Abstract
A child's early literacy experiences have a long-term impact on reading and writing ability and academic success. Children with more and diverse literacy experiences are at a clear advantage to do better in school. Given that socioeconomic adversity is negatively correlated with children's language development, rich literacy experiences become even more relevant in this population. Children who enter primary school with fewer emergent literacy skills often continue to struggle to achieve academic success and are more likely to be unemployed as adults, hence the need to act from a prevention perspective by universally promoting these skills in preschool children is fundamental. The authors present as an intervention proposal, an emergent literacy program especially targeted to socially disadvantaged pre-school age children. In this program, mediated through storytelling, several emergent literacy skills will be worked on, namely vocabulary, conventions about print, narrative structure, phonological awareness, the child's concept as a reader, and motivation for writing.
TopSocial Disadvantage
Socio-economic adversity is associated with child language development (Dockrell et al., 2022; O’Hare, 2016; Romeo et al., 2018, 2021), and this adversity has been a focus of investigation for decades (Pace et al., 2016).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Phonological Awareness: Is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds of spoken language.
Speech-Language Pathologist/Therapist: Is the professional responsible for prevention, assessment, diagnose and treatment of speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication, and swallowing disorders in both children and adults.
Storytelling: Is the art of conveying narratives through different means to enroll with an audience.
Emergent Literacy: Is the early skill for learning to read and write in young children.
Narrative: Is a structured story that describes events, often involving characters and a plot.