Route to Literacy: Knowledge of Concepts about Print by Children of Preschool Age
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14712/23362189.2020.000Keywords:
early literacy, parents and children reading together, concepts about print, home literacy environmentAbstract
In addition to the identification of letters and their clusters in words, reading requires additional knowledge and skills. The reader must be familiar with the graphic and formal properties of books, the directionality of reading, and other elements of books that are collectively called concepts about print. They are acquired as early as at preschool age.
Aims: The aim of the research was to assess the knowledge of concepts about print of a sample of Czech preschool children (n = 142) and to identify the factors that related to this knowledge.
A test originally developed by Marie M. Clay was used. It assessed 19 elements of print. Th e other research instrument was a questionnaire in which the parents of these children described their home literacy environment.
Findings: As expected, the children’s performance improved with their age. Simultaneously, the differences in performance among children of the same age decreased with age. Th e children performed best in understanding a text as a carrier of a story, knowledge of the front page of a book, the identification of capital letters, and the directionality of reading. Regression analysis examined four models that predicted their performance in concepts about print. Th e best predictors appeared to be the age of the children, the amount of time spent on reading together, the parents’ print activities with the children, and the number of books a child possessed. While the first predictor embraces the child’s maturation and experiences of books during preschool years, the other three predictors include the influence of the home literacy environment. These four predictors explained 29.4% of the overall variance of the regression model. Contrary to expectations, the frequency of parents and children reading together had only a weak correlation with concepts about print.
Conclusions: Knowledge of concepts about print appears to be an important theoretical framework, but it is also a valuable diagnostic variable in early literacy. In addition, it reveals the quality of the home literacy environment.
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