What is Early Literacy and Which Skills Should We Develop?

The early years are crucial for developing skills that prepare children for reading and writing. Early literacy lays the foundation for formal learning. Discover its impact on children’s educational and professional futures.

By Ximena Dueñas, Gina Catalina Loaiza, Silvana Godoy Mateus and José Luís Sánchez

The early years of a person’s life are crucial for their development. Scientific evidence has shown that early care impacts sensory skills, motor skills, comprehension, expression, curiosity, exploration, non-verbal communication, vocabulary, and emotional relationships. During this period, early literacy develops, fostering foundational skills that will prepare children for formal reading and writing learning.

The sophistication of these skills depends on the quantity and quality of oral and written language experiences from birth. These experiences include:

• Learning words and their meanings.
• Back-and-forth conversations.
• Exposure to a variety of texts and reading materials at home or in the library.
• And the accumulated knowledge about the child’s world and the written world.

Learning opportunities are shaped by the environment, caregivers, family, and access to quality early education. These initial experiences lay the foundation for learning to read and write, known as early literacy.

What is Early Literacy and Why is it Important?

Early literacy, as defined by Donna Coch (2022), includes the emerging literacy knowledge and skills that infants and toddlers develop at home, in daycare, and preschools. These skills form the basis for formal school learning and determine professional and economic prospects throughout life.

Coch emphasizes the importance of teachers and caregivers preparing children, rather than waiting for them to be “ready to read.” In this sense, they must help and support them in developing the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes to learn to read and write.

As illustrated in Figure 1, the blue line shows that children who begin preschool (K) with these foundational skills tend to develop them further and experience successful educational trajectories. In contrast, the red line represents those who start school without these skills, who face ongoing difficulties that may lead to dropping out or progressing through the educational system without learning, perpetuating the so-called Matthew effect.

Figure 1. Educational Trajectories Based on Fundamental Skills

Source: Adapted from Coch, 2022, p. 21.

Which Skills Should Be Developed During Early Literacy?

It is important to create learning opportunities in family environments, daycare centers, and early education settings to develop foundational skills. These skills represent essential knowledge that must be cultivated beforehand, so children can learn to read and write, thus forming competent readers and writers.

Some of the most important foundational skills are addressed in the 2008 National Early Literacy Panel report:

1. Oral Language: This is the foundation for learning written language and involves knowing how to listen and speak. Through listening and interacting with family and caregivers, children absorb vocabulary and Spanish syntax, learn to combine words to communicate ideas and emotions, and use language with consideration for context or the recipient. For example, they learn to choose the appropriate register (formal or informal) to communicate effectively and develop the ability to understand narratives read by significant adults. These skills are later transferred to reading comprehension (Camargo et al., 2013). Oral exchanges and read-alouds allow children to develop abilities such as understanding and recalling, identifying and organizing events in sequence, following instructions, and interpreting and evaluating ideas in stories. The systematic development of speech influences writing; a child who speaks accurately, using more complex syntax and a wide vocabulary, approaches the structured, contextualized style of written language. Moreover, when a child speaks, teachers or caregivers must correct and pronounce words correctly, ask the child to expand, clarify, or repeat information, and help them appropriately organize what they say.
2. Print Concepts: Children must understand how books and printed writing work. Teachers, caregivers, or literacy leaders play a crucial role in this process. They should show the book’s cover, introduce the title, and highlight who the author or illustrator is. They should also point out how letters and words are arranged (from left to right and top to bottom) and explain that the words on the page represent spoken language.
3. Vocabulary Development: Children should have a broad vocabulary, with depth in meaning and quick recall. For these reasons, its teaching must be explicit and systematic.
4. Phonological Awareness: This is the ability to identify, discriminate, and manipulate the sounds that make up words (Jiménez y Ortiz, 2007). Phonological skills are essential for initiating literacy and require explicit teaching, as children need to understand that words are made up of different-sized sound units, each requiring different levels of work (Defior y Serrano, 2011). For example, lexical awareness focuses on the words that make up sentences or phrases; syllabic awareness is the ability to reflect on and manipulate syllables within a word; intrasyllabic awareness focuses on the onset or rhyme of words; and phonemic awareness allows the identification, counting, or manipulation of the minimal units of speech, or phonemes.
5. Letter Knowledge: Children must be able to identify, name, and write letters (uppercase and lowercase) of the alphabet, as well as the sounds they represent. This knowledge of the alphabet is a crucial precursor to reading and writing.
6. Emergent Writing: According to Villalón Bedregal and Figueroa (2016), this concept is the most important predictor for learning to produce texts and is manifested when adults incorporate written materials into children’s daily lives, proposing different activities that encourage positive attitudes towards writing. This approach also helps them understand fundamental aspects of how the writing system works: that it represents oral language, its communicative function, how letters are assembled, their directionality, the ability to differentiate images from letters, the identification and writing of letters, knowledge of some grapheme-phoneme correspondences, as well as the writing of their name and the names of significant people for children.

Finally, early literacy is the “stage” where the adults most significant to children build emotional bonds with reading and writing through playful, meaningful practices, offering caring and motivating interactions. Families, caregivers, and teachers play an essential role in fostering rich oral exchanges in terms of both vocabulary quantity and depth, as well as complex syntactic structures (more elaborate sentences). They provide children with reading materials, read to them aloud, engage in back-and-forth conversations about what has been read, participate in library activities and story hours, promote early scribbles and name writing, and create an affectionate environment around oral and written language that motivates learning and helps children find meaning in words.

If you want to learn more about these topics and other important skills related to early literacy, we invite you to explore the following resource and stay tuned for the upcoming launch of the free course “The Journey of Literacy.”