Rhyming words

Attention to rhyming words also contributes to phonological awareness. When two different words end with the same sound, as in school and cool, we call them rhyming words. Dr. Seuss’s classical children’s book Hop on Pop presents a great number of pairs of rhyming words. Pairs such as cup-pup and house-mouse with humorous illustrations give you and the children fun moments to laugh together. Mouse and house are written in phrases: “Mouse on house,” is natural and not so surprising; however, “House on mouse,” is unnatural, impossible, and surprising. The illustration is humorous. The spelling patterns of these word pairs (cup-pup, hop-pop, and mouse-house) have identical endings. There are other rhyming words that end with different spellings. For instance, fox and socks are rhyming words whose endings are spelled differently. Reading Dr. Seuss’s book titled Fox in Socks would be a good context for mentioning this fact.

Print concepts

Oral language development and phonological awareness do not necessarily require written texts. However, print concepts, alternatively called concepts about print or print awareness, do involve them. They do not necessarily refer to sound and letter correspondences. Print concepts refer to the awareness of how print works to convey a message. The directionality that the written text flows is one of the print concepts for a language. English text is read from left to right, whereas Arabic and Hebrew flow in the opposite direction. The concepts of spaces between words and knowing the roles of authors and illustrators belong to print concepts. There are many more print concepts, such as how to hold a book and turn a page correctly. Basically, print concepts are acquired over time through all of the read-aloud experiences that children have from the first day of their lives. While you might not need to explicitly teach them all of these concepts, during a read-aloud you can say something like, “The author of this book is Donald Crews. The author is the person who writes the words. Donald Crews actually drew the pictures too, so he is also the illustrator.”

Alphabet knowledge

Alphabet knowledge includes both letter names and letter sounds. Knowing what sound each letter makes is essential for decoding, as children will need to blend the component sounds to say a word. However, knowing the letter names can help children communicate with their caregivers and teachers who are giving them formal reading instruction. There are many alphabet books of different types which can help you teach letter sounds and names. One type just identifies words that start with each letter, accompanied by illustrations for them. Elizabeth Doyle’s (2015) A, B, See! and Suse MacDonald’s (1986) Alphabatics are great examples of this type. In Alphabatics, the letters do acrobatics on the pages. Then the letters turn into things that start with those letters on the other pages. For example, the lowercase n turns upside down in four steps on the and then it becomes a nest on the opposing page. You can simply say the name of the letter and explain the word that begins with the letter. Then add what sound that letter makes. “The name of the letter is N (pronounced ‘en’). The word nest starts with the letter N, which sounds like /n/.” There are other types of alphabet books that have more narrative, with themes or information, such as Miss Bindergarten Takes a Field Trip with Kindergarten by Joseph Slate (2004), Tasha Tudor’s (2012) A is for Annabelle, and David McLimans’s (2006) Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet. You and the children can create an original alphabet book as a project. As reading and writing are developed simultaneously, you don’t need to wait until the children master reading to make one.

This section has discussed the emergent literacy stage, which is the one before formal reading instruction takes place. In the next section, the early literacy stage will be explained as the one that follows the emergent stage. During formal reading instruction in the early literacy stage, concepts such as phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency become more important than alphabet knowledge or print concepts. Vocabulary and comprehension are still important, though, and are taught more explicitly.

The early literacy stage

Comprehension is the bottom line of reading

Once children start formal literacy instruction at school, they learn to pay attention to the sounds in a word. They analyze the individual sounds, then they put the sounds together to make the word. Once children understand this system, we try to help them automatize the process so they can read fluently. Fluent reading with adequate speed can help children focus more on the meaning of the text. Since the bottom line of reading is comprehension, all of the discrete skills emphasized in formal literacy instruction (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary) should have the child’s meaning-making success as their aim. Therefore, this chapter will show you how to focus on meaning-making and comprehension while you tutor them in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary.

Vocabulary

Let’s start with vocabulary. There are three kinds: receptive, productive, and sight-word. Receptive vocabulary is the words whose meanings are understood. When you read a sentence or listen to someone speaking, you can make sense out of it because you have an adequate receptive vocabulary. Productive vocabulary is the words that can be readily used to generate speaking and writing. Even if you understand some difficult or fancy words when you see them, you may never use them for your own speech or writing: so they are not in your productive vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary develops earlier than productive vocabulary. Sight-word vocabulary is the volume of printed words that are recognized without a decoding effort. A large sight-word vocabulary would seem to be helpful for reading fluency, but it’s useless if the reader doesn’t know what the words mean. Early literacy development is comprised of teaching children to understand and use vocabulary words in reading and communicating.

Word selection for vocabulary teaching should be intentional. Sometimes there are words in children’s picturebooks that adults don’t even know. Words like lackadaisical and languid in Eric Carle’s (2002) Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth could be unfamiliar to caregivers, particularly to non-native speakers. It might not be a good idea to focus on your own difficulties in selecting the words to teach. Instead, focus on the words that are useful for the children you teach. When you pre-read a book before introducing it to the children, choose just two or three vocabulary words, because you don’t want to spend the whole read-aloud time teaching vocabulary.

While vocabulary teaching can be fun, there are many other fun conversations that you can have with the children about other aspects of a book. When choosing the words to teach, then, think about three points. First, consider the usefulness of the words in the children’s everyday lives. See if the children can use them easily in a conversation. See if you can also increase their exposure to these words in other contexts. Driver would be a good vocabulary-word choice from Mo Willems’s (2003) Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. While it might not be a difficult word for you, it might be new to the children whom you teach, and it is a useful word for the children’s everyday conversations. Second, consider the concreteness of the words. As a general rule, focus on more concrete ones, which will be more useful to the children. Third, consider the amount of repetition in the book of the target words. If they appear multiple times, the child will see them in different contexts, which is helpful for learning nuances. You can also look for opportunities to teach some important homonyms (e.g., the verb hide meaning “keep out of sight” and the noun hide meaning “animal skin”).

Reading aloud is a great context for children to learn vocabulary in. They can see the words and hear them when you read them aloud and when you talk about the story. Then you can explicitly teach child-friendly definitions for the target words, asking the children to repeat the words and use them in sentences, or act out their meaning.

Fluency

Fluency is reading with accuracy, automaticity, natural prosody (e.g., intonation), and stamina. More succinctly, fluency means reading like you talk. When you hear children reading “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” with good fluency, brown should have a higher tone than bear; and the children will take a short breath before saying “…what do you see?” On the other hand, reading with several awkward pauses and unnecessary repetitions like, “Brown…brown bear, brown,…brown bear, what do…ya,…you see?” does not sound like how you talk in English.

Making connections between oral language and reading is significant for fluency development. When you or another fluent reader reads a book to the children, it is an opportunity for them to perceive connections between oral language and the text. They can hear you demonstrating the intonation, rhythm, and flow of the sentences written in the book. Another important way to develop children’s fluency is to let them read easy books lots of times. For instance, if a child’s Guided Reading Level for instruction is H, books at levels C and D would be good fluency builders.

Again, reading aloud is a great context for building children’s fluency. You can informally assess their ability when they read aloud to you. They can hear their own reading, which is immediate feedback to their ears. When a book is relatively easy according to the children’s reading ability, they can feel the rhythm and flow of the language better, which reinforces the connection between oral and written English. So, if you see 7-year-old children grab The Very Hungry Caterpillar once in a while, you don’t need to discourage them just because their instructional level is at the Junie B. Jones books. Encourage them to read the text aloud. You can use some prompts for dialogic reading to talk about topics like healthy eating or the life cycles of different insects and animals.

Phonics

Phonics relates sounds to letters. It relates phonemes, the smallest sound units of a language, to graphemes, the letters or letter combinations that produce those sounds. For instance, f is the grapheme (symbol) for the phoneme /f/ (sound), as in the word fat. While this letter-sound connection is straightforward, many grapheme-phoneme relationships are more opaque. For instance, the letter c (not k) is the grapheme for the phoneme /k/ in the word cat. Moreover, there are multi-letter graphemes, such as the 2-letter grapheme “ph” for the phoneme /f/ in the word phone, and the 3-letter grapheme “igh” for the phoneme /ai/ in the word night. As there are many difficult letter combinations like this found in English phonics, it makes little sense to say phonics instruction should be completed in a short period of time. Rather, it should take place over a long time, so children can observe patterns in how sounds correspond to letters in simple/short words as well as complex/multisyllabic ones.

The simple letter-sound correspondences in themselves are insufficient to enable children to grasp the meanings of long words. Multisyllabic words usually consist of multiple meaningful parts. In terms of understanding, it is less useful for a beginning reader to break a long word like unrealistic down into phonemes than to break it into meaningful chunks like un-real-ist-ic. Perhaps a child below 2^nd grade might not need to deal with too many multisyllabic words in their process of learning to read. However, observing patterns within words and sorting words into different families, like the -um family (hum, chum, gum, and glum), and the -am family (ham, jam, and clam), can help children process parts of words in bigger chunks and later deal more easily with longer words with multiple meaningful parts.

Children gradually become aware of the smallest parts of their language having meaning, called morphemes. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. A stand-alone word such as apple is a free morpheme. When free morphemes appear with other morphemes attached to them, they are the base or root word. Bound morphemes serve grammatical morphemes or derivational morphemes. Grammatical morphemes signal grammatical information such as number (e.g., cat vs. cats), tense (e.g., walk vs. walked), and possession (e.g., Xavier vs. Xavier’s). They are always suffixes in English. Derivational morphemes make a new word by being attached to root morphemes, which change the meaning (e.g., from happy to unhappy; from sing to singer) or can change the syntactic category (e.g., from beauty to beautiful). They can be prefixes or suffixes. Most grammatical morphemes are mastered during early childhood, whereas derivational morphemes are studied in the later school-age years (Pence Turnbull & Justice, 2016). Learning these morphemes during early and later childhood substantially increases vocabulary size. How excited the children are to figure out the meaning of a word they never saw before by deciphering the meaning units that they already know!

Phonemic awareness

To explain phonics, I used the term phoneme several times. Again, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. It does not bear any meaning itself. However, it can make a huge difference when you replace one phoneme in a word with another. When you replace /k/ in the word cat with /b/, you make a totally different animal. Replacing c with b in the word cat relates to phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness was briefly explained under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Phonological-awareness training on bigger word parts (at least syllable-size) should take place earlier than phoneme-level training. For instance, door and knob make the new word doorknob, which is an example of phonological awareness at the word level. This is easier than putting the phonemes /p/, /e/, and /t/ together to make the word pet. Perhaps children might even be able to skip phoneme-level instruction in learning to read long words if they know how to analyze patterns within words. The focus of reading instruction should be on meaning-making, which is the big picture of literacy development.

Writing

Reading and writing develop simultaneously. Marie Clay, a “guru” of young children’s literacy development, suggests that writing can be encouraged if your child can just hold a pencil or a crayon. They do not need to master reading first for you to teach them writing. In the early stages of children’s writing development, they just draw and scribble. Research has found that very young children who can’t write yet can distinguish between drawing and “writing.” When they say they are drawing, they make large figures with round edges. When they say they are writing, though, they use strokes and dots. They lift their pencil off the page and interrupt their movements more when they are “writing.” Just be patient when you see your child scribbling indiscernible letters. When they scribble and call it writing, just affirm them and encourage them to do more “writing.”

Your child will go through several different stages in the process of writing development. Their scribbles will turn into letter-like forms arranged linearly. Then when there are real noticeable letters in your child’s writing, it still might be pretend writing with randomly ordered letters. Some letter combinations could represent correct sound blends. Many times, these are letters from your child’s name or are used at the beginning of words. It is a long journey for your children to master the conventional English writing system. In the meantime, allow them to use their own inventive spelling. “It is far too soon to aim for correctness. Accept and enjoy the child’s many attempts and accomplishments” (Clay, 2010, p. 12).

Gentry’s (2005) writing-development scale can track children’s writing progress and personalize instruction to scaffold their writing development. It describes 5 stages that children go through. Van Ness et al. (2013, p. 578) provide Gentry’s writing-development stages as listed below:

1. Non-alphabetic: Children use markings, scribbles, and pictures, but no letters.
2. Pre-alphabetic: Children write letters, but the letters do not represent sounds. Random letters cannot be read, for example, “RzxTQO” for “bottle.”
3. Partial alphabetic: Children write letters that represent sounds. There is directionality such as from left to right. There is some correct spelling, for example, “bt” for “bottle.”
4. Full alphabetic: Children provide a letter for each sound. Some medial short vowels are written, for example, “botl” for “bottle.”
5. Consolidated alphabetic: Most (two thirds) of the words are written correctly. There is one-to-one spelling correspondence, for example, “bottle” for “bottle.”

Spelling as a window into child’s reading and writing development

Spelling is a window through which you can assess your child’s reading development (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2019). When your child is only able to pretend to read, their writing looks like scribbles. When they start using letter-sound knowledge and blending letters, they might get the beginning and ending consonants, while omitting the intervening vowels, for instance, spelling cat as ct. Once vowels are used correctly in simple words like cat and dog, your child will start learning to spell more complicated words. At this stage, bottle might be spelled botl. English is one of the most opaque languages in terms of spelling. That is why you can see many English monolingual adults who still struggle with it. Much reading experience is necessary for your children to learn to spell correctly, in addition to their receiving explicit teaching of spelling patterns in words. We suggest graciously accepting developmental spelling, also known as invented spelling, in children’s writing to encourage them to focus on the content of their writing as they go through Gentry’s developmental stages of writing.

Schickedanz and Collins (2013, pp. 124-125) recommend the following effective practices for supporting children in their writing:

1. Read to children even in infancy and engage them in conversation. It not only develops language, vocabulary, and their background knowledge, but also makes them familiar with written discourse.
2. Expose them to a range of purposes for writing in daily life such as creating a menu, compiling a grocery list, writing a note to their mom, making a wish list for Santa, etc.
3. Provide mark-making experiences (scribbles, mock letters, and pictures) early, as it gives an opportunity for them to talk about the meaning.
4. Talk to children about their writing and drawing.
5. Keep the focus on meaning and communicating.

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Attributions and References

“Foundations of Early Literacy” by Sohyun Meacham, Methods of Teaching Early Literacy is licensed under CC BY 4.0

“Writing” by Nandita Gurjar and Sohyun Meacham, Methods of Teaching Early Literacy is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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