MD. 96 49p. - ERICDOCUMENT RESUME ED 392 019 CS 012 352 AUTHOR Sonnenschein, Susan; And Others TITLE Strands of Emergent Literacy and Their Antecedents in the Home: Urban Preschoolers

DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 392 019 CS 012 352

AUTHOR Sonnenschein, Susan; And OthersTITLE Strands of Emergent Literacy and Their Antecedents in

the Home: Urban Preschoolers' Early Literacy .

Development. Reading Research Report No. 48.

INSTITUTION National Reading Research Center, Athens, GA.;National Reading Research Center, College Park,MD.

SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED),Washington, DC.

PUB DATE 96

CONTRACT 117A20007NOTE 49p.

PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS *Emergent Literacy; *Family Environment; *Family

Influence; Longitudinal Studies; Parent Attitudes;*Preschool Children; Preschool Education; ReadingResearch; Sociocultural Patterns; *SocioeconomicInfluences; Urban Education

IDENTIFIERS Maryland (Baltimore); Phonological Awareness; PrintAwareness

ABSTRACTThis report considers preschool children's early

literacy-related competencies. The data are from the first 2 years ofthe Early Childhood Project, a longitudinal investigation followingpreschool children from different sociocultural groups in Baltimore,Maryland, through their transition irto the early years of elementaryschool. Children were tested in 14 early literacy-reIatedcompetencies during the spring of both their pre-kindergarten andkindergarten years. The tasks measured aspects of an Orientationtowards Print, Phonological Awareness, or Narrative Competence. Someof the tasks used were standard reading readiness measures. A secondseries of analyses considered the relation between homepractices/experiences and emergent literacy development. Childrenwero tested to see whether being brought up in a home predominantlyoriented toward the view that literacy is a source of entertainmentis more or less likely to develop an Orientation towards Print,Phonological Awareness, of Narrative Competence than a child beingbrought up in a home where literacy is more typically viewed as a setof skills to be acquired. These different approaches to literacy werederived from parents' answers to questions about how to help fosterreading as well as a review of the children's home activities. Takingan approach that literacy is a source of entertainment was positivelyrelated to an orientation toward print as well as aspects ofnarrative competence and phonological awareness. In general, takingthe approach that literacy is a set of skills to be learned waseither negatively related or not significantly related to the threestrands. (Contains 51 references and 15 tables of data.)

(Author/RS)

Strands of Emergent Literacyand TheirAntecedents in the Home:Urban Preschoolers EarlyLiteracy Development

Susan SonnenscheinLinda BakerRobert SerpellDeborah ScherSylvia Fernandez-FeinKimberly A. MunstermanDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONOffice of E0ocationa, flessaics and Improvement

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATIONCENTER (ERIC)

V/This document has been reproduced asreceived from the person or organizationoriginating it

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Points of view or opinions stated in thisdocument do not necessarily representofficial OERI position or policy

NationalReading ResearchCenter

READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 48

Winter 1996

2 BEST COPY AVAILABLE

NRRCNational Reading Research Center

Strands of Emergent Literacyand their Antecedents in the Home:

Urban Preschoolers' Early Literacy Development

Susan SonnenscheinLinda Baker

Robert SerpellDeborah Scher

Sylvia Fernandez-FeinKimberly A. MunstermanDepartment of Psychology

University of Maryland Baltimore County

READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 48Winter 1996

The work reported herein is a National Reading Research Project of the University of Georgiaand University of Maryland. It was supported under the Educational Research andDevelopment Centers Program (PR/AWARD NO. 117A20007) as administered by the Officeof Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The findings andopinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the NationalReading Research Center, tne Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the U.S.Department of Education.

NRRC NationalReading ResearchCenter

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About the National Reading Research Center

The National Reading Research Center (NRRC) isfunded by the Office of Educational Research andImprovement of the U.S. Department of Education toconduct research on reading and reading instruction.The NRRC is operated by a consortium of the Universi-ty of Georgia and the University of Maryland CollegePark in collaboration with researchers at several institu-tions nationwide.

The NRRC's mission is to discover and documentthose conditions in homes, schools, and communitiesthat encourage children to become skilled, enthusiastic,lifelong readers. NRRC researchers are committed toadvancing the development of instructional programssensitive to the cognitive, sociocultural, and motiva-tional factors that affect children's success in reading.NRRC researchers from a variety of disciplines conductstudies with teachers and students from widely diversecultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in pre-kinder-garten through grade 12 classrooms. Research projectsdeal with the influence of family and family-schoolinteractions on the development of literacy; the interac-tion of sociocultural factors and motivation to read; theimpact of literature-based reading programs on readingachievement; the effects of reading strategies instructionon comprehension and critical thinking in literature,science, and history; the influence of innovative groupparticipation structures on motivation and learning; thepotential of computer technology to enhance literacy;and the development of methods and standards foralternative literacy assessments.

The NRRC is further committed to the participationof teachers as full partners in its research. A betterunderstanding of how teachers view the development ofliteracy, how they use knowledge from research, andhow they approach change in the classroom is crucial toimproving instruction. To further this understanding,the NRRC conducts school-based research in whichteachers explore their own philosophical and pedagogi-cal orientations and trace their professional growth.

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Sacramento

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Betty ShockleyFowler Drive Elementary School

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About the Authors

Susan Sonnenschein is an Associate Professor inthe Applied Development Psychology Program atthe University of Maryland Baltimore County. Shehas conducted research in children's languagedevelopment. She also has explored how parentalbeliefs and practices affect children's cognitivedevelopment. She is currently one of the principalinvestigators, along with Linda Baker and RobertSerpell, in the Early Childhood Project, a longitu-dinal project investigating the development ofliteracy for children from different socioculturalbackgrounds. Dr. Sonnenschein and her co-authorsmay be contacted at the Department of Psychology,University of Maryland Baltimore County, 5401Wilkens Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21228-5398.

Linda Baker is a Professor of Psychology at theUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County and aprincipal investigator at the National ReadingResearch Center. She received her Ph.D. fromRutgers University. Her current research focuseson the social and cultural contexts of children'searly literacy development. She is also interested inthe development of metacognition and compre-hension monitoring.

Robert Serpell is Director of the doctoralprogram in Applied Developmental Psychology atthe University of Maryland Baltimore County.Born and raised in England, he received hisPh.D. in Experimental Psychology from theUniversity of Sussex. Dr. Serpell worked at the

University of Zambia from 1965 to 1989, and is anaturalized citizen of Zambia. His research hasfocused on socio-cultural factors in cognitivedevelopment and childhood disabilities. His publi-cations include Culture's influence on behaviour(London: Methuen, 1976) and The significance ofschooling (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Deborah Scher is a graduate student in the AppliedDevelopmental Psychology doctoral program at theUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County. She isinterested in children's emergent literacy. Currentlyshe is investigating first graders' motivations andattitudes toward reading.

Sylvia Fernandez-Fein is a graduate student inthe Applied Developmental Psychology doctoralprogram at the University of Maryland BaltimoreCounty. She is interested in educational issues,particularly reading and motivation. She is currentlyinvestigating achievement motivation in adoles-cents.

Kimberly A. Munsterman is a graduate student inthe Applied Developmental Psycl.ology doctoralprogram at the University of Maryland BaltimoreCounty. She is currently doing research with theEarly Childhood Project, examining the home andschool contexts of children's early literacy develop-ment. Her master's thesis concerns the contribu-tions of home storybook reading to children's earlyreading skills and motivation.

Li

National Reading Research CenterUniversities of Georgia and MarylandReading Research Report No. 48Winter 1996

Stands of Emergent Literacyand their Antecedents in the Home:

Urban Preschoolers' Early Literacy Development

Susan Sonnenschein

Linda BakerRobert SerpellDeborah Scher

Sylvia Fernandez-FeinKimberly A. MunstermanDepartment of Psychology

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Abstract. This report considers preschool chil-dren's early literacy-related competencies. The dataare from the first 2 years of the Early ChildhoodProject, a longitudinal investigation followingpreschool children from different socioculturalgroups in Baltimore through their transition into theearly years of elementary school. A general hypoth-esis guiding our research is that children fromdifferent sociocultural groups may have differenthome experiences because of characteristics of theirniche (such as, parental beliefs about child develop-ment, available material resources, and generalactivity patterns of the family) that can lead todifferences in subsequent reading development.

Children in our project were tested on 14 earlyliteracy-related competencies during the spring ofboth their pre-kindergarten and kindergarten years.The tasks measured aspects of an OrientationTowards Print, Phonological Awareness, or Narra-tive Competence. Some of the tasks used were fairly

1

standard reading readiness measures, such as letternaming. Other tasks were more directly tailored tothe individual child's home-based experiences,such as identifying printed materials commonly usedat home.

In this report, we considered the nature of thepreschool children's early literacy-related compe-tencies. More specifically, we considered children'sskills in pre-kindergarten and changes between pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. A second series ofanalyses considered the relation between homepractices/experiences and emergent literacy devel-opment. We tested whether a child being brought upin a home predominantly oriented toward the viewthat literacy is a source of entertainment is more orless likely to develop an Orientation Towards Print,Phonological Awareness, or Narrative Competencethan a child being brought up in a home whereliteracy is more typically viewed as a set of skills to

be acquired. These two different approaches to

2 Sonnenschein et al.

literacy were derived from parents' answers toquestions about how to help foster reading as wellas our review of the children's home activitiesreported by the parents. Taking an approach thatliteracy is a source of entertainment was positivelyrelated to an orientation toward print as well asaspects of narrative competence and phonologicalawareness. In general, taldng the approach thatliteracy is a set of skills to be learned was eithernegatively related or no' significantly related to thethree strands.

This report describes findings from the first2 years of an ongoing, longitudinal study ofpreschool children's emerging literacy compe-tencies. The data represent one aspect of theEarly Childhood Project, an exploration of thecontexts in which children from various socio-cultural groups growing up in Baltimore expe-rience lieracy as they make the transition frompre-kindergarten through the early years ofelementary schooling. Our central concern inthis project is how the complex overlappingcontexts of home and school interact to facili-tate or impede reading development. The focalchildren in the project live in Baltimore neigh-borhoods with four contrasting types of demo-graphic profiles: (1) low income, predomi-nantly African-American families; (2) lowincome. predominantly European-Americanfamilies; (3) a mix of African-American andEuropean-American, low-income families; and(4) a mix of African-American and European-American, middle-income families.

We are conducting a 5-year, longitudinalstudy of this sample using a combination ofqualitative and quantitative measures. Ourresearch design includes an ecological inven-tory of socialization resources and activities,based on observations, diaries, and interviews

in both the home and the school; an account ofsocialization e thnotlzeories , based on structuredinterviews about the beliefs, values, and prac-tices of the parents and teachers responsible forstructuring those environments; an account ofco-constructive processes through which chil-dren appropriate the cultural resources ofliteracy, based on observations and video-recordings of the child's interaction with sib-lings and adult caregivers at home and withpeers and teachers at school; and periodicassessment of individual children's emergingliteracy competencies, based on structuredelicitation of behaviors representative of theo-retically important cognitive functions, withsome tasks individually tailored to the child'sown home-based experiences.

This report focuses on the children's emer-ging literacy competencies and changes in thenature of those competencies between pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. Data are pre-sented from year one of the project when thechildren were in pre-kindergarten and fromyear two when they were in kindergarten.There is a growing body of research indicatingthat all young children growing up in an indus-trialized society like the United States experi-ence many, varied forms of literacy-relatedactivities (Morrow, 1983; Sonnenschein,Brody, & Munsterman, 1995, Sul zby & Teale,1991). Nevertheless, children from differentsociocultural groups may have different liter-acy-related experiences (Baker, Sonnenschein,Serpell, Fernandez-Fein, & Scher, 1994;

Heath, 1983; Sonnenschein et al., 1995; Teale,1986). Systematic differences in experiencesmay result in systematic differences in chil-dren's literacy knowledge as they enter school.

NATIONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER, READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 48

Strands of Emergent Literacy 3

In this project, we are particularly interested indocumenting the developmental pathways fordifferent groups of children. We hope thus tocontribute to an understanding of the interfacebetween children's emerging literacy skills andtheir school experiences. During the first 2years of our project, we collected measuresdocumenting pre-kindergarten and kindergartenchildren's knowledge of and about literacy.Although we obviously expect and are inter-ested in developmental improvement over theyears, we wish to avoid the orientation, ini-tially criticized by Goodman (1979), thatcharacterizes young children as knowing noth-ing about literacy. Rather than limiting ourfocus to the deficiencies exhibited by youngchildren, our preference is to consider skills thechildren do have and how these skills develop.

The research questions addressed here stemfrom our general hypothesis that the particularactivities preschool-age children engage in athome are linked both (backward) to culturallyorganized characteristics of the niche (ethno-theories of caregiving and material resourcesdesigned to enable literate practices [such ashaving books, newspapers, drawing materials],and recurrent family activity patterns [takingthe child to the supermarket or library]) and(forward) to the rate and/or sequence in whichvarious component competencies relevant toliteracy emerge in the course of child develop-ment. Our previous research report (Baker etal. , 1994) focused on the recurrent familyactivity patterns experienced by the children inour study, revealing some sociocultural differ-ences. In this report, we consider the nature ofthe children's emerging literacy-related compe-tencies over a 1-year period. Which skills do

the children already display in pre-kindergar-ten, which do they develop over the next year,and what does the nature of their errors tell usabout the children's construction of literacy?We focus on three broad domains of experi-ence relevant for the development of readingabilities: phonological awareness, narrativecompetence, and an orientation toward print.We then consider how development of theseearly literacy competencies relate to certainhome-based practices and parental beliefs abouthow literacy is acquired.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework that underliesour conceptualizations is presented in detail ina previous report (Baker et al., 1994). It can besummarized as follows:

1. Human development occurs in a context ofoverlapping and interdependent systems ofsocial and cultural organization (Bronfen-brenner, 1979).

2. Each child develops within an eco-culturalniche structured by physical and socialsettings, customs of child rearing, andimplicit theories of caregivers (Gallimore &Goldenberg, 1993; Goodnow & Collins,1990; Serpell, 1993a, 1993b; Super &Harkness, 1986).

3. Most everyday cognitive activities aresocially situated and socially distributed(Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989;Wertsch, Tulviste, & Hagstrom, 1993).


Sonnenschein et al.

4. Cognitive development occurs through aform of socio-historically embedded ap-prenticeship (Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky,1978).

5. When children are raised in a literate soci-ety, they are exposed from infancy onwardto cultural practices that provide opportuni-ties for learning about reading and writing(Baker et al., 1994; Baker, Serpell, &Sonnenscheiri, 1995; Morrow, 1989; Son-nenschein et al., 1995; Sulzby & Tea le,1991; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988).

The broad hypotheses guiding the projectare as follows: (a) distinctive patterns of social-ization practices can be identified in the homeenvironments of children being raised as mem-bers of different sociocultural groups; (b) thosedistinctive patterns reflect different implicittheories of child development and parentalresponsibility among the children's primarycaregivers; and (c) a major source of variationin the patterns of school performance by chil-dren of different sociocultural groups is thevariable degree to which the socializationpractices and associated parental beliefs of theirhome environment match the developmentarpathway defined by the curriculum of theirelementary schools.

As we have discussed in other writings(Baker et al., 1994), we view the context ofhuman development as a complex of incom-pletely overlapping, partly independent systemsof social and cultural organization (Bronfen-brenner, 1979). Within this complex, the devel-opment of each child is viewed as embedded

within an ecocultural niche, characterized by aparticular constellation of material resources,recurrent activities, and modes of co-constructiveparticipation in these activities, informed by theimplicit theories of child development andsocialization held by their principal caregivers(Super & Harkness, 1986). These caregiver"ethnotheories" are an important resource forintersubjective understanding among the parents,other caregivers and children in a given subcul-tural group, as they provide the frameworkwithin which the responsibility and effectivenessof individual acts are evaluated in the course ofeveryday life. Literacy is viewed in our analysisas a cultural practice that specifies and regulatesparticular recurrent forms of activity, partic-ipation in which requires particular informationprocessing skills, contextual knowledge, andstrategies for matching the skills deployed to thecontext (Scribner & Cole, 1981).

Our theoretical framework thus draws uponthe work and methodologies of various disci-plines, and our approach to data analysis usesboth qualitative and quantitative techniques. Weare interested in sociocultural commonalities anddifferences among groups of children, and ourdesign in the Early Childhood Project allows usto test such issues. However, in this report wefocus primarily on changes with age. The analy-ses addressing sociocultural differences arelimited to differences as a function of familyincome.

Children's Early Literacy Competencies

In this section, we discuss in more detailthe two general research issues addressed inthis report.


Strands of Emergent Literacy

Developmental Competencies and ChangesDuring Preschool

Psychologists, influenced in part by cross-cultural studies of human development, haveacknowledged the importance of studyingbehavior within different contexts because theskills a child displays in one situation maydiffer from those displayed in another (Rogoff& Morelli, 1989; Serpell, 1976, 1979). Thatis, although a child might not demonstratecertain skills when he or she is observed in thelaboratory, he or she may demonstrate themwhen observed within the familiar structure ofthe home. These findings have influenced thestudy of early reading, where there has been achange in emphasis from reading readiness toan emphasis on children's appropriation ofliteracy (Sulzby & Tea le, 1991). This changingconceptualization is indicated by the coining ofthe term emergent literacy, reflecting thenotion that children begin to appropriate abroad base of literate knowledge even beforeformal schooling begins. "An emergent literacyperspective ascribes legitimacy to the earliestliteracy concepts and behaviors of children andto the varieties of social contexts in whichchildren are becoming literate" (Sulzby &Tea le, 1991, p. 728).

Our own view of the appropriation ofliteracy represents an attempt to understand thechild's emerging skills as he or she observesand interacts with more knowledgeable othersboth at home and at school. Wells (1986)identified a number of ways in which children'shome experiences in the preschool years fosterlanguage and later literacy skills. In discussinghow children learn language, he emphasized

that the talk that young children engage in isnot an end in itself but is goal-directed toachieve other purposes (e.g., communicatingneeds and desires). Similarly, we believe thatmuch of the preschool child's learning aboutliteracy at home may come about as the childengages in literate activities for purposes otherthan explicit learning (e.g., looking at twoboxes of cereal and deciding which to take).

The concept of guided participation mayprovide an explanation for the processesthrough w'lich literacy is fostered at home. AsRogoff (1990) discusses, a child and a morecompetent adult or sibling engage in a collabo-rative process whereby the more competentperson provides a supportive structure andfacilitates the child's appropriation of newskills.

From our reading, the literature suggeststhe existence of three strands of competencerelevant for early literacy development: Phono-logical Awareness, Narrative Competence, andOrientation Toward Print. We have used thesethree strands to organize our presentation ofdata.

Phonological Awareness. There is a largebody of literature documenting a relationbetween phonological awareness as measuredby tests of rhyme and alliteration and of read-ing development (Bryant, Bradley, MacLean,& Crossland, 1989; Hansen & Bowey, 1994).The more sensitive a child is to the componentsounds in words, the more likely he or she is toread well. Rhyme and alliteration knowledgecontribute to reading both by increasing sensi-tivity to phonemic differences and by preparingthe child to recognize the similar spellingpatterns shared by words that rhyme (Bryant,



MacLean, Bradley & Crossland, 1990; Gos-wami & Bryant, 1990). One hypothesis aboutthe origins of phonological awareness is thatchildren learn to analyze the component soundsin words with the help of linguistic routinessuch as nursery rhymes (MacLean, Bryant, &Bradley, 1987; Bryant et al., 1989). For exam-ple, Bryant et al. (1989) found for a sample ofmiddle- and working-class English children thatthere is a strong relation between knowledge ofnursery rhymes at age 3 and success in readingover the next 3 years, a relation that appearsto be mediated by the higher levels of phone-mic awareness that are fostered by rhymes .

(Fernandez-Fein, 1995). The significant rela-tion between knowledge of nursery rhymes andphonemic awareness several months later wasmaintained even when children's intelligenceand parents' educational level were statisticallycontrolled (MacLean et al., 1987). Hatano(1986), working with Japanese children, founda similar relation between a common children'splay activity involving saying a word beginningwith the last syllable of the word another childsaid and the rate of acquisition of kana literacy.

Narrative Competence. Many researchersposit that there are significant similaritiesbetween forms of oral and written language andargue that instead of focusing on the modality(oral or written) of the language, one shouldconsider its communicative function (McCabe& Peterson, 1991). Such an approach empha-sizes the importance that children's languagecompetence has for later literacy development.Aspects of language that are considered impor-tant are those that lead the child to go beyondthe immediate context and engage in extendeddiscourse, such as narratives.

Narrative competence is considered bymany to be relevant for literacy acquisition(e.g., Dickinson, 1991; Snow, 1991). Exposureto narratives begins early as children beginlistening to others relate their experiences andin turn produce their own narratives almost assoon as they can talk. However, there may bedifferences in the structure of narratives as afunction of one's sociocultural background(Heath, 1983; McCabe & Peterson, 1991).Such differences could have implications forhow well different groups of children fare inschool if there is a mismatch between theirhome and school narrative styles.

Narratives appear to play an important rolein children's early schooling because the typeof structure inherent in the narratives of ourmainstream society (e.g., White middle-income)appears in the books most commonly read topreschool and elementary-aged children. Fur-thermore, being read storybooks (a majorsource of exposure to written narratives) is animportant predictor of literacy acquisition(Sulzby, 1985; Wells, 1986). For example,Wells (1986) compared how four fairly typicalhome-based activities during the preschoolyears (looking at and talking about a picturebook; coloring; writing; and listening to astory) predicted children's knowledge aboutliteracy at age 5 years, and their later readingachievement at 10 years. He found that listen-ing to stories was the most important predictorof literacy knowledge at ages 5 and 10.

Orientation Toward Print. Researchershave documented the relation between chil-dren's knowledge of print and later readingskills. For example, Wells (1985) administeredClay's (1979) Concepts about Print task and a


14


test requiring identification of letters to asample of middle-income children enteringkindergarten. Scores on these two tests werecombined to yield a composite "knowledge ofliteracy" measure that significantly predictedchildren's reading scores 2 years later. Thework of Lomax and McGee (1987) and Mason(1980) also suggests that an orimation towardprint may serve as a foundation for later liter-acy development. Lomax and McGee proposedthat early reading skills are clustered into fivecomponents: (1) concepts about print, refleCt-ing the notion that children are aware that printand reading are meaningful and that printrepresents objects or speech; (2) graphicawareness, reflecting children's attention tothe graphic &tails of printed letters or words;(3) phonemic awareness, reflecting children'sawareness that spoken words can be analyzedinto their component sounds; (4) grapheme-phoneme correspondenceknowledge, reflectingchildren's knowledge of letters and their asso-ciated sounds; and (5) word reading, reflectingchildren's ability to read isolated words.Lomax and McGee studied children between 3and 6 years old and found that concepts aboutprint and, to a degree, graphic awareness wereamong children's earliest developing skills,with the other skills developing later. How-ever, children did not need mastery of onecomponent before moving to another compo-nent. Even the oldest children improved theirknowledge of what might be considered to bethe most basic component (concepts aboutprint). Mason (1980) studied the developmentof several early literacy skills over the courseof a school year with a group of 4-year-olds.Based on her results, she postulated that learn-

ing to read words follows a three-level hierar-chy: first one learns to read signs and labels,then one learns letter names, and then oneassociates letters with sounds (see also Hiebert,1981; Hiebert, Cioffi, & Antonak, 1984).

Niche-Competency Relations

We believe that parents' beliefs about howchildren learn and develop influence whatexperiences they make available, which in turnshould influence their children's development.Such a view is based on Super and Harkness'(1986) notion of the developmental niche. Thatis, a child's development is influenced by hisor her family's ethnotheories about develop-ment, the social milieu, and the experiencesavailable to the child. Our method during thecoming years will enable us to explore morefully the relations between beliefs and behav-iors and children's literacy development. Inthis report, we begin such investigation byconsidering the nature of certain experienceschildren have as well as specific parentalbeliefs. In a subsequent report (Serpell et al.,1995), we discuss in more detail parentalgoals and beliefs.

When the children in the project were inpre-kindergarten their primary caregivers wereasked to keep a diary for a 1-week period oftheir children's activities and experiences(Baker et al., 1994). Although caregivers knewthat we were interested in their children'sdevelopment, we made no mention that wewere particularly interested in the developmentof literacy. The print-related experiencesreported in the diaries were reviewed andreliably coded as falling into one of three



categories reflecting different approaches toliteracy appropriation: literacy is a source ofentertainment, literacy consists of a set of skillsthat should be deliberately cultivated, andliteracy is an intrinsic ingredient of everydaylife.

There appeared to be some socioculturaldifferences in how the families prepared theirchildren for literacy. Based on the nature ofprint-related activity reported in the diaries,middle-income families tended to show greaterendorsement of the theme that literacy is asource of entertainment than did lower incomefamilies. Low-income families, on the otherhand, tended to be more likely to view literacyas a skill to be deliberately cultivated (e.g., thechild practiced reading flashcards or complet-ing workbooks). These sociocultural differ-ences in beliefs about engaging in literacy andhow literacy is best acquired appear to be con-sistent with Delpit (1986), who reported thatlow-income African-American parents reactedmore favorably to a classroom that emphasizeda skills approach for fostering literacy (insteadof a whole language approach), and with Gold-enberg, Reese, and Gallimore (1992), whofound that low-income Latino parents adopteda skill-based approach when reading storieswith their young children that were sent homeby the child's teacher. In our analyses, thecontrast between two socioeconomic stratayielded significant differences , while no signifi-cant difference was found between African-American and European-American familieswithin the lower SES sample.

In this report, we pursued further thethemes of literacy as a source of entertainmentand literacy as a set of skills to be cultivated.

We considered whether the child's niche ismore likely to foster the view that literacy is aset of skills to be acquired or literacy is asource of entertainment. Of interest waswhether these two approaches to literacywould differentially affect the child's emerg-ing competence.

Method

Participants

The recruitment strategy for the EarlyChildhood Project has been extensively de-scribed by Baker et al. (1994). Briefly, partici-pants in this longitudinal project were drawnfrom residential neighborhoods served by sixpublic elementary schools in Baltimore City.These neighborhoods were as follows.

1. Low income African American: studentpopulation at the two participating schoolsover the past 3 years was 86% or moreAfrican American, and 86% or more quali-fying for free lunch. Ten children partici-pated during pre-kindergarten and 8 duringkindergarten.

2. Low income European American: studentpopulation at the two participating schoolsover the past 3 years was 75% or moreEuropean American and 75% or morequalifying for free lunch. Eleven childrenparticipated during pre-kindergarten and 10during kindergarten.

3. Low income, mixed ethnicity: student popu-lation at the one participating school over


6


the past 3 years ranged between 33% and66% African American with the remainderEuropean American, and 75% or morequalifying for free lunch. Eight childrenparticipated during pre-kindergarten and 7during kindergarten.

4. Middle income, mixed ethnicity: studentpopulation at the one participating schoolover the past 3 years ranged between 33%and 66% African American with the re-mainder European American, and 60% ormore paying for lunch. Ten children partic-ipated during pre-kindergarten and 9 duringkindergarten. We had intended for there tobe more children in our middle-incomegroup, but only one school that met ourdemographic criteria had a pre-kindergartenprogram.

We had several selection criteria for eligi-bility to the project. The only one pertinenthere is that no children who had identifiabledevelopmental disabilities were recruited.

Once families were recruited into the proj-ect, they completed a diary about their child'sactivities. The caregivers also responded toseveral structured interviews about the natureof their children's recurrent activities and abouttheir beliefs concerning how children learn anddevelop.

In Year 1 when the children were in pre-kindergarten, 39 children (mean age of 4.86years, standard deviation of 3.16 months)participated in the competency testing. Duringthe second year of the project when the chil-dren were in kindergarten, 34 children (meanage of 5.84 years, standard deviation of 3.32

months) received the test battery. Two of thechildren participating during Year 2 had notyet joined the project in Year 1, so competencydata are available for them only for Year 2.Several children moved out of the area betweenthe Year 1 and Year 2 testing; thus, Year 2data are not available for them.

Procedure

During Year 1, each child was tested in thespring of pre-kindergarten in the school. Chil:dren were tested individually in two sessionsby a graduate student member of our researchteam who was of the same ethnicity as thechild. The assignment of testers to childrenwas arranged such that the research assistantwas not otherwise involved in working with thechild's family. Testing sessions were approxi-mately 1 week apart. Each child received thetasks in the same predetermined order.

Our plan during Year 2 was to follow asimilar testing pattern. Most of the childrenwere tested by the same research assistant as inYear 1, but 8 were tested by a different assis-tant, who was of the same ethnicity as thechild. Five of the children were tested in thesummer after the completion of the school yearbecause they were absent or unavailable duringthe scheduled testing days. Summer testing wasconducted at the children's school or the localpublic library.

Phonemic Awareness

Five different tasks were used to assessphonemic awareness: rhyme detection andproduction, alliteration detection and produc-



tion, and nursery rhyme knowledge. Theserhyme and alliteration tasks, adapted fromMacLean et al. (1987), were selected as mea-sures of phonemic awareness on which evenpreschool-aged children demonstrate somecompetence. All of the words used on the fourrhyme and alliteration tasks were common one-syllable words familiar to preschoolers.

Rhyme detection. The detection tasks in-volved a forced choice procedure. Children hadto choose which of two one-syllable wordsrhymed with a target word. For example, thechild was asked, "Does cat rhyme with hat ordoes cat rhyme with bell?" At the outset of thetask, the child was told how to do the taskthrough example and explanation. Then thechild was given two practice trials with feed-back. The order of the paired contrasts on thistask was varied so that sometimes the correctchoice was the first and sometimes the secondword. There were 10 test trials during whichthe child received no feedback about perfor-mance.

Rhyme production. The production tasksrequired that the child produce a word whichrhymed with another one-syllable word. Thechild was told, "I'll say a word and you tell mea word that rhymes with or sounds like thesame word as the word I say." For example,the child was told, "If I say bell, you wouldsay. . . ." The child was given an example andtwo practice trials, followed by 8 test trials.

Alliteration detection. Children had tochoose which of two words started with thesame sound as a target word. The child wastold, "I'm going to ask you to tell me whichwords start with the same sound." For exam-ple, "Does pin start with the same sound as pig

or does pin start with the same sound as tree?"Following the example and two practice trials,the child was given 10 test trials.

Alliteration production. Children had toproduce a word that began with the same initialsound as the target word. The child was told,"If I say run, you would say. . . ." After theexample, the child received two practice trialsfollowed by 8 test trials.

Nursery rhyme knowledge . This task, adapt-ed from Maclean et al. (1987), assessed chil-dren's knowledge of five common nurseryrhymes. Children were asked to recite Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star; Humpty Dummy Sat on aWall; Jack and Jill; Baa Baa Black Sheep; andHickory Dickory Dock. These rhymes wereselected by Maclean et al. as familiar to chil-dren in England. We pilot tested them withchildren of similar sociocultural profiles tothose in the current sample and found they alsowere appropriate for use in this region of theUnited States.

The child was given the name of eachnursery rhyme and asked to recite it or to sayas much of it as he or she could. If the childhad difficulty, the research assistant promptedwith the first few words of each line as needed,but the rhyming word was never prompted.

Narrative Competence

Three different tasks were used to assesschildren's narrative competence: storybookreading, a narrative production task, and alanguage comprehension task.

Storybook reading. This task was adaptedfrom a task used by Sulzby (1985) and pro-vided information about the child's knowledge



about reading. Children were asked to read ortell about a familiar book. Our original planwas for the child's teacher to select a familiarbookone that had been read in class. In mostcases, this is how selection occurred. In somecases (around 10%), the child chose his or herown book from among a set of books used inclass. Books chosen generally were between 20and 30 pages and had a simple storyline.

The book selected for reading was presentedto the child with the following instructions:"Your teacher showed me this book that youhave heard her read. I've never read this oneand I would love to hear this story. Will youread or tell me about it?" If the child protestedthat she/he could not read, the research assis-tant said, "Well, let's go through the booktogether and you show me the pictures."

Narrative production. Children were askedto produce narratives about what had ostensiblybeen memorable events for them. Prior toworking with the children, we asked the par-ents to tell us about some recent event that theirchild had experienced that had been memorablefor the child. During the course of the firsttesting session, in between more formal tasks,the research assistant prompted the child todiscuss the events mentioned by his or herparent. For example, in one case the researchassistant said, "When I was talking to yourmom about how you were going to come playgames with me, she told me about the time thatyou had the chicken pox. I once had the chick-en pox. Can you tell me about having chickenpox?" On each occasion, the research assistantattempted to elicit as detailed a narrative aspossible by expressing interest and probingwith nonleading questions.

Language comprehension. The purpose ofthis task was to assess how well the childrenunderstood a particular story. The task was notadministered in Year 1 because the testingsession was lengthy and we were concernedabout children's fatigue. When we dropped anunsuccessful task used in Year 1, we decidedto add the story comprehension measure inYear 2.

Immediately following the completion ofthe Concepts about Print task in Year 2, thechild was told, "Let's read the book Where'sthat Bus? together now" (Browne, 1991). Thebook was selected because it seemed to theprincipal investigators to be an age-appropriateand interesting story. It was read in as naturala manner as possible. The book presented astory about a rabbit and a mole who werewaiting for a bus to take them to their friendSquirrel's house for lunch. Rabbit and Molebecame bored while waiting for the bus andwent off several times to pick some flowers,eat strawberries, and take a nap. Each timethey missed the bus. Eventually, Squirrel cameto them with a picnic lunch (on a bus travellingin the opposite direction). At the end of thestory, Rabbit complained that "not one buscame our way the entire day." Comprehensionof the story required both hearing the text andlooking at the pictures because the busses thatRabbit and Mole missed were visually shownbut never explicitly mentioned. Three times, asthe book was read aloud, the child was askedto attempt to read a page. Efforts were compli-mented and the research assistant reread thepage. Spontaneous comments by the childrenabout the book were responded to appropri-ately. If the child failed to comment on the



awaited bus, it was pointed out to the child,"Look, what is that?" After completing thebook the child was asked several questions:(1) Did Rabbit and Mole ever catch the bus?;(2) Did any bus come their way? (The child wasgiven feedback as necessary on both questions);(3) Why did Rabbit and Mole miss the bus?;(4) Do you remember that Squirrel came on a bus?(The child was shown the page, if necessary);(5) Why didn't Rabbit and Mole take that bus?

Orientation Toward Print

Six different tasks were used to assessorientation toward print: knowledge of func-tions of print materials, word recognition inenvironmental context, concepts of print,uppercase and lowercase letter knowledge, andnumber knowledge. The latter task was notincluded, however, in the Orientation TowardPrint composite.

Knowledge of functions of print materials(functional print). This task, adapted fromLomax and McGee (1987), assessed children'sknowledge of the functions and uses of variouskinds of printed materials. The 9 iteme includ-ed in this task were a newspaper, a .devisionguide, a telephone book, a coupon for therebate on the purchase price of the cerealCheerios, a calendar, a children's storybook, ahandwritten grocery list, a business letter in anenvelope, and a road map. The child wasshown each item one at a time and asked whatit was. If the child did not know the name ofthe item, the name was provided. The childwas then asked how people use the item. Wedetermined in a subsequent set of interviewswith each caregiver whether items similar to

those used in the task were present in thechild's home and whether the child saw thoseitems being used or used them himself/herself.

Word recognition in environmental context(environmental print). This task was inspiredby Harste, Burke, and Woodward (1982), andit also drew upon the experimental research ondiscrimination learning by Zeaman and House(1963) and Serpell (1973). The task providedinformation about the clues that children use toderive meaning from print and how these clueschange with development. In order to make thetask more similar to an authentic everydayactivity, we placed the task of recognizingobjects within the context of unpacking groceryitems. The task consisted of four phases. Phase1 required the child to perform a discrimina-tion among items that differed on multipleperceptual dimensions: size, shape, color,surface, texture, and so on. In Phase 2, thecharacteristic logo which incorporated theproduct name was cut from the commercialpackaging and mounted on a white index card.The items in Phase 2 were less multidimension-ally contrastive than those in Phase 1, but werestill discriminable on the basis of features ofcolor, shape and script. In Phase 3, only thenames of the products were used and they wereall printed with the same font on white indexcards. In this phase, discrimination requiredrecognizing the words at least logographicallyif not alphabetically or orthographically.

More specifically, each child was asked toidentify a product that he or she uses at homeby the actual container (box, can, bottle, etc.)with which it is marketed, by its logo (pre-sented on a card), or by its printed name (alsopresented .m a card).



The items selected for inclusion were indi-vidually tailored to each child's home experi-ences. Caregivers were presented ahead of timewith a list of common cereals, soft drinks,toothpastes, cookies, and canned goods, suchas soups and pastas, which pilot testing hadrevealed were commonly used by child-en inneighborhoods similar to those in this ;tudy.They were asked to indicate which items theyused at home on a regular basis and their childthus would be likely to recognize. Four of thefamiliar items, each from a different category,were selected as target items for the focal childand four nonfamiliar items (matched in catego-ry to the target items) were used as distractors.

During Phase 1 (using actual products orobjects), both the child and the research assis-tant had a bag of grocery items, each withdifferent contents. The research assistant gavethe child one bag, kept one for herself andsuggested that they open their bags in much thesame way that families unpack their groceriesupon returning from the store. While openingher bag, the research assistant speculated, "Iwonder what I've got in mine." She then ex-tracted one item at a time exclaiming, "Ohlook! I've got X in mine," and encouraged thechild to do likewise. (A demonstration of thistask, which was inspired by naturalistic obser-vations made by Marta Caballeros, a memberof the research team in 1992, has been record-ed on videotape and is titled EnvironmenialPrint: A competency measure of emergentliteracy designed for use by the Early Child-hood Project. This video will be available fromthe National Reading Research Center.) Boththe child and the research assistant took turnsnaming the items in their respective bags

(Naming of Product). The research assistantthen took all the items from both bags andrandomly placed them upon a table. The childwas told to show a designated product to astuffed animal (Identification of Product). Afterthe child showed the stuffed animal an item, itwas placed back upon the table with the otheritems.

Phase 2 required that the child identify theitems solely by their logos which were pastedon index cards. There was both a naming andan identification component in Phase 2.

The stimuli used in Phase 3 (both namingand identification) were printed cards. Thechild was shown each printed card and asked toname or read the word on the card. Then thecards were placed on the table and the childwas asked to show the cardi, one at a time, toa stuffed animal. The research assistant direct-ed the child to show the stuffed animal eachparticular card by saying, "Show (animal) thecard that says 'Cheerios' ."

In Phase 4, the child was shown the logoand asked to match the printed card to it.

Concepts about print. This task was adapt-ed from Clay (1979) and explored the child'semerging concepts about print in a more struc-tured way than the open-ended storybookreading task. The child was shown a story-book, Where's that Bus? (Browne, 1991), andasked 12 questions tapping knowledge about:particular letter names (2 letters), word bound-aries, punctuation, where on the page the storyis contained (e.g., print vs. pictures), anddirectionality of reading (left to right, top tobottom).

Letter knowledge. Children were asked toidentify all theletters of the alphabet, first in



uppercase and then in lowercase letters. Theseletters were presented one at a time on notecards.

Before the uppercase letters task was ad-ministered, the letters comprising the child'sname were removed from a randomly-ordereddeck of note cards. The child was shown theinitial letter of his or her first name and askedto identify it. Then the remaining letters of thechild's name were shown in a scrambled orderfor identification. Subsequently, the child wasshown the rest of the letter cards and asked toidentify each letter. This order (except for theletters of a particular child's name) was thesame for all children. If the child made fiveconsecutive errors, the remaining cards werespread in front of the child and he or she wasasked to identify any additional letters.

The same procedure to that described abovewas followed for the lowercase letters task,with the exception that the child was not askedto identify the letters of his or her name first.A different random order of letters was used.

Number knowledge . Children were asked toname the visually displayed digits from 1 to 10.These were printed on single note cards pre-sented individually one at a time. The order ofpresentation was a predetermined random orderthat was the same for all the children. As withthe procedure followed for letter identification,if the child made five consecutive errors, theremaining cards were spread out and the childwas asked to identify any additional numbers.

Order of Tasks: Year 1

Day 1. The order of tasks dwing Day 1 wasas follows: Word Recognition in Environmental

Context, UpperCase Letters, Rhyme Detection,Storybook Reading, Rhyme Production. Sixnarrative prompts were interspersed throughoutthe testing during Day 1. It took approximately20-25 min to complete these tasks.

Day 2. The order of tasks during Day 2was as follows: Knowledge of Functions ofPrint Materials, Lowercase letters, Numbers,Alliteration Detection, Nursery Rhyme Knowl-edge, Alliteration Production, Concepts aboutPrint, Language Comprehension. It took ap-proximately 25-30 min to complete thesetasks.

Order of Tasks: Year 2

The measures used during Year 2 and theordering of these measures was the same as inYear 1, with the exception that a LanguageComprehension measure was added as the finaltask on Day 2. Day 1 testing lasted approxi-mately 20 min. Day 2 testing lasted approxi-mately 30-35 min.

Coding of Tasks.

Procedures for coding the tasks are de-scribed below. Additional description, if de-sired, is available from the authors. Each taskwas scored by one of the authors (SF-F, KM,DS). For each task where there was any sub-jectivity to the scoring, reliability was comput-ed by having two coders independently score20% of the randomly selected children's re-sponses and then compare their scoring. Dis-agreements were resolved by discussion amongthe coders and one of the principal investiga-tors (SS). No reliabilities were computed for


St :ands of Emergent Literacy 15

the letter and number knowledge tasks, therhyme production and detection tasks, thealliteration production and detection tasks,concepts about print task, and narrative produc-tion task because the scoring was objective.

Rhyme and alliteration detection and pro-duction. The number of items, out of 10, thateach child answered correctly on the rhymeand alliteration detection tasks comprised thechild's score on each of these two tasks. Therhyme and alliteration production tasks, simi-larly, were scored by counting the number ofcorrect responses, in this case, out of 8. Non-sense words that rhymed with the target word,in the case of the rhyme task, and that startedwith the same sound as the target woi-d, in thecase of the alliteration task, were scored ascorrect.

Nursery rhyme knowledge. The coding forthis task was based on the work of MacLean etal. (1987), but a 4-point scale was used ratherthan the 3-point scale used in the prior study inorder to allow greater differentiation amongresponses (Fernandez-Fein, 1995). Children'sperformance on each of the five nurseryrhymes was scored as follows: 0no lcnowl-edge of the rhyme; 1a little knowledge;2more knob. ledge, including some of the keyrhyming words; and 3knowledge of most orall of the rhyme. The scores were summed anddivided by five to arrive at each child's nurseryrhyme knowledge score. The possible scorerange for this measure was between 0 and 3.Interrater reliability was 95% for the Year 1data and 92.5% for the Year 2 data.

Storybook reading . The children's readingof the storybook was characterized by ratingthe child on four dimensions:

1. Willingness to read story. Responseswere coded as either "responds immediately,""hesitant but reads when encouraged" whichincluded any child who responded "I can'tread" or otherwise seemed reticent, and lastly"child refuses to read or tell story" which wasused only in the rare instance when the childoutright refused to engage in the task.

2. Orientation of the book held by the child.Responses were coded as to whether the chilodid or did not correctly orient the book.

3. Turning of book's pages . Of interest wasthe child's pattern of turning the pages andtelling the story. Responses were categorizedinto one of three groups reflecting the appro-priateness of the child's page turning andhis/her storytelling behavior. "Telling thestory" was defined as talking that related to thecontent of the book, even if that monologue didnot inclade specifically story-like elements.Responses were coded as: tells story and turnspages appropriately, tells story but does notturn pages appropriately, or turns pages butdoes not tell story.

4. "Reading" of story. Responses werecoded into one of five categories and weregiven between 0 and 3 points. One cztegoryconsisted of responses where children actuallyread the words of the story (3 points). Theremaining categories were for "nonreading"responses. If the child mainly described thepictures, the behavior was categorized as "childdescribes pictures, story not formed" (1 point).This category was used to categorize responsesof children who spoke very little or childrenwho just labeled picture; in the story. Thesechildren were distinguished from those whotold a story based on the pictures (2 points).



Another coding category was for responseswhere the child told the story like a memorizedroutine, not from print or pictures; however,no child displayed this pattern of behavior. Thefinal coding category was for cases where thechild really did not offer any informationthroughout the interaction. Such responseswere coded "child offers little or no informa-tion" (0 points).

Coded responses to this dimension servedas data in the quantitative analyses for thestorybook reading task. Interrater reliabilityacross all questions on this task was 94% forYear 1 data and 90% for Year 2.

Narrative production. Coding of the chil-dren's narratives proceeded in two steps. Stepone required identification of a child's longestnarrative for coding. Step two focused ondetermining the explicitness of a child's refer-ence within the selected narrative; that is, thedegree to which the child's words or the ac-companying context of an utterance rendered areference understandable to a listener. Thetheoretical rationale for this coding is detailedin Hill (1994).

1. Selection of codable narrative. Althougheach child produced several narratives inresponse to prompts by the research assistant,only the one containing the greatest number ofclauses was selected for coding. Such identifi-cation was made by Susan Hill, a member ofour research team, using a procedure describedin her master's thesis (Hill, 1994). Writtentranscriptions of each narrative were reviewed.The start of a narrative was considered to be'the child's relevant production (talk about anevent from the past) after a prompt by theresearch assistant (e.g., "I heard from your

Mom that you went shopping for new shoes").The end of a narrative was signalled by: anexplicit ending by the child (e.g., "That'sall"); the introduction of a new task (recall thatprompts were given during conversation be-tween other tasks); a topic change; or twodirect questions, one right after the other,asked by the research assistant. False starts bythe child were ignored in coding. Narrativesthen were segmented into clauses, d fined asany grammatical unit containing a predicate,and the narrative with the greatest number ofclauses was selected fc- coding for each child.

2. Explicitness of reference. All referencesto characters, objects, locations, and eventswere coded as either explicit, specified ornonspecified references. Explicit referenceswere proper names and nouns. Such referencewas not dependent upon the accompanyingcontext for interpretability. Specified referenceswere definite pronouns (he, she, etc.) anddemonstratives (that thing, there) in which thecharacter, location or object had been explicitlyintroduced earlier in the narrative by the childor by the research assistant in her prompt tothe child. Thus, such references were fullyinterpretable in the context of the child's narra-tive. Nonspecified references were pronouns ordemonstratives whose reference to a character,location or object had not been made earlier byeither the child or the research assistant.

Language comprehension. Children weregiven credit for any words which they read inthe story, "Where 's that Bus?" However, if thechild merely described the picture, and, bychance, said words that appeared in the text,the child was not given credit for having readthose words. Responses to the comprehension



questions which followed the story readingwere each coded as correct or incorrect. Inter-rater reliability for responses to the comprehen-sion questions was 88%.

Knowledge of functions of print materials.Children's responses and the research assis-tants' prompts were transcribed from videotape.Identification and function responses were thenscored for each child on each of the 9 items pre-sented during testing. Identification responseswere given 1 point if correct and 0 points ifincorrect. For each item, the standard label(e.g., telephone book, TV guide) or a slightvariation of that label was scored as correct.Identification responses were scored by twoindependent coders. Interrater reliability was98% for the Year 1 data and 100% for Year 2data. Responses about the function of the itemswere coded on a 3-point scale, with "0" indi-cating an incorrect response, "1" indicatinga partially correct but incomplete response,and "2" indicating a well-specified, completeresponse. Interrater reliability was 88% forYear 1 data and 90.2% for Year 2 data.

Word recognition in environmental context.Children's responses were recorded at thetime of testing and subsequently by trainedcoders viewing the videotaped sessions. Eachinstance of correct identification or naming wasawarded 1 point. These instances were totaledfor each child to yield a score up to 4 possiblepoints in each of the areas of productname/identification, logo name/identification,print name/identification, and matching. Inter-rater reliability was 100% for Year 1 data and98% for Year 2 data.

Concepts of print. Coding for the Conceptsof Print task focused on whether or not the

child's response was correct or incorrect. Thisinformation was recorded by the researchassistant during task administration. All video-tapes were watched a second time, and anycoding errors were corrected.

Letter knowledge. During the testing ses-sion, research assistants recorded the uppercaseletters and lowercase letters correctly identifiedby each child. Each child's correct responseswere then totaled in each of the categories,yielding a maximum possible 26 points foreach of the two letter tasks.

Number knowledge. During the testingsession, research assistants recorded the num-bers correctly identified by each child. Scorescould range from 0 to 10.

Results

The first section considers the literacy-related competenci's of the children. Thesecond section addresses the relation betweenthe experiences available in the children'sniche and their literacy-related competencies.

Developmental Competencies and Changesduring Preschool

The presentation of the data begins withempirical evidence supporting the conceptualvalidity of the three literacy-related strandsmentioned in the introduction to this paper(Phonemic Awareness, Narrative Competence,Orientation Toward Print). The data are thenconsidered in terms of the changing competen-cies of the children and the nature of children'searly literacy constructions.


18 Sonnenscizein et al.

Table 1. Correlation of letter task with composites (letters excluded from Orientation Toward Printcomposite) during Pre-kindergarten (Year 1) and Kindergarten (Year 2)

Task

PhonologicalAwareness

Year 1

OrientationToward Print

Year 1


Year 2


Year 2

NarrativeCompetence

Year 2

LettersYear 1

.529* .620* .532* .701* .555*

LettersYear 2

.174 .406 .289 .518* .414

*p < .01.

Three strands of early literacy-relatedskills. We have identified three strands that webelieve are relevant for early literacy develop-ment: Phonological Awareness, NarrativeCompetence, and Orientation Toward Print.These strands were created on theoreticalgrounds. However, some additional empiricalsupport for the validity of the strands comesfrom considering the intercorrelations amongthe measures. Given the great number of corre-lations conducted, and therefore the increasedrisks of Type I errors, only correlations withp < .01 are considered to be significant.

Conceptually, letter knowledge could berelated to either phonological awareness ororientation toward print. However, otherresearchers have more often considered letterknowledge to be an aspect of orientation to-ward print. We believe that letter recognition ishighly related to both orientation toward printand phonological awareness. However, prelim-inary correlational analyses, which are reportedin Table 1, indicated that the letter tasks weremore highly correlated with the Orientation

Toward Print composite than the PhonologicalAwareness strand, especially in Year 2. There-fore, we added the letter tasks to the Orienta-tion Toward Print strand.

The Phonological Awareness strand was acomposite of the percentage correct scores fromthe rhyme production and detection tasks, thealliteration detection task, and the nursery rhymetask. There was a floor effect on the alliterationproduction task; therefore, these data were notincluded in these analyses. As shown in Table 2,the rhyme task in Year 1 significantly correlatedwith the nursery rhyme task in Years 1 and 2.However, in Year 2, the rhyme tasks did notcorrelate with the nursery rhyme task.

The Phonological Awareness compositescores in Years 1 and 2 were significantlycorrelated (r = .69, p < .01). The correlationbetween the Phonological Awareness scores inYear 1 and Year 2 appeared to be stronger thanthe correlation between Phonological Aware-ness and the other strands (see Table 3). How-ever, this composite was correlated with all theother composites.

NATIONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER, REhDING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 48


Table 2. Correlation coefficients among tasks in Phonological Awareness composite

Task Rhyme Year 1Alliteration

Year 1Nursery

Rhyme Year 1RhymeYear 2

AlliterationYear 2

NurseryRhyme Year 2

AlliterationYear 1

.185

Nursery RhymeYear 1

.562* .237

RhymeYear 2

.447 .087 .221

AlliterationYear 2

.462 .126 494* .240

Nursery RhymeYear 2

.495* .204 .682* .238 .268

*p < .01.

The Narrative Competence strand was acomposite of the child's score on the storybookreading task (question 4 focusing on whetherthe child read or told the story), the scores onthe language comprehension measure, and theproportion of referents that were either explicitor specified from the child's longest narrativeproduction. Recall that the language compre-hension measure was given for the first time inYear 2 and coded narratives were only avail-able from Year 1.

There was less empirical support for thevalidity of this composite, as none of the indi-vidual measures correlated with each other.However, the three measures required verydifferent skills from the child.

The correlation between the NarrativeCompetence composites at Year 1 and 2 wasnot significant (see Table 3). However, only

one measure in the composite was repeatedboth years, with the other two measureschanged.

There were four tasks which comprised theOrientation Toward Print strand: Concepts ofPrint task, Functional Print task, Environmen-tal Print task, and Letter tasks. The compositeconsisted of the percentage correct on thetasks. Note that an aggregate score was com-puted for the two letter tasks based on the sumof correct responses on both tasks. For theenvironmental print task, a weighted aggregatescore was calculated from the sum of pointsearned on the production and recognitioncomponents of the product, logo, and printtasks. The product tasks were worth 1 pointeach (maximum possible 8 points), the logoversions were worth 2 points each (maximumpossible 16 points) and the print tasks were



1 arme a . intercorreiations among rre-Kmaergarten t Y ear 1) ana mnaergarten t 7 ear z) composites

Composite


Year 1


Year 1

NarrativeCompetence

Year 1


Year 2


Year 2

NarrativeCompetence

Year 2

OrientationToward PrintYear 1

.613*

NarrativeCompetenceYear 1

-.06 .04

PhonologicalAwarenessYear 2

.688* .554* -.01

OrientationToward PrintYear 2

.430 .756* .04 .461*

NarrativeCompetenceYear 2

.577* .663* .03 .541* .664*

* p < .01.

worth 3 points each (maximum possible 24points).

There appeared to be empirical support forthe validity of the Orientation Toward Printstrand. Perusal of Table 4 indicates that 3 ofthe possible 6 correlations among tasks in Year1 were significant at the .01 level. Similarly, 3of the possible 6 possible correlations amongtasks in Year 2 were significant.

Table 3 shows that the Orientation TowardPrint scores in Year 1 and 2 were significantlycorrelated (r = .76, p < .01).

We hypothesized that there would be signif-icant correlations between Year 1 and Year 2

for each strand. This was true for both thePhonological Awareness and the OrientationToward Print strands. We also hypothesizedthat each strand should be more highly corre-lated with itself (from Year 1 to Year 2) thanwith the other strands. Z tests were conductedto test the difference in relative strength ofcorrelations among the pairs. These tests werenonsignificant, although in the expected direc-tion. Our quite limited sample size likelyreduced the power of these analyses.

Developmental changes in children's earlyliteracy from Year I to Year 2. Separate analy-ses of variance were run for each task and its



Table 4. Correlation coefficients among tasks in Orientation Toward Print composite

Task

Conceptsof PrintYear 1

EnvironmentalPrint

Year 1

Functionof PrintYear 1

LetterRecognition

Year 1


EnvironmentalPrint Year 2

Functionof PrintYear 2

LetterRecognition

Year 1

Environ-mental

PrintYear 1

.286

Functions

of PrintYear 1

.497* .176

LetterRecogni-

tionYear 1

.646* .255 .416*


.562* .128 .452* .649*

Environ-mental

Print

Year 2

.507* .235 544* .599* .394

Functionsof PrintYear 2

.459* .073 .609* .417 .528* .526*

LettcrRecogni-tion

Year 2

.371 .254 .281 .510* .618* .306 .402

*p < .01.

components to test whether children's abilitieshad improved over the course of the year. Tosummarize the overall findings: althoughchildren's abilities clearly improved during theyear, they already had literacy-related knowl-edge in pre-kindergarten. All the childrendemonstrated competence on some of the tasks

even though, not surprisingly, no child reachedceiling on all the tasks. During pre-kindergar-ten, 74% of the children were able to respondcorrectly to some questions on at least 12 ofthe 14 tasks. In fact, approximately 16% of thechildren earned some points on all 14 tasks.During kindergarten, children's abilities had


2"


Table 5. Change in Scores on Phonological Awareness Tasks in Pre-kindergarten (Year 1) and Kindergarten(Year 2) -

Task

Year 1

Mean Scores(SD)

Year 2Mean Scores

(SD)

F-valueSig. of F

Rhyme detection% of items correct 55.9 87.8 51.72

N = 33 (24.5) (16.8) p < .001

Rhyme production% of items correct 28.3 63.3 25.76N = 31 (35.5) (37.3) p < .001

Alliteration detection% of items correct 46.7 67.0 23.51

N = 31 (17.1) (17.6) p < .001

Alliteration production% of items correct 8.6 12.8 0.72N = 30 (17.1) (20.5) ns

Nursery rhymescore on 0-3 rating scale 1.43 2.14 49.59N = 33 (0.76) (0.37) p < .001

improved. All children earned points on at least13 of the tasks.

The data are organized in terms of measurestapping Phonological Awareness, NarrativeCompetence, and Orientation Toward Print.

1. Phonological Awareness. Table 5 depictschildren's scores on the rhyme detection andproduction tasks, the alliteration detection andproduction tasks, and the nursery rhyme task.Table 5 also shows F values for the comparisonof Year 1 and Year 2 scores. Childreo im-proved significantly between pre-kindergar.en

and kindergarten on each of the tasks exceptfor the alliteration production task.

2. Narrative Competence. Table 6 showsthe children's scores on the storybook readingmeasure, the language comprehension mea-sure, and the narrative production measure.Children significantly improved in their ap-proach to the task between pre-kindergartenand kindergarten. A .closer look at specificbehaviors indicates that, even during pre-kin-dergarten, most of the children knew how tohold the book, turn the pages, and even tell the


4.)


Table 6. Change in Scores on Narrative Competence Tasks from Pre-kindergarten (Year 1) to Kindergarten(Year 2)

Task Year 1 Year 2 F-Value

Storybook reading, mean'score on 0-3 rating scale (SD)N = 32

1.50 (.68) 2.03 (.72) 11.53

p < .002

Narrative production, mean2N = 30

.90 (.15) NA NA

Language comprehension'N = 33

NA .76 (.19) NA

'See pages in the text for information about the coding of this task.2Proportion explicit or specified referents3Mean score on comprehension questions

Table 7. Storybook Reading Performance in Pre-kindergarten (Year 1) and Kindergarten (Year 2)

Measure Year 1 Year 2

Willingness to read: refuses 2.6% 2.9%

hesitant 23.1% 29.4%

responds immediately 74.4% 67.6%

Orientation of book: incorrect 2.6% 5.7%correct 97.4% 94.3%

Turning of pages: turns pages and tells story appropriately 74.4% 94.1%

not doing both of above 25.6% 5.9%

Reading of story: offers little information 12.8% 0.0%describes pictures (story not formed) 25.6% 24.2%

tells story from pictures (story formed) 61.5% 45.5%

child reads 0.0% 30.3%

story (see Table 7). It should be noted, how- reading different books which seemed to vary

ever, that the children in different classes were in difficulty level. A big change from the Year



Table 8. Mean Proportion of Correct Responses to Questions from Language Comprehension Task

Questions Mean SD

1. Did Rabbit and Mole ever catch the bus? N = 33 .73 .45

2. Did any bus come their way? N = 33 .91 .29

3. Why did Rabbit and Mole miss the bus? N = 33 .91 .29

4. Do you remember that Squirrel came on a bus? N = 33 .97 .17

5. Why didn't Rabbit and Mole take that bus? N = 32 .50 .51

1 to Year 2 testing, was that approximately athird of the children were beginning to attemptto decode the printed words.

The mean proportions of correct responsesto the questions asked on the LanguageComprehension task are presented in Table 8.The majority of the children correctly answeredmost of the questions. The one notable excep-tion was that only 50% of the children wereable to correctly respond to the question"Why didn't Rabbit and Mole take thatbus?" However, 37% of these wrong answersshowed that the children seemed to under-stand the general story, but either did notnecessarily understand that aspect of it or thespecific question. For example, severalchildren responded that there was "notenough room" on the bus. Other childrenanswered that Rabbit and Mole did not takethe bus because they were too busy "comingback and forth." In fact, that was the correctexplanation of why they had missed earlierbuses.

The vast majority of the children's refer-ences to people, objects, or locations in theirnarrative productions were sufficiently explicitfor a listener to understand. Thus, in only 10%of the cases was the reference so vague that thelistener could not understand after listening tothe narrative what or who the child was refer-encing.

3. Orientation Toward Print. Table 9indicates the children's pre-kindergarten andkindergarten scores on the number, letter,concepts of print, functions of print, andenvironmental print tasks. The EnvironmentalPrint task components were analyzed andreported separately, as it was of interest toknow exactly what aspects of the task a childcould or could not do.

Children's scores improved significantlybetween pre-kindergarten and kindergarten onall but two tasks: Environmental PrinttasksIdentification and Naming of PrintedWord. In general, the children were better atthe identification than at the naming versions of



Table 9. Scores on Orientation Toward Print Tasks in Pre-kindergarten (Year 1) and Kindergarten (Year 2)

Task

Year 1

Mean Scores(SD)

Year 2Mean Scores

(SD)

F-valueSig. of F

Number Identification% correctly identified 49.4 89.7 47.41

N = 32 (36.4) (17.0) p < .001

Uppercase Letter Identification% correctly identified 26.4 77.3 71.47

N = 33 (34.7) (31.9) p < .001

Lowercase Letter Identification% correctly identified 19.5 70.1 97.86

N = 32 (28.5) (27.6) p < .001

Concepts of Print ,

% items answered correctly 31.9 61.1 46.28

N = 19 (17.1) (21.1) p < .001

Functions of Print% items correctly identified 44.8 59.0 41.57

N = 30 (20.0) (17.8) p < .001

Environmental Print Tasks:

% correct identification of product 77.3 87.9 4.52

N = 33 (25.3) (17.8) p = .041

% correct naming of product 30.3 50.8 21.48

N = 33 (23.2) (24.6) p < .001

% correct identification of logo 64.8 80.5 5.74

N = 33 (31.0) (27.5) p = .023

% correct naming of logo 28.0 50.8 17.20

N = 34 (26.3) (28.3) p < .001

% correct identification of printed word 42.6 39.8 0.08

N = 28 (32.4) (40.6) ns

% correct naming of printed word 5.3 11.4 3.44

N = 34 (10.4) (18.8) p = .073

% correct matches between logo and printed word 45.7 78.4 16.56

N = 30 (39.6) (32.5) p < .001



Table 10. Functions of Print Task: Percentages of items correctly identified

Item Year 1 Year 2

Child's Storybook 56.4 97.1

TV Guide 28.9 32.4

Telephone Book 34.3 55.9

Coupon 34.2 50.0

Calendar 47.5 76.5

Newspaper 79.5 79.4

Grocery List 12.8 21.2

Letter 71.8 61.8

Road Map 28.9 55.9

the Environmental Print tasks (p < .001).They also were relatively better with both theproduct and logo identification than with theprint identification (p < .001).

As shown in Table 9, the pre-kindergartenchildren did best on the Environmental Printtasks when: they were asked to identify prod-ucts or lops from those products available intheir home. In fact, the majority of childrensucceedcd on this task, which attests to theircompetence in recognizing print in their envi-ronment. However, they could not yet utilizetheir knowledge of print to match a logo withits printed name. By kindergarten, the majorityof children had become much more strategicand were able to perform this matching task.Informal observation suggested that the chit-

dren attempted to analyze the logos into therelevant letters and then match logo and printedcard from the letters. This increased skill islikely related to the fact that the children'sability to recognize letters also increased sig-nificantly during the year.

Pre-kindergarten children's orientation to-ward familiar print is evidenced by more thanhalf of them being able to correctly identify astorybook, a newspaper, and a business letterin the Functions of Print task (see Table 10 andTable 11). However, there was variability inchildren's ability to label different types ofprint materials and to explain how these itemswere used.

In our original planning for this study, wewere interested in learning what printed items



Table 11. Functions of Print Task: Percent of children scoring incorrect, partially correct, and correct onfunction responses

Item Score Year 1 Year 2

Child's Storybook 0 11.4 2.9N = 36 1 2.9 2.9

2 85.7 94.1

TV Guide 0 44.4 32.4

N = 36 1 33.3 23.52 22.2 44.1

Telephone Book 0 43.2 14.7

N = 36 1 45.9 55.92 10.8 29.4

Calendar 0 42.9 23.5

N = 36 1 74.3 17.6

2 22.9 58.8

Newspaper 0 33.3 8.8N = 36 1 58.3 41.2

2 8.3 50.0

Coupon 0 37.8 14.7

N = 36 1 62.2 70.62 0.0 14.7

Grocery List 0 45.5 23.5

N = 36 1 33.3 23.5

2 21.2 52.9

Letter 0 66.7 26.5

N = 36 1 27.3 44.1

2 6.1 29.4

Road Map 0 57.1 23.5

N = 36 1 25.7 29.42 17.1 47.1



the children actually used or saw used at theirhomes. Therefore, caregivers (N = 29) weregiven a list of the items used on the Functionsof Print task and asked to rate whether theirchild knew and had experience with each item.In most cases (89%), caregivers stated that ourselected items were familiar to the children. In28 of the cases (about 11%), however, thecaregiver responded that the child had nofamiliarity with the item. It is noteworthy thatthose parents often underestimated their chil-dren's print-related knowledge. In 13 of the 28cases where the parent had indicated that thechild did not know an item, the child couldidentify the item and in 21 of the cases thechild was able to completely or partially statehow it is used.

The children's errors on both the environ-mental print tasks (naming versions of bothproduct and logo phases) and the functions ofprint tasks shed additional light on how muchinformation about print is acquired by the endof pre-kindergarten. Childrer 's errors on theenvironmental print tasks were categorized asfollows: don't know (no other informationprovided), naming the generic product (e.g.,soup instead of Campbell's chicken soup),unrelated response (e.g., "I love Mommy"),naming some other item from the task, describ-ing the package (this seemed to be a descriptionof the picture on the package"brown bear"for Teddy Graham cookies), personal commentabout the product (e.g., "I like that stuff'),producing a word that had some phoneticsimilarity to the product (e.g., "Kick Fruit" forKix cereal). The most common error thatchildren made when asked to name a productor its logo was to give a general name for the

product, such as cereal or cookies. Forty-twopercent of the children's errors were so coded.Such errors occurred both when naming prod-ucts (where pictures of the product might havebeen available) as well as when naming theitems from just the logos. Clearly these chil-dren had already appropriated some meaningfrom the print on the logo or product.

Children's errors on the identification por-tion of the Functions of Print task were alsoinformative. Sometimes the child just respond-ed "I don't know" (approximately 8% of thetime). The remaining responses, in particularfor the television guide, telephone book, cou-pon, and grocery list, suggested that manychildren who did not know exactly what theseitems were called nevertheless knew somethingabout these materials. For example, both thetelevision guide and the telephone book wereusually called books or magazines or they wereidentified in terms of a general description ofhow they are used. Thus, a coupon for Cheer-ios was called a ticket or something you take tothe market or Cheerios store. In fact, there wasonly one response where the child's answer didnot obviously indicate an awareness that he orshe was looking at printed material. That childreported that a newspaper was something youuse to eat crabs with (not the response we werelooking for but an understandable one, at leastin Baltimore!).


The second major research topic addressedhere concerns the relations among parentalbel iefs , children's activities, and children'sliteracy development. The question of interest


3 (')


to us was how a child's developmental nicheaffects his or her appropriation of literacy.Would a child growing up in a niche thatfosters the view that literacy is a source ofentertainmem have different competencies thana child growing up in a niche that fosters theview that literacy is a set of skills to be culti-vated? We began investigation of this questionby computing a composite measure of anentertainment approach in the niche and acomposite measure of a skills approach in theniche for each child. Composite scores consistedof information taken from the diaries kept bythe parents as well as from answers to one ofthe interview questions. These scores wereused in two types of analyses: as correlateswith composite scores on the three literacystrands and as predictor variables for perfor-mance on these strands.

As discussed in the introduction, Baker etal. (1994) found that diaries of the children'sactivities kept by their parents in Year 1 indi-cated variability in the kinds of print-relatedactivities most likely to be mentioned. Eachprint-related activity was categorized as fallinginto one of three general categories consistentwith a view of literacy as: an integral ingredi-ent of one's everyday life, a source of enter-tainment, and a set of skills to be cultivated.Analyses in the present report focused on thelatter two categories because we thought that itwas these two themes that would have moreinstructional implications for how literacy isfostered by families. Our hunch was supportedby the way parents responded to questionsabout how to help children learn to read, withfew families mentioning the instructional oppor-tunities available from exposure to everyday

life activities. A print-related activity wascoded as "skills oriented" if it involved eitherthe practice of literacy skills or homeworkactivities (see Baker et al., 1994, for furtherdisc ission of coding categories). Each child'sniche was assigned a "skill" score of between0 and 2 depending upon how many of the skillcategories were coded. A print-related activitywas coded as "entertainment oriented" if it fellin one of the five following categories: jointbook reading, independent 'or self-initiatedreading, play involving print, incidental expo-sure to print while being entertained, or visitsto library or book stores. Each child's nichewas assigned an "entertainment" score of be-tween 0 and 5 depending upon how many ofthe entertainment categories were coded. Thisentertainment score was then multiplied by .4to equate for the different number of skill (2)and entertainment (5) categories. We did notcount the number of print-related activitiesmentioned within each category but justcounted the number of categories.

In Year 1, primary caregivers were involvedin several hour-long interviews concerningtheir beliefs about how children learn anddevelop. One of the questions they were askedwas "What is the most effective way to helpyour child learn to read?" Most parents gaveseveral examples of ways to facilitate readingacquisition. Answers were scored on a 0 to 2-point scale for both skill and entertainmentapproaches. A score of 0 was given if nomention was made of anything that could beconsidered to be a skills approach (consistentwith the skills approach used to code activitiesfrom the diaries). A score of 1 was given for avague or unspecified mention of something that



Table 12. Zero-Order Correlations Between Entertainment and Skil Orientations and Three Literacy-Related Strands


Narrative Compe-tence

Orientation TowardPrint

Year 1, Full Sample N =EntertainmentSkills

35364*

-.223.139.277

.508**-.130

Year 1, Low Income N = 26Entertainment .220 .253 .352Skills -.041 .128 .010

Year 2, Full Snmple N = 31

Entertainment .289 .481** .459**Skills -.358* -.185 -.191

Year 2, Low Income N = 23Entertainment .243 .380 .358Skills -.299 -.042 -.025

p < .05, **p < .01.

could be considered to be a skills approach. Ascore of 2 was given for either several skill-type examples or one that was very detailed. Aparallel method of scoring was used for theentertainment approach. Interrater reliabilitycalculated for 20% of the responses was .84.

Separate composite scores for both theskills and entertainment orientation were com-puted. Each composite score consisted of theprint-related information from the diary and theanswer to the interview question, with bothsources of information weighted equally. Wecomputed zero- order correlations between thecomposite scores for two orientations towardliteracy and the three literacy-related strandsfor the Year 1 and Year 2 data. The zero-order

correlations between the skills/entertainmentorientations and the three literacy-relatedstrands are presented in Table 12 and arediscussed in the sections that follow. For allthe following analyses the distributions of thescores in the three literacy-related strandswere normalized using the Fisher r to ztransformation.

We also ran several multiple regressionanalyses to determine how predictive either a"literacy is a set of skills" niche oi tentation ora "literacy is a source of entertainment" nicheorientation was for the development of each ofthe three literacy-related strands (PhonologicalAwareness, Narrative Competence, and Orien-tation Toward Print). Separate analyses were



Table 13. Prediction of Phonological Awareness (Year 1 and Year 2, Full Sample and Low-Income Sample)from a Skill and Entertainment Orientation'

14 ChangeF (R2

Change) SE B Beta

Year 1, Full Sample N =-- 35

Entertainment .132 .132 5.189** .256 .121 .340

Skill .163 .031 1.224 -.145 .131 -.177

Year 1, Low Income N = 26Entertainment .048 .048 1.265 .158 .141 .224

Skill .051 .003 .081 -.048 .167 -.057

Year 2, Full Sample N = 31

Skill .123 .123 4.406* -.270 .124 -.358

Entertainment .212 .084 3.08 .205 .117 .289

Year 2, Low Income N = 23

Skill .089 .089 2.155 -.283 .150 -.381

Entertainment .196 .106 2.778 .231 .139 .139

'Note that Skill and Entertainment are listed in the order they entered the regression equation.*p < .044, **p < .029.

run, with the dependent variable the compositescores on each of the three literacy-relatedstrands for each year. Given our small samplesize, we had limited power for these analyses,so findings must be regarded as tentative.

Phonological Awareness. Table 12 shows asignificant correlation between an entertainmentniche orientation and phonological awarenessduring Year 1 for the full sample of families.This correlation was positive but not significantduring Year 2 (full sample) as well.

As we have mentioned, there were socio-cultural differences in the nature of print-relat-ed activities reported in the diary (Baker et al.,1994). Parents from the middle-income groupwere significantly more likely to report activi-

ties consistent with the notion that literacy is asource of entertainment. Therefore, all analy-ses were repeated with just the children fromthe low-income groups to determine if thepatterns would change. The correlations werepositive but not significant. However, oursample size, especially when restricted to justlow-income families, is quite small.

In general, a skills niche orientation corre-lated negatively with Phonological Awareness(but was significant only during Year 2, fullsample). This pattern was true for both the fullsample and just the low-income families.

The multiple regression correlational analy-ses indicated that in Year 1, an entertainmentniche orientation toward literacy was the better



Table 14. Prediction of Narrative Competence (Year 1 and Year 2, Full Sample and Low-Income Sample)from a Skill and Entertainment Orientation'

le ChangeF (le

Change) SE B Beta


Skill .077 .077 2.82 .259 .143 .301

Entertainment .108 .032 1.168 .142 .131 .179

Year 1, Low Income N = 26Entertainment .064 .064 1.711 .182 .146 .245

Skill .076 .012 .317 .098 .173 .111


Entertainment .232 .232 9.042* .369 .123 .477Skill .262 .030 1.177 -.148 .136 -.173


Entertainment .144 .144 3.709 .330 .170 .408Skill .160 .016 .397 -.121 .192 -.129

'Note that Skill and Entertainment are listed in the order they entered the regression equation.*p < .005.

predictor of Phonological Awareness, account-ing for 13% of the variance, F(1,34) = 5.19,p < .03. A skills approach toward thedevelopment of literacy did not account fora significant percentage of the remainingvariance. In Year 2, a skills orientationtoward literacy was the better predictor ofPhonological Awareness, accounting for12% of the variance, F(1,30) = 4.41, p < .05(see Table 13). Recall, however, that thezero-order correlation between the skillsorientation and Phonological Awareness wasnegative. An entertainment approach towardthe development of literacy did not accountfor a significant percentage of the remainingvariance .

Narrative Competence. An entertainmentapproach was significantly correlated withNarrative Competence only during Year 2, fullsample (see Table 12). None of the other zero-order correlations were significant.

The multiple regression correlational analy-ses showed that neither a skills approach nor anentertainment approach accounted for a signifi-cant portion of the variance in Year 1 for thecomplete sample of children (see Table 14). InYear 2, an entertainment approach to literacywas the better predictor of Narrative Compe-tence. It accounted for 23% of the variance,F(1,30) = 9.04, p < .005. A skills orientationapproach accounted for no additional signifi-cant variance.



Table 15. Prediction of Orientation Toward Print (Year 1 and Year 2, Full Sample and Low-Income Sample)

from a Skill and Entertainment Orientation'

le ChangeF (le

Change) SE B Beta


Entertainment .258 .258 11.818** .378 .114 .499

Skill .261 .004 .176 -.052 .124 -.063


Entertainment .124 .124 3.526 .246 .133 .353

Skill .124 .000 .006 -.013 .159 -.015


Entertainment .211 .211 8.021* .362 .127 .459

Skill .248 .037 1.416 -.160 .135 -.192


Entertainment .128 .128 3.236 .319 .172 .387

Skill .142 .013 .326 -.106 .186 .119

'Note that Skill and Entertainment are listed in the order they entered the regression equation.*p < .008, **p < .002.

Again these analyses were repeated withjust the low-income children. The pattern inboth Years 1 and 2 was the same as with thefull sample; however, none of the findingswere significant.

Orientation Toward Print. As indicatedin Table 12 an entertaimnent niche orienta-tion was significantly related to an Orienta-tion Toward Print during both Year 1 andYear 2 for the full sample. The relation,although positive, was not significant for thelow-income sample. There was no signifi-cant relation between a skills niche orienta-tion and an Orientation Toward Print.

The multiple regression correlationalanalyses showed that in both Year 1 andYear 2, an entertainment niche orientationwas the better predictor of Orientation TowardPrint. In Year 1, it accounted for 26% of thevariance, F(1,34) = 11.82, p < .002. InYear 2, it accounted for 21% of the vari-ance, F(1,30) = 8.02, p < .008. A skillsorientation accounted for no significantadditional variance in either Year 1 or Year 2.

As before, these analyses were repeatedwith just the low-income children. Althoughthe pattern was the same as with the fullsample, there were no significant relations.


4j.


Discussion

One of the general issues addressed by ourlarger ongoing research project is the degree towhich the activities a child engages in at home(which in themselves are determined by theinterrelations among parental beliefs, availablematerial resources, family activity patterns, andinterests of the child) varies among children ofdifferent sociocultural groups and how theseactivities relate to and predict the developmentof and engagement in reading. In a previousreport (Baker et al., 1994), we addressed thenature of our focal children's home-basedactivities. In this report, we considered thenature of preschool children's emerging liter-acy competencies. We began by presenting datashowing children's literacy-related skills at theoutset of the project and some changes thatoccurred during the next year. We then consid-ered how aspects of the children's home nicheare predictive of these early literacy-relatedskills.

Developmental Competencies and ChangesDuring Preschool

Based on a review of the literature and ourown understanding of literacy, we selectedmeasures designed to tap three aspects ofliteracy-related skills : Phonological Awareness ,

Narrative Competence, and Orientation To-ward Print. We will explore in the future therelation between the activities the childrenengage in at home and development of skills ineach of these three strands. We also will seehow performance on these three strands pre-dicts later literacy acquisition.

All of the children in this study, during pre-kindergarten, had some knowledge of manyearly literacy-related skills. For the most part,they did better when asked to perform tasksthat more directly tapped their knowledge ofthe print found in their homes. Thus, duringpre-kindergarten they did better on tasks re-quiring them to recognize products found athome or logos from those products than theydid on many of the other tasks, such as taskstapping phonemic awareness.

Even children's errors on certain of theOrientation Toward Print tasks suggest that bypre-kindergarten the children are aware ofmany types of print available at home. Whenthey could not correctly identify an item, theiranswers showed that they usually knew that theitem contained print. When asked to name anitem or state how it is generally used in theFunctions of Print task, the majority of thechildren's "errors" were reasonable answers.For example, stating that a calendar is some-thing you use to recall birthdays is one use thatmany people make of calendars.

These findings provide support for theimportance of considering the context withinwhich development occurs and is assessed. Allchildren growing up in a society like that herein the United States have many, varied ekpo-sures to literate activities. Nevertheless, thenature of activity to which a child is exposedmay differ due to the child's socioculturalbackground (Heath, 1983; Taylor, 1983;Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988). By testingchildren's emerging competencies throughtasks employing objects that the children usedand saw used at home, we were able to demon-strate that even in pre-kindergarten the major-



ity of the children had an awareness and anunderstanding about various forms of printavailable in tf- -ir homes.

Evidence that children come to school withknowledge about everyday forms of print couldbe used as a basis for teachers to plan instruc-tional programs. As Wells (1986) has sug-gested, every child comes to school withcertain competencies which the teacher mustdevelop and build upon. The trick is for theteacher to identify these competencies anddevise appropriate educational programs.

By the time the children were tested at theend of kindergarten, their early-literacy relatedknowledge had improved significantly in manyareas. They continued to improve in theirrecognition, identification, and understandingof the usage of products found at home. Theyalso improved in their phonological awarenessand formal letter recognition skills. Some ofthis increased knowledge no doubt was due tothe beginning of formal instruction in kinder-garten. In addition, children's increased knowl-edge of the print in their environments duringpre-kindergarten may have heightened theirinterest and led to increased receptivity tolearning.

As we continue following these children,we will assess how predictive these earlyliteracy-related skills are of more formalliteracy skills.


Having documented some of the children'searly literacy competencies, we wanted to de-termine how the child's home niche relates tothe development of these literacy-related skills.

For this report, we considered two aspects ofthe child's niche: parental answers to an inter-view question and parental reports of theirchildren's activities. We tested whether a childliving in a niche that is oriented toward theview that literacy is a source of entertainmentis more or less likely to develop competence inthe three early literacy-related strands than onewho is living in a niche that is oriented towardthe view that literacy is a set of skills to beacquired. Although we presented the data aseither an entertainment or a skills orientation,many families clearly reported activities re-flecting both orientations. Such findings areconsistent with Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines(1988), who showed the range of literateactivities engaged in at home by low-incomefamilies. Nevertheless, low-income families inour study were more likely than middle-incomeones to focus on fostering skills as a means ofsocializing reading (Sonnenschein & Munster-man, 1995).

ThP data appear tn ctrnngly support thenotion that living in a niche more consonantwith the view that literacy is a source of enter-tainment is correlated with the development ofliteracy-related skills. Consider the zero-ordercorrelations presented in Table 12 for the fullsample. An entertainment approach was signif-icantly and positively related to PhonologicalAwareness (Year 1), Orientation Toward Print(Year 1 and Year 2), and Narrative Compe-tence (Year 2). In all cases (even when thecorrelation failed to reach significance), thecorrelation between an entertainment orienta-tion and the literacy-related strands waspositive. In all cases (except for NarrativeCompetence, Year 1), the correlation between



a skills orientation and the literacy-relatedstrand was either near zero or negative. In fact,there was a significant negative correlationbetween a skills orientation and PhonologicalAwareness (Year 2). The correlations for thelow-income sample showed the same patternbut failed to attain significance, probably dueto the smaller sample size.

Findings from the multiple regressionanalyses further support the importance of anentertainment orientation. Such an orientationwas the best predictor of an Orientation To-ward Print (full sample) and aspects of Narra-tive Competence (story understanding, fullsample). Again the findings for the low-incomesample, while in the same direction, did notreveal significant relations. The results forPhonological Awareness were more complex.In Year 1 (full sample), an entertainmentorientation was the better predictor. In Year 2,a skills orientation was the better predictor butit was negatively correlated with the strand.

This evidence of the importance of anentertainment approach to fostering literacy-related skills seems to be consistent with fre-quently recommended pedagogical practices.That is, children in the primary grades areencouraged to read trade books rather thanbasals, and phonics skills are either not taughtor taught within the context of the actual read-ing task. Delpit (1986) has questioned theutility of such a teaching approach for low-income African Americans because of concernsvoiced by parents and community members thatthese children have limited opportunities toacquire necessary skills. Our data suggest that,at least when one considers home-based experi-ences, children in preschool do better when

they are exposed to an entertainment orienta-tion. This appeared to be true for both the fullsample as well as just the low-income children.

How do we explain the negative relation inYear 2 between a skills orientation and Phono-logical Awareness? We present two possiblehypotheses which further research shouldconsider. One, an entertainment orientation iseffective and a skills orientation is not. Withinthis hypothesis are several possibilities. Onepossibility is that the two approaches could bedifferentially engaging to the children. If so,children might be more attentive or even spendmore time in literate activities framed within anentertainment context. Another possibility isthat parents who took a skills orientation eithertaught inappropriate or irrelevant skills. Ourorientation composites do not include observa-tions of activities, so we cannot rate the qualityof instruction. Two, perhaps the skills orienta-tion does not lead to lower phonological aware-ness but rather parents who take such an ap-proach are reacting to what they believe is lessadvanced competence on the part of their child.At this time, we are not able to determinewhich hypothesis is the better answer.

What is available at home, while extremelyimportant, is not the entire story; the nature ofthe school experiences is also important. Aspart of the Early Childhood Project, we haveinterviewed the teachers of these children.Most of the teachers thought that academicskills were important for preschool children;nevertheless, they thought social skills andself-esteem were more important than academicskills. Teachers endorsed each of the literacythemes (entertainment, skills, and intrinsicingredient of everyday life) for their kindergar-



ten students. However, they considered literacyas a set of skills the least relevant for the chil-dren. These teachers reported classroom activi-ties consistent with each of the three themes.Thus, according to teacher reports, the childrenat school also were getting a broad exposure toliteracy-facilitating activities.

One limitation of this study is that thesample is relatively small. Thus, we had limit-ed power to explore sociocultural similaritiesand differences. We are in the process ofenlarging our sample and intend to investigatesociocultural factors with a larger sample size.One of the premises underlying the EarlyChildhood Project is that a person's beliefs andpractices are at least in part a function of one'ssociocultural background. Thus, we would notbe surprised to learn that low-income African-American families have different notions aboutaspects of child rearing than do low-incomeEuropean-American families. It is quite possi-ble that certain important predictors of literacyfor one sociocultural group may not be so foranother group. On the other hand, our currentdata suggest that providing children with expe-riences consistent with the notion that literacyis a source of entertainment was the morepowerful predictor of important early literacycompetencies for low-income as well as formiddle-income children.

Author Note. Additional support for this researchwas provided by the National Institute of ChildHealth and Human Development (PROJECT NO.RO1 HD29737-01A1). The findings and opinions donot reflect the position or policies of NICHD. Theresearch represents a collaborative effort, and we

are very appreciative of the contributions of ourother colleagues on the research team during 1992-1994: Hibist Astatke, Marta Caballeros, MarieDorsey, Victoria Goddard-Truitt, Linda Gorham,Susan Hill, and Tunde Morakinyo.

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MD. 96 49p. - ERICDOCUMENT RESUME ED 392 019 CS 012 352 AUTHOR Sonnenschein, Susan; And Others TITLE Strands of Emergent Literacy and Their Antecedents in the Home: Urban Preschoolers