EDUC 13A

Reading Readiness and Emergent Literacy

Reading
 Is the development of out-of-school interest
 Is to the enjoyment of leisure time
 To personal and social adjustment
 Without it or lack of it will greatly affect the individual’s adjustment in life.

Readiness
 the state of being fully prepared for something
 willingness to do something.
 refers to the period when the child is getting ready to read. This starts with the preschool years.

Reading readiness
 Starts in the some where the child acquires a functional listening and speaking vocabulary from
parents and older members of the family.
 The child is engages in varied activities using real or concrete objects like toys, tools, and other
common equipment.

Emergent Literacy
Mary Clay 1966
 One who used the term emergent literacy.
 Is based on an assumption that a child acquires some knowledge about language, reading and
writing even before attending any formal education.

Teale 1987
 Describe as the emergent literacy as the early signs of reading and writing demonstrated by
young children before they begin to make formal instruction to reading and writing.
 The concept of emergent literacy suggest that all children that come to school already have
certain experiences and interests in learning.

Cox
 Concluded that children needed to reach the mental age of 6 and half before they could learn to
read.
 Prerequisites included a range of skills, from knowing letter names to being able to walk on a
balance beam.

1960's and the 1970's

 When studies of children who were early natural readers and writers showed that literate
behavior does not begin at a particular age but emerges continually.
 Clay stated that literacy development begins with children‘s first experiences with print in the
home and continues through preschool and the first few years of formal schooling.

Emergent Literacy
 Children starts to learn language from the day they are born during early speech and language
development, children learn skills that are important to the development of literacy.
 Basic building blocks for learning to read and write. They are the skills, knowledge, and attitudes
that children develop before they learn the conventions of formal reading and writing.

Cox
 Compares the basic principles governing the reading readiness perspective and the emergent
literacy perspective.

Then: Reading Readiness

 Reading instruction should begin only when children have mastered a set of prerequisite skills.
 Children should learn to read before they write.
 it is not important what children know about language before formal teaching and practice of a
sequence of skills begin.
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Now : Emergent Literacy

 Reading and writing are language processes and thus learned like spoken language through
active engagement and the construction of meaning.
 Young children have been actively engage in functional reading and writing experiences and in
real life settings before coming to school.
 Young children actively construct concepts about reading and writing.
Clay 1966,Vygotsky 1981, Teale 1987

Before
• Early literacy somewhat neglected.
• Little attention given to child‘s literacy development before formal schooling.
• Assumed that the beginning of literacy was in grade 1.

After
• A great deal of attention to literacy development in early childhood.
• Acquisition of information about literacy begins at birth and continues of early childhood.
• Development of literacy in child‘s earliest years.

Indicators of Readiness
1. General mental ability
2. Background of previous experiences
3. Range of speaking vocabulary
4. Accuracy of pronunciation and related speech habits
5. Ability to express oneself clearly to others
6. Habit of observing details and forming associations with things seen or heard
7. Ability to perceive likeness and differences
8. Ability to recognize relationships
9. Ability to keep in mind a series of events or other items
10. Ability to think clearly and in sequence
11. Ability to make choices and decisions
12. Good health
13. A well-nourished body
14. Freedom from fatigue
15. Visual efficiency and discrimination
16. Auditory efficiency and discrimination
17. Emotional balance
18. Social adjustment and feeling of security
19. Ability to focus on specific learning activities
20. Ability to follow directions
21. Ability to work effectively in a group
22. Interest in pictures and the meaning of written printed symbols
23. A desire to learn to read

Skills of Emergent Reader

Left to Right Progression
 Reading which starts from left of the page going to the right.
 Right handed/ left brain hemisphere
 Left handed/ Right brain hemisphere
 Whatever is the hand and brain dominance, children should be trained to read properly.
 Reversal< saw /was>

Visual Discrimination
 is the ability to differentiate differences, size, shape, color, etc.
 This skills can be best taught by letting the children identify things and actual objects with
emphasis on color, size, and shape discrimination.

Auditory Discrimination
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 Is the ability to differentiate differences in the sounds that they hear such animal sounds,
sounds of different musical instruments, sounds of different means of transportation, sound
that people produce, and other sounds that the children may hear in their surroundings.

Sound and Letter Names

 The sound of the letters of the alphabet are introduced first.
 The phoneme-grapheme or the sound-letter relationships.
 Five letter sister
a- always smiling, e- hardly hears, i- fond od shouting, o- who pouts in her mouth open, u- who
always panics.

The sequence in the introduction of the sounds is done by groups

Vowels – a, e, i, o, u
Consonants
a. Ascending letters – b,d,h,k,l,t
b. Descending letters- g,j,p,q,y
c. One-space letters- c,m,n,r,s,v,w,x,z
d. Special letter- f

Comprehension Skills of the Emergent Reader

 Comprehension lessons of the emergent learners may start with skills in classifying pictures that
are similar, shape that similar or different, colors that are the same and those that are different.
 Nothing details, sequencing ideas, organizing ideas, classifying ideas, summarizing and other
critical thinking skills.