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Differentiating Literacy Instruction for Culturally, Linguistically and Ability Diverse Students

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Prerequisite Literacy Skills

Developing literacy competence begins at a very early age, long before the child demonstrates an ability to read or write. Although this process is very complex in nature, a few fundamental, interrelated prerequisite skills have been identified, including: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, the alphabetic principle, and print knowledge. Recently, much emphasis has been placed on these skills because of our knowledge of the strong impact such foundational skills have on later achievement and increased effectiveness of prevention programs as compared to intervention programs. Below are concepts that apply to children who are younger than kindergarten age.

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

• Phonemic awareness is only one type of phonological awareness; phonological awareness is much broader, and includes other skills such as syllabic knowledge, onset, and rhyme.
• Phonemic and phonological awareness should not be confused with phonics, which is the knowledge that there is a predictable relationship between sounds and their corresponding letters.
• Phonological awareness has been demonstrated to be a strong predictor of later reading achievement (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).
• Both phonemic and phonological awareness are prerequisite skills for development of the alphabetical principle.
• Children who have poor speech discrimination may have difficulty acquiring phonological and phonemic awareness.
• Although phonological awareness is a good predictor of reading success, there are mixed results on the impact of direct instruction of phonological awareness on literacy skill development after the child enters the first grade (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

Teaching Strategies for Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

• Activities that can improve these skills could focus on rhyme, segmentation of morphemes and syllables, categorization and identification of syllables, and identification of similar and different sounds in word pairs.
  • Read a variety of stories and other written material to and with the child. Discuss them. Highlight new words.
  • Introduce new words and correct misuse of words.
  • Speak in appropriate adult language and avoid talking down to children (in other words, avoid using baby-talk).
  • Expose the child to a variety of experiences that s/he can use to make connections between those experiences and words. For example, while taking a walk around the neighborhood with a child, or riding a bus with the child, point out things you commonly see - car, bus, man, woman, girl, boy, tree, flower, colors - and use these words repeatedly and often during conversations with him/her.
    

Early Vocabulary Development

• The correlation between vocabulary size and literacy is well documented, particularly for early reading ability.
• Vocabulary size is a better predictor of early reading skills than age or general developmental level.
• Socio-economic status may be correlated with vocabulary size. One study demonstrated that first graders from higher income families had almost double the vocabulary than those from lower income families (Graves & Slater, 1987 as cited in Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

  Teaching Strategies for Early Vocabulary Development

  • Regardless of the child's background and learning experiences, his or her vocabulary can be increased through repetitive exposure to new words and rich conceptual experiences.

Alphabetic Principle

• The development of the alphabetic principle comprises various skills, such as rhyming, counting, adding and deleting syllables; matching beginning sounds in words; substituting and identifying sounds in selected words; matching and letter naming; and following print with the finger during read-alouds.

  Teaching Strategies for Alphabetic Principle

  • Development of such skills can occur through activities such as:
    • Reading and reciting songs, books, or poems that use rhyme or manipulation of sounds;
    • Playing word games (e.g., looking at a picture which includes a tree, you could say, "I see something in this picture that rhymes with flea, what is it?");
    • Reading engaging books to the child while pointing to the text being read;
    • In a variety of settings, identifying letters (e.g., pointing to the S on a stop sign and telling or asking the child "What letter is that?")

Print Knowledge

• Along with understanding what words are, how to construct them and take them apart, the student must also have an overall concept of what it looks like and feels like to read;
• Skills include but are not necessarily limited to understanding of the direction in which words are read, proper orientation of reading materials (holding the book right side up, moving from the left page to right page, and reading sentences from left to right);

  Teaching Strategies for Print Knowledge

  • Many of these skills are acquired through witnessing such behavior, such as observing parents reading for pleasure or necessity, using writing in a variety of settings, reading to the child, or dictating what the child says.
    

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