Capitalises on children’s strengths and
compensates for their weaknesses.
• Child centred.
• Builds children’s literacy knowledge and
understandings and develops some basic
skills and processes.
.
• Oral language is fundamental to a sound pre-
primary literacy program as it is a
predecessor to reading and writing.
The Emergent Literacy Stage
Important Kindergarten and
Pre-Primary Experiences
• Imaginative / Dramatic Play – advances cognitive
development; children develop more sophisticated
language skills; opportunity to role play / engage
in reading and writing “role play” behaviour in a
real context
• Modelling / Demonstrating of reading and writing
behaviours
• Sharing and discussing books
• Listening to Repeated Book Readings
• A print rich environment
• Language games and rhymes
• Phonological games and rhymes
• Opportunities for talk and listening
• Children given opportunity to experiment
with writing – this can sometimes be drawing
• Extend vocabulary and syntax (sentence
structures)
• Shared writing (children tell a story –
teacher writes it down)
• Shared Reading
• - Interactive story reading)
• Language Experience
• Modeled writing
• Chart class made stories , songs, rhymes
• Create books recounting excursions
• Words and labels around the room
• Writing centre
• The mailbox
• Story centre – felt boards, puppets…
• Library corner
Oral Language
(receptive and expressive)
• Listening with attention and for different purpose
(e.g. to follow directions, to engage in
conversation)
• Speaking for different purpose and to different
audiences
• Use sentences of increasing length and
grammatical complexity
• Speech production / pronunciation of individual
sounds / words
• Vocabulary (word meaning – comprehend and use
new words)
Reading and Writing
• Understand the different genre structures
• Understand the social function of reading and
writing
• Motivation toward reading – interested in books,
enjoys listening to them and discussing them.
• Confidence to attempt to read and write
• Concepts about print
• Knowledge of alphabet
•
• Sound – letter correspondence
• Punctuation, capitalization and other
conventions
• Eye-hand coordination
• Fine motor skills
• Comprehension
• Visual and auditory memory
• Cognitive reasoning
• Semantic memory
• Ability to note detail
• Imaginative skills
• Knowledge of literary forms
• Connects information in books to real
life