Preschoolers’ Emergent Approaches to Speech-Print Linking During Writing

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Fostering a Love of Literacy for Early Childhood Settings (Table 15)

Abstract

This study describes how young children linked speech and print in their own writing and the social/material conditions supporting this learning. Using qualitative methods and a cross-sectional design, this study documented speech-print linking (SPL) for 134 English-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds beginning with their earliest writing and continuing as they learned that English print is glottographic and alphabetic. Analyses identified an ordered trajectory of six core approaches to SPL during writing. Adult interactions supported attention to SPL through the use of metalinguistic language and physical practices (pointing, slowed and segmented reading of print) materializing the one-to-one match between spoken and written language. Children’s emergent approaches to SPL provide evidence of their developing understanding of how print functions as a representational system.

Author

• Deborah Rowe, Vanderbilt University