Research Paper

Submitted By montaya23
Words: 1032
Pages: 5

Literacy Article

The article that I choose is titled “The Essentials of Early Literacy Instruction.” The vast amount of research being conducted on literacy development in children is rapidly providing tools that will serve as a foundation for daily practices. With the help of the ongoing research being conducted in this article the question still remains, what should young children be doing and learning before they go to kindergarten? These real life questions seem to have multiple options but no absolutely correct answers, which are needed in providing the essentials for early literacy in children.
Nowadays there are numerous terms that are used in reference to preschool stages of literacy development. The terms commonly used are emerging literacy, emergent reading, emergent writing, early reading, and symbolic tool. These terms for emergent readers have been adapted to literacy because they help with providing benchmark’s needed for children in grades from k-3. The term emergent reading is also important because it’s visible in the earliest phases of literacy development. When it comes to early literacy, making connection is very important with helping the students understand what they have been reading and it takes an observant teacher to help with bringing out these connections. This article provided an example of a child reading about goldfish. The teacher helps with the process by asking the students probing questions that encourage them to dig deeper into their understanding. She begins by asking them if they remember their gold fish and what they named it. Furthermore, by the teachers constant efforts to make the connections with literacy this in turn helps with a deeper understanding of the literacy for which the students are reading.
Early literacy relationships coincide with communication networks such as speaking and listening because they all mesh together. Younger students do require writing assignments to assist them with in correlating their reading and writing subjects. Students also need oral language to help with these subjects as well. When it comes to teaching young children about literacy one of the key components is content. Content helps with shaping your lessons and also providing the appropriate materials for the age group that is being instructed. It is also important for the teacher to find supporting research that helps to guide students into the right direction to further aid the students in succeeding. Current research has pin pointed three content areas in early literacy, these areas are oral language comprehension, phonological awareness, and print knowledge. It is important for students to learn about mainstay concepts and skills from spoken and written language for more complex and elaborated understandings. This means students should be able to grasp the alphabetic principle, recognition of basic structures, sense of genre, and have a strong desire to know. When it comes to literacy learning the written language is a lot harder than speaking it. As children gain experience with the language of their community, they learn which words (or sequences of phonemes) stand for which concepts in their language. Writing and reading with an alphabetic system involves an extra layer of symbols, where the phonemes are represented by letters.
To elaborate further this means that beginners must both learn the extra symbols, the letters of the alphabet, and raise their consciousness of the phonemes (because, while speaking and understanding speech, we unconsciously sequence and contrast phonemes). This article provided an example of speakers understand the two very different concepts named by the words nail and lane without consciously noticing that those words are constructed from the same three phonemes but in different sequences. It is important when children learn to read, that they must pay attention to those three phonemes, how they are sequenced, and what letters