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This article was downloaded by: [University of Illinois Chicago]On: 17 October 2014, At: 12:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Research in ChildhoodEducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujrc20
Educators' Literacy Practices in TwoEmergent Literacy ContextsLisa-Christine Girard a , Luigi Girolametto a , Elaine Weitzman b &Janice Greenberg ba University of Toronto , Toronto , Canadab The Hanen Centre , Toronto , CanadaPublished online: 19 Dec 2012.
To cite this article: Lisa-Christine Girard , Luigi Girolametto , Elaine Weitzman & Janice Greenberg(2013) Educators' Literacy Practices in Two Emergent Literacy Contexts, Journal of Research inChildhood Education, 27:1, 46-60, DOI: 10.1080/02568543.2012.739591
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Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 27: 46–60, 2013Copyright © Association for Childhood Education InternationalISSN: 0256-8543 print / 2150-2641 onlineDOI: 10.1080/02568543.2012.739591
Educators’ Literacy Practices in TwoEmergent Literacy Contexts
Lisa-Christine Girard and Luigi GirolamettoUniversity of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Elaine Weitzman and Janice GreenbergThe Hanen Centre, Toronto, Canada
This study examined educators’ strategies for promoting emergent literacy skills in early childhoodclassrooms and children’s responses to these strategies. Educators’ responses to items on a literacyquestionnaire were correlated with the observed use of strategies. Twenty early childhood educatorsand 76 preschoolers participated in this study. Videotaped interactions of small-group storybook read-ing and a poststory writing activity were coded to capture the frequency of educators’ and children’suse of print references, alphabet letter names, alphabet letter sounds, and decontextualized language.A literacy questionnaire tapped educators’ perceptions of their literacy facilitation practices in thesesame areas. Educators and children used more utterances that contained alphabet letter names andthe sounds of letters during the poststory writing activity than during storybook reading. In contrast,they used higher frequencies of decontextualized language in storybook reading than in the writingactivity. Educators’ ratings of strategies to model letters, sounds, and prediction questions were cor-related with educators’ use of these strategies during videotaped interactions. Overall, the results ofthis study suggest that literacy-rich contexts in addition to storybook reading may be useful for pro-moting emergent literacy skills in early childhood classrooms. Professional development is requiredto improve educators’ knowledge about emergent literacy facilitation skills and the diverse contextsin which it may be carried out.
Keywords: early literacy, early literacy learning, early childhood educators, early childhood
An important focus of early childhood settings is the facilitation of emergent literacy skills(Justice, Kaderavek, Fan, Sofka, & Hunt, 2009). Emergent literacy has been defined as the skillsand knowledge that precede formal reading and support the development of decoding skills andreading comprehension (e.g., Sulzby & Teale, 1991). Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998) categorizedemergent literacy skills into two broad areas: outside-in skills, which include vocabulary andoral language development, and inside-out skills, which include print knowledge, alphabet letter
Submitted April 13, 2011; accepted June 14, 2011.This study was funded by the Canadian Language and Literacy Network and the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (Canada).Address correspondence to Luigi Girolametto, University of Toronto, 500 University Avenue, Room 160, Toronto,
ON M5G 1V7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
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EDUCATORS’ LITERACY PRACTICES 47
names, and phonological awareness. Within this conceptualization, outside-in skills are purportedto facilitate reading comprehension, whereas inside-out skills support the development of earlydecoding and spelling. The importance of facilitating emergent literacy skills in preschool settingsis underscored by the finding that children who begin elementary school with poor emergent lit-eracy skills are less able to take advantage of reading instruction in kindergarten (Snow, Burns,& Griffin, 1998).
Increasing numbers of children attend child care centers where their developmental progress isfacilitated by early childhood educators. As a result, these settings have the potential to be impor-tant sources of emergent literacy experiences, because there are multiple opportunities to modelemergent literacy skills during naturalistic classroom activities. Examples of these activitiesinclude name writing, singing rhyming songs, and storybook reading, all of which may include afocus on print concepts, sound awareness, and oral language. However, existing reports suggestthat that this potential is rarely realized. Several studies reveal that early childhood educators andpreschool teachers may provide less than optimal support for emergent literacy development, inpart, because their knowledge and expertise in this area is highly variable (e.g., Cunningham,Perry, Stanovich, & Stanovich, 2004; Cunningham, Zibulsky, & Callahan, 2009; Mather, Bos,& Babur, 2001). In addition, studies that have investigated the quality of literacy input “acrossthe day” (Connor, Morrison, & Slominski, 2006; Dickinson & Caswell, 2007; Justice, Mashburn,Hamre, & Pianta, 2008; Massey, Pence, Justice, & Bowles, 2008; Perlman & Fletcher, 2008) havereported substantial variability in the amount and type of emergent literacy instruction across andwithin classrooms. Moreover, there is variation in terms of how different classroom contexts mayinfluence the amount of emergent literacy talk, with some activities, such as storybook read-ing, providing more opportunities for literacy input (e.g., Girolametto, Weitzman, Lefebvre, &Greenberg, 2007; Massey et al., 2008). Thus, one purpose of this study was to examine the extentto which educators provided emergent literacy input within two activities that occur frequently inchild care centers, namely, storybook reading and a poststory writing activity. A second purposewas to examine the relationship between variation in the educators’ perceptions of their literacypractices and variation in the observed frequency of emergent literacy input during these twoactivities.
This study examines two complementary strategies for facilitating emergent literacy skills inpreschool children. The first promotes the development of oral language, an outside-in skill, byproviding opportunities for children to hear and use decontextualized language (Massey et al.,2008; van Kleeck, Vander Woude, & Hammett, 2006; Zucker, Justice, Piasta, & Kaderavek,2010). Decontextualized language refers to cognitively challenging, inferential language thatgoes beyond the “here and now” of the text to encourage children to relate an event in the story-book to their own personal experiences, make inferences and predictions about the characters inthe story, and provide explanations for story events. In contrast, less cognitively challenging lan-guage refers to talk about the story that includes basic descriptions, labels, or literal recounts ofinformation that are provided in the text (e.g., “what color is the dog,” “what is the dog doing?”).Educators’ use of inferential language has been associated with greater use of inferential languageby children (Zucker et al., 2010). The importance of this type of cognitively challenging languageis underscored by its central role in promoting advanced oral language development (van Kleecket al., 2006). Although storybook reading provides a natural context for decontextualized lan-guage (e.g., Massey et al., 2008), it is not known whether a poststory writing activity has thepotential to elicit similarly high rates of decontextualized story talk. In this study, we examined
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48 GIRARD ET AL.
four levels of oral language, at increasing levels of decontextualization, which have been adaptedfrom previously published protocols (e.g., Girolametto et al., 2007; van Kleeck et al., 2006).
The second strategy of interest in this study focused on educators’ use of utterances that con-tained print concepts, alphabet letter names, or sounds. Young children learn these inside-outskills from repeated exposure to text (e.g., in books, letters, signs) and from shared literacy experi-ences, in which adults make explicit references to print (Justice, Pullen, & Pence, 2008). Throughexplicit exposure to print, children learn about the different ways in which print conventions arerepresented, acquire elementary knowledge of alphabet letter names, and develop a concept ofwords and how they are composed (Zucker, Ward, & Justice, 2009).
Little is known about the ways in which context (i.e., the activity in which educators and chil-dren are engaged) influences the extent to which educators provide emergent literacy input. Themajority of the extant research has focused on shared storybook reading and the opportunities thatexist within this activity for modeling decontextualized language (e.g., van Kleeck et al., 2006;Zucker et al., 2010) and print knowledge (e.g., Justice & Ezell, 2002; Zucker, Justice, & Piasta,2009). Yet it is interesting to note that storybook reading is normally characterized by relativelysmall amounts of talk concerning alphabet letter names, sounds of letters, or print concepts. Forexample, Zucker et al. (2009) reported that verbal references to print occurred at the rate of onceper minute during storybook reading. Moreover, the results of this study revealed that 40% ofeducators’ references to print focused on how books are organized, 29% modeled letter namesand sounds, 19% referred to words, and 11% pointed out print as an object of meaning (e.g.,environmental print in illustrations). Thus, the amount of print/sound talk during storybook con-versations was minimal. In addition, during 15-minute literacy activities (e.g., shared storybookreading), Connor et al. (2006) revealed that educators focused on oral language skills (i.e., vocab-ulary, comprehension) for approximately 60 seconds, alphabet letter knowledge for 40 seconds,and letter-sound correspondences for 50 seconds. Taken together, these two studies reveal thatpreschool educators’ explicit models of emergent literacy strategies may be infrequent duringstorybook reading. This study builds on our understanding of how context may influence liter-acy input by comparing two naturalistic classroom activities (e.g., storybook reading, a poststorywriting activity) in terms of the frequency of emergent literacy models that they afford.
A secondary purpose of this investigation is to examine early childhood educators’ perceptionsof their own literacy practices. This is an important area of investigation, because educators’perceptions of their actual classroom practice may be indicative of their classroom practices.Unfortunately, studies that have compared educators’ self -ratings with behavioral measures havereported notable discrepancies between perceptions and practice. For example, Pentimonti andJustice (2010) administered questionnaires to determine educators’ perceptions of strategies toencourage children’s abstract, decontextualized language during storybook reading. Of interestwere strategies used by teachers during whole-class read-aloud sessions, such as generalizations(e.g., the child relates the content of the story to personal experiences), reasoning (e.g., the childexplains why something has occurred in the story), and predictions (e.g., the child predicts thenext event in the story). There was no relationship between teachers’ responses on written ques-tionnaires and the frequency with which they used these strategies during storybook reading.These findings are similar to previous studies that investigated educators’ knowledge of literacyand classroom practices (Cunningham et al., 2004; Cunningham et al., 2009) and to studies thatcompared educators’ scores on tests of literacy knowledge with their perceptions of their knowl-edge (Mather et al., 2001; McCombes-Tolis & Feinn, 2008; Spear-Swerling, Brucker, & Alfano,
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EDUCATORS’ LITERACY PRACTICES 49
2005). Further research investigating the perceptions and practices of early childhood educators isneeded to determine the gaps in classroom literacy practices, with the aim of informing objectivesfor professional development (Cunningham et al., 2004). Thus, this study examined educators’responses on a literacy questionnaire to behavioral data obtained from videotaped classroomactivities with preschool children (i.e., storybook reading and a poststory writing activity).
This study asked three questions. The first question asked whether early childhood educatorsused a higher rate of literacy models in storybook reading versus a poststory writing activ-ity. It was hypothesized that educators would use more strategies referring to print during thepoststory writing activity and more decontextualized language during storybook reading. Thesepredictions are based on results of a previous pilot study that reported this pattern of findings fora similar age group of children (Girolametto et al., 2007). The second question asked whetherchildren would mirror their educators regarding their use of references to print and decontextu-alized language. We predicted that children would also use more references to print during thewriting activity and more decontextualized language during the storybook reading based on pre-vious work (i.e., Girolametto et al., 2007; Justice, Pullen, et al., 2008; Massey et al., 2008). Thethird question asked whether early childhood educators’ perceptions of their literacy practiceswere correlated with their observed literacy practices. Although previous research has suggestedthat teachers have difficulties accurately reporting on their knowledge of emergent literacy strate-gies, no studies have examined the relationship between perceived versus observed practices ofearly childhood educators with respect to these specific skills under investigation (i.e., print refer-encing, alphabet letter names, alphabet letter sounds, decontextualized utterances), and few havelooked at preschool educators. We predicted that educators’ ratings would be significantly andpositively correlated with their use of these emergent literacy strategies during two videotapedactivities.
METHOD
Participants
Early childhood educators. The participants in this study were 20 early childhood educa-tors who worked in 18 licensed child care centers in the metropolitan area of Toronto, Canada.All educators had completed high school and a 2-year postsecondary diploma in early childhoodeducation. The 20 educators were female and had at least 2 years of experience in child care set-tings. All educators worked in preschool classrooms for 4- and 5-year-olds that had an adult-childratio of 1:8, as mandated by law in the Province of Ontario. Descriptive data on the characteristicsof the early childhood educators can be found in Table 1. The educators in this study held the pri-mary responsibility for curriculum planning in their classrooms. None of the educators reportedreceiving previous professional development on facilitating emergent literacy.
Children. A total of 76 children participated in this study. Each early childhood educator wasvideotaped in interaction with a small group of four typically developing children from her class-room. The group size was set at four children because previous research indicated that youngchildren are more interactive in small-group rather than large-group settings (McCabe et al.,
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TABLE 1Characteristics of the Early Childhood Educators (N = 20)
Variable M (SD) Minimum-Maximum
Age (in years) 39.5 (9.5) 23–58Years of educationa 2.9 (1.2) 2–5Years of experienceb 16.3 (7.0) 2–26Class sizec 15.0 (6.0) 8–24
aYears of education includes postsecondary education only. bExperience is determined as the number ofyears an educator had been working in child care settings. cAll classrooms had a ratio of one educator forevery eight children.
1996). This small group size is considered to be optimal for joint book reading activities andearly literacy instruction (Wasik, 2008).
To be representative of the gender balance in classrooms, each group attempted to include anequal number of boys and girls. Summary data describing the characteristics of the children canbe found in Table 2. The average age of the children was approximately 55 months. Most wereenrolled concurrently in half-day Junior Kindergarten or Senior Kindergarten programs at thetime of the study and spent the remainder of the day in child care. Junior Kindergarten programsare intended for 4-year-olds and are offered by public schools in Ontario, in addition to SeniorKindergarten programs designed for 5-year-olds.
Design and Procedure
Educators were recruited by means of a brochure with a fax-back application form that was cir-culated to all child care centers in Metropolitan Toronto, inviting educators to participate in aresearch study on emergent literacy. Once application forms were received, a research assistantcontacted the supervisors of the child care centers to confirm their commitment to participating inthe study. Where the supervisor and the educator agreed to participate, a research assistant visitedthe child care center to describe the research in more detail and obtain the educators’ written
TABLE 2Characteristics of the Children (N = 76)
Variables
GenderMale 34Female 42
Age (months) M (SD) 54.9 (6.0)Minimum-maximum 44-69
Time in child carea M (SD) 25.8 (16.5)Minimum-maximum 1–60
aLength of time in months that child has attended the child care center.
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EDUCATORS’ LITERACY PRACTICES 51
consent. Educators then completed three brief questionnaires that requested demographic infor-mation (e.g., educators’ age, training, years of experience), information about their classroomliteracy practices, and information about the children’s language development. They were givencopies of consent forms and questionnaires (requesting demographic information) to distribute tothe parents of the children.
One to two weeks after this first visit, the research assistant returned to the centers to collect theparent consent forms and questionnaires. In some cases, only three families had signed consentforms and the group size included the three available children. During this visit, the researchassistant videotaped the educator-child interaction during book reading and a poststory writingactivity. Only the children participating in the study were videotaped; the other children playedwith similar materials in another room or in a different area of the same classroom, or theyparticipated in outdoor play. The instructions for the shared storybook reading session were “Thepurpose of this videotape is to observe how children communicate during a typical storybookreading activity. Please read these two books to the children the way you usually read to them.”The groups were videotaped for 15 minutes of storybook reading that took place on the floorof the designated book center. The research assistant provided the educator with two unfamiliarbooks, Little Yellow Dog Gets a Shock (Simon, 2003) and Don’t Forget to Come Back (Harris,1978). The books were selected because they displayed print in various ways (e.g., in balloons,embedded within the pictures, in different font sizes and shapes).
Following the book reading activity, the educator and children engaged in a 15-minutepoststory writing activity. The instructions for this activity were,
Take the book Little Yellow Dog Gets a Shock to the child-sized table and remind them about thestory, that is, how the dog and cat share the chair with the rabbit. Ask the children to draw a pictureabout sharing. When they have finished, encourage them to write their names and a short descriptionof the picture. If the children say that they can’t write, help the children by writing the words forthem.
The materials provided by the research assistant included paper, pencils, and markers of differentcolors and sizes. Immediately following the videotaping, the early childhood educators rated therepresentativeness of their interactions using a 5-point scale (1 = very typical, 3 = typical, 5 =not typical). Educators rated their amount of talk and rate of speech as typical (mean rating =3.0 and 3.2, respectively). In addition, the educators determined that their comfort level was typi-cal of unobserved interaction (mean rating = 3.2). These ratings provided some assurance that theeducators believed their interactions to be similar to other unobserved small-group interactions inthe child care center.
Dependent Measures
Educators completed the Early Literacy Educator Questionnaire, adapted from a family literacyquestionnaire developed by Boudreau (2005) to assess their own classroom literacy practices.This rating scale included 12 items that educators rated using a 5-point frequency scale, rangingfrom 1 (never/not currently) to 5 (several times a day, very frequently). A reliability analysisof these 12 items yielded Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.80. The individual items and thesummary variables for the 20 educators are displayed in Table 3.
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TABLE 3Summary Statistics for Ratings on the Early Literacy Educator Questionnairea
Summary statistics
Questionnaire item MedianMinimum-Maximum
1. How often do you read to large groups of children? 4.0 3.0–5.0(a) On average, how many hours per week? 2.0 0.5–5.0(b) How many books do you typically read in one sitting? 1.8 1.0–2.5
2. How often do you read to small groups (i.e., fewer than 5)? 4.0 2.0–5.0(a) On average, how many hours per week? 1.1 0.4–7.5(b) How many books do you typically read in one sitting? 1.5 1.0–3.5
3. How often do you ask the children questions as you read the story? 4.0 3.0–5.0(a) Do you ask children to summarize facts in the story? 3.0 1.0–5.0(b) Do you ask children to relate their own experience to the story? 3.0 1.0–5.0(c) Do you ask children to predict what will happen next? 4.0 2.0–5.0
4. Do you attempt to teach the alphabet letter names when readingbooks?
3.0 1.0–5.0
5. Do you attempt to teach the sounds that alphabet letters make whenreading books?
3.0 1.0–5.0
6. Do you show parts of the book, such as where the words are, whatdirection to read?
3.0 1.0–5.0
7. Do you point out signs or words to the children? 5.0 3.0–5.08. Do you play games with alphabet letters? 4.0 1.0–5.09. Do you name letters as you write them? 5.0 1.0–5.010. Do you play rhyming games with the children? 3.0 1.0–5.011. Do you name the sounds that letters make? 3.0 2.0–5.012. Do you play games with sounds? 3.0 1.0–5.0
aAdapted from Boudreau (2005).
Videotaped interactions of educator-child interactions during storybook reading and apoststory writing activity provided the behavioral outcome measures used in this study. Thevideotapes were transcribed, and the transcripts were subsequently coded to yield measuresof decontextualized language and print/letter/sound references for educators and childrenseparately.
Transcription of educator utterances. All educators’ utterances occurring in the middle10 minutes of storybook reading and the middle 10 minutes of the writing/writing activity weretranscribed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) (Miller & Chapman,2002). This permitted all transcripts to be a standard 10 minutes in length, as some interactionswere shorter than the planned 30 minutes. Following a procedure used by Johnston (2001), oneresearch assistant completed all the transcripts and a second research assistant corrected the tran-scripts while viewing the videotape, entering queries and corrections directly onto the transcript.The two research assistants then met to resolve all discrepancies; where a discrepancy could notbe resolved, an X was entered on the transcript. Agreement reliability was calculated using thefollowing formula: number of agreements / (the number agreements + disagreements) × 100
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EDUCATORS’ LITERACY PRACTICES 53
(Sackett, 1978) and yielded 97.5% for educators’ utterance boundaries and 98.2% for educators’words. Agreement reliability indicated the extent to which the verifier agreed with the originaltranscriber prior to making any changes.
Educator coding system. A coding system, previously used by Girolametto et al. (2007),was used to classify the educators’ utterances into four levels of decontextualized talk and to iden-tify utterances that used print reference keywords, alphabet letter names, or alphabet letter sounds.Coding for decontextualized language and for print concepts was applied to the 10-minute story-book reading session and reading/writing activity. The content of educators’ utterances receivedone of four levels of decontextualization. Level 1 utterances were statements or questions thatfocused on a single element in the story (e.g., “What’s this?,” “The dog is yellow”). Level 2 utter-ances focused on two or more elements and the relationships between them (e.g., “The dog isrunning after the cat,” “Where are the dog and cat sitting?”). Level 3 utterances introduced emo-tions or extratextual connections to events in the children’s lives (e.g., “Have you ever had ababysitter?,” “What did that make you feel like?”). Level 4 utterances were statements or ques-tions that elicited inferences, predictions, and explanations (e.g., “Why did the dog chase thecat?,” “Where do you think the cat will go?”).
Utterances were next coded for print concepts, using a coding system adapted from the workof Ezell and Justice (2000) and Girolametto et al. (2007). Print referencing keywords includedall utterances containing 14 different keywords, including “print,” “read,” “say/says,” “spell,”“illustrator,” “author,” “lines,” “symbol,” “title/name,” “write,” “alphabet,” “letter,” “word,” and“sentence” (Ezell & Justice, p. 40). Alphabet letter names included all utterances that containedletter names (e.g., “This is a B”). Alphabet letter sounds included all utterances that explicitlyidentified the sounds that alphabet letters made (e.g., “This letter makes the sound /b/”).
Twenty percent of the transcripts were recoded independently by a second research assis-tant to provide reliability estimates for levels of decontextualized language, print referencingkeywords, alphabet letter names, and alphabet letter sounds. Interrater reliability was calculatedusing the formula: number of agreements / (the number agreements + disagreements) × 100(Sackett, 1978). The reliability for the four levels of decontextualized language was: 97.2% forLevel 1 (n = 212), 93.0% for Level 2 (n = 123), 94.6% for Level 3 (n = 185), and 90.8% forLevel 4 (n = 240). The reliabilities for print concepts were 95.6% for print referencing key-words (n = 45), 100% for alphabet letter names (n = 82), and 100% for alphabet letter sounds(n = 31).
Child coding system. Children’s utterances that immediately followed an educator codewere also coded using the same system that was applied to educators’ utterances. When an edu-cator code elicited talk from more than one child, all of the children’s utterances were coded. Thechild coding was completed by the first investigator, and 20% of the videotapes were randomlyselected and coded by an independent research assistant for reliability purposes. The interraterreliability for the individual child codes was: 93.5% for Level 1 (n = 46), 98.3% for Level 2 (n= 58), 94.2% for Level 3 (n = 52), and 94.1% for Level 4 (n = 119). The interrater reliabilityfor the children’s print concepts was: 100.0% for print referencing keywords (n = 21), 97.7% foralphabet letter names (n = 43), and 100.0% for alphabet letter sounds (n = 2).
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54 GIRARD ET AL.
RESULTS
The results are presented in four sections: (1) descriptive summary of educators’ responses to theEarly Literacy Educator Questionnaire, (2) analyses examining the emergent literacy strategiesused by early childhood educators during storybook reading and a poststory writing activity,(3) analyses of the children’s responses to the educators’ emergent literacy strategies duringstorybook reading and a post-story writing activity, and (4) correlations between the observed fre-quencies of educators’ strategies and their ratings on an emergent literacy questionnaire. Becauseall hypotheses were directional, one-tailed tests were used with alpha set at .05.
All educators completed a questionnaire on their current classroom literacy practices. Theresults of the questionnaire are summarized in Table 3. Most educators reported that they readto small groups of children (i.e., fewer than five children) on a daily basis (i.e., rating of 4.0) forapproximately one hour per week. They asked children questions a few times per story (ratingof 4.0). For example, they reported that they “occasionally” asked the children to summarize thefacts that are in the story (i.e., a rating of 3.0) or relate their own experiences to the story (i.e., a rat-ing of 3.0). However, they reported using prediction questions with higher frequency of 4.0 (i.e.,a few times per story). With respect to print concepts, educators reported that they occasionallyshowed parts of the book, such as where the words are and what direction to read in (i.e., ratingof 3.0). However, they pointed out signs or words in the classroom on a daily basis (i.e., ratingof 5.0). The educators reported that they occasionally taught letters of the alphabet (i.e., rating =3.0), played alphabet letter games weekly (i.e., rating = 4.0), and named letters during writingactivities on a daily basis (i.e., rating = 5.0). Modeling sound awareness was tapped by four itemsthat were consistently rated as 3.0 (i.e., occasionally).
The first series of analyses examined the educators’ facilitation of emergent literacy derivedfrom coding the videotaped interactions during storybook reading and the post-story writingactivity. It was hypothesized that the early childhood educators would use more print referenc-ing keywords, alphabet letter names, and alphabet letter sounds in the poststory writing activity.Further, it was hypothesized that they would use more decontextualized talk during storybookreading. Table 4 summarizes the means and standard deviations for these variables. For eachvariable, the frequency data were submitted to a mixed analysis of variance, with context (story-books, poststory writing activity) as the between-participants factor. The main effect of contextwas tested using the multivariate criterion of Wilks’s lambda (�). Educators’ use of alphabetletter names reached significance, � = 0.63, F(1,19) = 11.41, p = 0.002, partial η2 = 0.38, asdid their use of sounds, � = 0.82, F(1,19) = 4.19, p = 0.028, partial η2 = 0.18. However, printreferencing keywords did not reach significance, � = 0.98, F(1,19) = 0.40, p = 0.268, partialη2 = 0.21. Consistent with the hypothesis, these results confirmed that educators used signifi-cantly more utterances containing alphabet letter names and sounds during the post-story writingactivity than during storybook reading. The effect size was large for letter names and mediumfor sounds (Bakeman, 2005). Next, the data for literal and decontextualized talk were examined.The summary data in Table 4 indicate that educators used more decontextualized talk during sto-rybook reading than during the poststory writing activity. Because of the large number of nullvalues during storybook reading, statistical analyses were not conducted.
The second research question examined the children’s participation in the two contexts.An examination of the data in Table 5 indicates that their use of the three print concept cate-gories was very low; thus, these three categories were collapsed for analysis. The results yielded
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EDUCATORS’ LITERACY PRACTICES 55
TABLE 4Means and Standard Deviations for Educators’ Literacy Talk in Two Contexts
Variable Storybook reading Poststory writing activity
# Educators’ utterances containingPrint referencing keywords
M (SD) 5.15 (3.6) 6.25 (6.4)Minimum-maximum 0–13 0–28
Alphabet letter namesM (SD) 0.05 (0.2) 7.00 (9.2)Minimum-maximum 0–1 0–35
Alphabet letter soundsM (SD) 0.10 (0.4) 1.35 (2.8)Minimum-maximum 0–2 0–9
# Educators’ utterances atLevel 1–2
M (SD) 35.2 (22.7) 1.7 (4.0)Minimum-maximum 5–92 0–16
Level 3M (SD) 14.2 (11.5) 0.1 (0.2)Minimum-maximum 0–47 0–1
Level 4M (SD) 22.9 (12.0) 0 (0.0)Minimum-maximum 1–47 0–0
Note. N = 20.
a significant difference for context, � = 0.695, F(1,75) = 32.98, p = 0.001, partial η2 = 0.31,indicating that children used significantly more print concepts in the post-story writing activity.The effect size for this result was large (Bakeman, 2005). Similar to the educators, the chil-dren used more literal and decontextualized talk during storybook reading. Because of the largenumber of null values during storybook reading, statistical analyses were not conducted.
The final question examined whether the educators’ self-reports of their emergent literacypractices would be positively correlated with their observed practices. A series of Spearman rankcorrelations were conducted to examine the relationships between early childhood educators’ rat-ings of their literacy practices with the frequency of their use during the two activities combined.The results of the correlations are presented in Tables 6 and 7. A significant correlation was foundbetween educators’ mean ratings on three alphabet letter items and their observed use of alphabetletters during the videotaped activities, r = .381, p = .049. Approximately 15% of the variance(i.e., R2 = .145) in educators’ use of letter names was accounted for by their rating on the ques-tionnaire. In addition, a significant correlation was found between educators’ mean ratings onfour sound awareness items and their observed use of sounds during the videotaped activities,r = .405, p = .038. Approximately 16% of the variance (i.e., R2 = .164) in educators’ use ofsounds was accounted for by their rating on the questionnaire. No significant relationship wasfound between educators’ mean ratings on two items: tapping print concepts and the observedfrequency of print references. With respect to their use of literal and decontextualized language,a significant relationship was found between educators’ ratings of one item concerning the useof prediction questions and the frequency of their Level 4 utterances in videotaped storybook
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TABLE 5Means and Standard Deviations for Children’s Literacy Talk in Two Contexts
Variable Storybook reading Poststory writing activity
# Children’s responses containingPrint referencing keywords
M (SD) 0.11 (0.3) 0.89 (1.3)Minimum-maximum 0–2 0–6
Alphabet letter namesM (SD) 0.03 (0.2) 2.21 (4.0)Minimum-maximum 0–1 0–22
Alphabet letter soundsM (SD) 0.03 (0.2) 0.07 (0.3)Minimum-maximum 0–1 0–2
# Children’s responses atLevel 1–2
M (SD) 5.8 (6.8) 0.3 (0.9)Minimum-maximum 0–31 0–5
Level 3M (SD) 3.8 (4.0) 0.01 (0.1)Minimum-maximum 0–17 0–1
Level 4M (SD) 4.3 (4.1) 0.01 (0.1)Minimum-maximum 0–19 0–1
Note. N = 76.
TABLE 6Correlations Between Educator’s Ratings and Observed Use of Print Referencing Keywords,
Alphabet Letter Names, and Alphabet Letter Sounds
Educators’ Ratings on Rating Scale Items (N = 20)
Keywordsb Lettersc Soundsd
Observed frequency of:a
Print referencing keywords r = .227, p = .168Alphabet letter names r = .381∗, p = .049Alphabet sound names r = .405∗, p = .038
∗Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (one-tailed).aThe frequency of individual codes derived from 20 minutes of interaction (storybook reading and poststory writingactivity, combined). bMean rating of Items 6 and 7 regarding print concepts (Mean rating = 3.4, “occasionally”). cMeanrating of Items 4, 8, 9 regarding letter names (Mean rating = 3.7, “weekly”). dMean rating of Items 5, 10, 11, 12 regardingsound awareness (Mean rating = 3.2, “occasionally”).
reading, r = .460, p = .021. Approximately 21% of the variance (i.e., R2 = .212) in educators’use of Level 4 utterances was accounted for by their rating on this item. No significant relation-ships were found between educators’ ratings of items concerning summarizing facts and relatingexperiences and the frequency with which they used comparable utterances during the videotapedinteractions.
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TABLE 7Correlations for Educator’s Use of Literal and Decontextualized Talk During Storybook Reading
Educators’ Ratings on Rating Scale Items (N = 20)
Summarize factsb Relate experiencesc Make predictionsd
Observed frequency of:a
Level 1 and 2 literal talk r = .000, p = .499Level 3 decontextualized talk r = −.252, p = .149Level 4 decontextualized talk r = .460,∗ p = .021
∗Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (one-tailed).aThe frequency of individual codes derived from 10 minutes of storybook reading. bMean rating of Item 3a, “If you askquestions as you read, do you ask children to summarize facts that are in the story?” cMean rating of Item 3b, “If youask questions as you read, do you ask children to relate their own experiences to the story?” dMean rating of Item 3c, “Ifyou ask questions as you read, do you ask children to predict what will happen next?”
DISCUSSION
The primary objective of this research study was to investigate the effects of context on educators’literacy practices. Educators and small groups of children were videotaped during two naturalisticactivities: storybook reading and a poststory writing activity. The results indicated that educatorsfrequently engaged the children in conversation during storybook reading at all levels of literaland decontextualized talk. Approximately one half of the educators’ utterances elicited facts fromthe story (i.e., Level 1 and 2 literal talk), whereas the other half elicited children’s more cogni-tively challenging talk, such as personal experiences, predictions, and inferences. These typesof utterances occurred very rarely during the poststory writing activity, even though there wasan opportunity to connect the theme of the storybook to children’s own experiences of sharingobjects or toys. The children mirrored their educators in the storybook activity by providing literaland decontextualized responses, albeit at a considerably lower rate than their educators. Similarly,there were few instances of literal and decontextualized story talk during the children’s poststorywriting activity. Prior studies have revealed similar patterns of concordance between educatorand child behavior for print strategies and decontextualized talk (e.g., Girolametto et al., 2007;Justice, Pullen, et al., 2008; Zucker et al., 2010).
These results support previous research findings indicating that shared storybook readingyields higher rates of cognitively challenging talk than other classroom contexts (e.g., Masseyet al., 2008). The importance of cognitively challenging talk has been supported by Zucker et al.(2010), who found that the use of cognitively challenging questions encourages children to partic-ipate in conversations at complex, inferential levels. However, the results contrast with previouswork suggesting that storybook reading also may provide an important context for modelingalphabet letter names and sound awareness. In this study, such models were negligible during sto-rybook reading but occurred much more often during the poststory writing activity. The writingactivity used in this study may have provided more scope for letter and sound talk because edu-cators asked the children to write their names and a brief description of their pictures. Children’sexposure to print concepts (e.g., letter names, sounds) is thought to facilitate their development ofprint awareness, which is considered to be foundational for the acquisition of literacy (Whitehurst
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& Lonigan, 1998). Thus, the comparison of two naturally occurring contexts revealed individ-ual areas of concentration with respect to creating complementary opportunities for modelingemergent literacy skills.
A secondary objective of this study was to investigate the relationships between variation in theearly childhood educators’ ratings of their own literacy practices and variation in the observed fre-quencies of literacy practices in the classroom. The results indicated that educators’ perceptionsof their practices were significantly and positively related to their practices in three main areas,including the use of letter names, sounds, and predictions (i.e., Level 4 decontextualized lan-guage). These findings are inconsistent with prior research that investigated elementary schoolteachers’ perceptions of their literacy instruction skills and indicated that teachers’ self-reportsare generally positive and overestimate their knowledge and use of literacy instruction strate-gies (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2004; Cunningham et al., 2009; Mather et al., 2001; Pentimonti& Justice, 2010). One possible explanation for this contrasting finding is that in these previousstudies, most teachers had completed preservice training that included reading instruction andwere familiar with the concepts in the questionnaire. In comparison, the early childhood educa-tors in this study completed a 2-year community college diploma that did not include significantcontent on emergent literacy development. Overall, the associations noted in this study suggestthat early childhood educators were able to provide reliable information about their use of threeof the six literacy strategies under investigation in this study (i.e., letter names, sound awareness,and predictions).
Several limitations must be noted in interpreting the findings of this study. First, this studyhad a small number of educators (N = 20) who self-selected their participation in this study andexpressed an interest in literacy. Consequently, the results of this study may not be generaliz-able to all educators working with preschoolers. However, all 20 educators had a 2-year diplomain early childhood education, at least 2 years of experience with preschoolers, and no emergentliteracy training. Therefore, the results may be applicable to educators with similar characteris-tics who are motivated to improve their knowledge of literacy facilitation. However, replicationinvolving educators with diverse characteristics is needed to construct a more complete pictureof the abilities of preschool educators. A second limitation involves the representativeness of thevideotaped activities and whether the observations can be generalized to other contexts. Althougheducators rated the representativeness of these activities as typical, it is possible that educatorsmay have felt inhibited or may have displayed skills that they thought the researchers wantedto elicit, rather than engage in “typical” interactions. In addition, naturalistic classroom observa-tions in other contexts and without videotaping would be necessary to corroborate the findings ofthis study. There may be additional opportunities for educators to use these strategies throughoutthe day that were not captured by the shared storybook reading or the poststory writing activ-ity that were examined in this study. Third, this study did not include information about thedomain-specific knowledge that early childhood educators possessed about emergent literacy.Investigating knowledge constructs has the potential to determine how aware educators are ofthe components of emergent literacy (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2009). Future work that includesa short questionnaire focused on subject matter knowledge would permit a more complete pic-ture of what educators know about emergent literacy skills and how to facilitate them. Finally,the educators in this study were observed during literacy activities with small groups of children(i.e., three to four children), which may not represent the typical size of reading groups in manypreschools. The educators completed a survey in which they reported reading to small groups
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on a daily basis, but their self-reports may not accurately represent typical reading interactions.Consequently, the results of this study are applicable to small-group literacy activities, which isa best practice for supporting learning in young children (Wasik, 2008). Replication of this studyinvolving larger reading groups is needed to construct a complete picture of educators’ ability topromote emergent literacy skills across the day.
This study contributes to the literature in two important ways. First, the results of this studyillustrate concordance between educators’ perceptions and their actual practices in three mainareas of emergent literacy instruction (i.e., letter names, sounds, and inferential prediction ques-tions). This suggests that the educator questionnaire used in this study may be a viable means ofobtaining a baseline of classroom literacy practices. The results of the questionnaire may be veryuseful for planning and implementing professional development workshops that seek to build onthe strengths of educators. For example, the variation in survey responses suggests that some edu-cators were implementing literacy strategies (e.g., stating alphabet letter names) seldom, whereasothers may have been using it often. Professional development workshops could draw on the skillsof those educators who report high use of a strategy to support the topics of small-group or large-group discussions. Second, this study includes a description of the benefits of poststory writingactivities for modeling code-focused talk. In comparison with shared reading, the results revealedthat the writing activity provided a richer context for modeling code-focused talk. The pattern offindings for storybook reading and the poststory writing activity has important implications forprofessional development. This study shows that untrained early childhood educators may natu-rally use many strategies that model emergent literacy skills, albeit in context-dependent ways.Professional development programs can build on educators’ existing strengths to (1) increasethe frequency of occurrence of these specific strategies (e.g., ask more prediction questions dur-ing storybook reading) or (2) transfer the use of a specific strategy to another context (e.g., askprediction questions during a poststory writing activity).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of staff at The Hanen Centre, research assistant GarthFoote, and the many research assistants, educators, and families who made this study possible.
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