Research on Emergent Literacy
According to the 1991 Carnegie Foundation report, Ready to Learn, A Mandate for the Nation, 35% of children in the United States enter public schools with such low levels of the skills and motivation that are needed as starting points in our current educational system that they are at substantial risk for early academic difficulties.
This problem, which is usually placed under the rubric of school readiness, is strongly linked to family income. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has documented substantial differences in the reading and writing ability of children as a function of the economic level of their parents. For example, among African-American and Hispanic students in the U.S. (two groups who experience disproportionate rates of poverty) the percentages of Grade 4 students reading below the basic level are 64% and 60%, respectively (National Center for Educational Statistics).
The relationship between the skills with which children enter school and their later academic performance is strikingly stable. For instance, research has shown that there is nearly a 90% probability that a child will remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if the child is a poor reader at the end of the first grade. Further, knowledge of alphabet letters at entry into kindergarten is a strong predictor of reading ability in 10th grade. Putting together these and many other findings, we see that school achievement co-varies with family income and social class. Social class differences in children's academic skills exist at the very beginning of school, and individual differences in school performance are stable from kindergarten to high school. There is tragedy in these facts because children's lives depend on success in school. Children who start school behind and typically stay behind. Their lives are at risk.
But the story begins well before school entry. We know that there are large social class differences in children's exposure to experiences that might support the development of emergent literacy precursors to academic success. For instance, research has shown that mothers from lower income groups engage in less shared picturebook reading and produce fewer teaching behaviors during shared reading than mothers from middle-class groups. One study found that 47% of public-aid parents reported no alphabet books in the home, in contrast with only 3% of professional parents reporting the absence of such books. By one estimate the typical middle-class child enters first grade with 1,000 to 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture book reading, whereas a child from a low-income family averages just 25 hours. Such experiential differences are clearly important in accounting for differences in academic outcomes and point to the importance of adopting approaches in the preschool period that prevent later difficulties in reading, writing, and other tasks of formal schooling.