Developing Early Literacy by in Young Children by Deborah Williams

Today’s youth were born into a high technology world; they have always been around electronic screens and had instant access to information.  It is not surprising, then, that many children have been exposed to sophisticated graphics and animations at a very young age, but a recent report on the Science Daily website explains that a new study shows,  “…early writing, preceding any formal education, plays an instrumental role in improving a child’s literacy level, vocabulary, and fine motor skills.”  These findings suggest that parents probably should shift from teaching letters of the alphabet to also helping their children to connect the sounds to the letters on paper.
The study was conducted by Professor Dorit Aram of the Jaime and Joan Constantiner School of Education of Tel Aviv University and with Professor Samantha W. Bindman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other US colleagues.  Professor Aram studied adult support of young children’s writing.  One type of support, “grapho-phonemic mediation,” involves the adult being “actively involved in helping a child break down a word into segments to connect sounds to corresponding letters.”  Professor Aram studied the levels of parental support for 135 ethnically-diverse, middle-income preschool children during a writing activity at a semi-structured birthday party.
Researchers found that parental support was most useful in developing early literacy skills in young children.   “The thing is to encourage children to write, but to remember that in writing, there is a right and a wrong,” said Prof. Aram. “We have found that scaffolding is a particularly beneficial activity, because the parent guides the child. And, if that parent guides the child and also demands precision in a sensitive and thoughtful way — i.e. ‘what did you mean to write here? Let me help you’ — this definitely develops the child’s literary skill set.”