What is Pre-literacy/ Emergent literacy?
Pre-literacy skills need to be facilitated in young children by providing strategies and engaging activities to support children as well-developed and functional readers (De Witt & Lessing, 2018, p. 1845). Pre-literacy involves a “set of skills, knowledge and attitudes to formal reading and writing.” Pre-literacy skills mainly focus on developing “emergent writing skills” and “phonological awareness” (De Witt & Lessing, 2018, p. 1846).
Emergent literacy skills are vital to reading, writing, and language abilities. Reading success is dependent upon decoding skills, phonology and phonemic awareness, orthography, morphology, syntax and print knowledge (De Witt & Lessing, 2018, p. 1845).
Pre-literacy development among young children is a necessary step in development of solid reading skills. Children who are exposed early to reading, verbal modeling, and conversation are more likely to develop strong skills for reading and speaking by the age of five years. These observations are supported by the neural connections that are formed through the early exposure during the critical years of preschool (Pergar & Hadela, 2020, p. 104).
A study done by Skibbee and Bowles indicated that prevention of reading difficulties is presumably favored among most experts compared to remediating reading challenges later (2020, p. 1125).
Research by Pergar and Hadela shows that parents are aware of the importance of reading to children at an early age however, parents feel that more attention is needed for adult-child reading and that they would participate in workshops to learn more (2020, p. 110). This indicates that a children’s book aimed at guiding parents on how to read could be very useful and effective for parents.