HELPING CHILDREN

Helping Children Learn Language and Literacy

Abstract

This longitudinal investigation focused on the language and literacy environments of 1046 children from low-income families across children's first three years of life. Children's language and cognitive abilities at 14, 24, and 36 months of age were examined in relation to the frequency of children's participation in literacy activities, the quality of mothers' engagements with their children, and the provision of age-appropriate learning materials. Each aspect of the literacy environment uniquely contributed to the prediction of children's language and cognitive skills at each age, beyond child and family characteristics. Similarly, literacy experiences at each of the three ages explained unique variance in children's 36-month language and cognitive skills. These findings point to the importance of targeting multiple aspects of the literacy environment, already by the first year of life, as a means to supporting the development of young children from low-income families.

Helping Children Learn Language and Literacy

Aspects of the early literacy environment

Our primary goal was to examine the language and literacy experiences of young children from low-income families, and to describe relations between these early experiences and children's development within and across the first three years. Numerous investigators have documented associations between the quality of children's early literacy experiences and their language and cognitive development, although the majority highlight a specific dimension of the environment such as shared bookreading or parenting sensitivity ([Bryant and Bradley, 1987], [Hart and Risley, 1995], [Payne et al., 1994], [Raikes et al., 2006], [Senechal and LeFevre, 2001], [Tabors et al., 2001] and [Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001]). To date, relatively few studies document the unique and combined influences of multiple aspects of the literacy environment on children's outcomes prior to the age of three (e.g., [Bradley et al., 1989], [Britto and Brooks-Gunn, 2001], [Elardo et al., 1977], [Leseman and de Jong, 1998], [Scarborough and Dobrich, 1994] and [Storch and Whitehurst, 2001]). Even fewer target infants and toddlers from low-income families, despite the well-documented finding that by age three many of these children display language and cognitive delays ([Administration for Children and Families, 2000] and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network, 2001 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network, Before head start: Income and ethnicity, family characteristics, child care experiences, and child development, Early Education and Development 12 (2001), pp. 545-576.[National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network, 2001]). The study of multiple aspects of children's literacy environments may have particular significance during the early, formative years when cognitive growth and language acquisition are rapidly developing ([Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000] and [Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2006]).

To this end, children's language and cognitive abilities were examined longitudinally at 14, 24, and 36 months of age in relation to three aspects of the literacy environment: (1) the frequency of children's participation in literacy activities.

Literacy activities

Early and consistent participation in routine literacy activities, such as shared bookreading, storytelling, and learning about letters and numbers, ...