Session Information
09 SES 05 B, Home and School Learning Environments, Early Childhood Education and Achievement
Paper Session
Contribution
Interest in investigating the extent of young children’s language and literacy knowledge when they enter school has increased in recent years. Monitoring the development of children’s literacy learning in the early years of school involves a number of challenges for educational researchers. These challenges include the choice of appropriate strategies for identifying the literacy knowledge and skills of young learners, and ways of comparing individual achievement with general patterns of literacy development. Formal and informal literacy assessments early in children’s first year at school indicate that there is a wide distribution of achievement, and that children’s literacy experiences prior to entering school vary considerably.
A set of early literacy assessments was developed and administered to a nationally representative sample of Australian children in a longitudinal study in 1999, the Longitudinal Literacy and Numeracy Study (Meiers, Khoo, Rowe, Stephanou, Anderson, & Nolan, 2006). The literacy activities were informed by contemporary research focusing on critical aspects in the development of effective literacy skills. The activities were designed to interest and engage students and were built around familiar contexts. The literacy activities included many ‘hands-on’ activities and authentic texts for example, high quality children’s picture storybooks. Since the initial study, similar literacy activities have been used in many other studies of students’ growth in literacy learning in the early years of school, for example, In Teachers’ Hands (Louden, Rohl, Barratt Pugh, Cairney, Elderfield, House, Meiers, Rivalland, & Rowe, 2005).
This paper focuses on findings related to children’s responses to picture story books read aloud from five different student samples, including four samples of students at the beginning of their first year at school, and one sample of students in preschool in the year prior to formal schooling. The studies involved span the years 2003-2012. Different picture story books were used in these five studies, and the paper will report on the percentages of students in each sample who responded appropriately to questions and prompts, and to the range of these responses. These related to different aspects of understanding and response to literacy texts: recalling some key aspects of a narrative, using visual information, providing simple explanations of a character’s actions and motivations, making predictions about what might happen at a key point in the study, and making inferences about what happened by drawing on visual information as well as what the text read aloud.
Data from these studies indicates the broad range of understanding of age-appropriate texts within the student samples. Rasch measurement was used to develop literacy scales showing the relative difficulty of text-based activities in each study, and across the five studies patterns can be identified in the nature of students’ responses. The data also provides evidence of the knowledge of texts that children acquire from their experiences prior to school, and has implications both for planning literacy teaching programs in the first year of school, and for providing access to literacy texts to all children in the years prior to school.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Louden, W., Rohl, M., Barratt Pugh, C., Cairney, T., Elderfield, J., House, H., Meiers, M., Rivalland, J & Rowe, K. (2005). In Teachers’ Hands: Effective Teaching Practices in the Early Years of Schooling . Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 28(3) 175-253. Meiers, M., Khoo, S.T., Rowe, K., Stephanou, A., Anderson, P., Nolan, K., Growth in Literacy and Numeracy in the First Three Years of School, Australian Council for Educational Research, 2006
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