Enhancing the Early Reading Skills: Examining the Print Features of Preschool Children’s Book

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the uses of print features in preschool children's books in the US and Turkey, in order to helping adults to understand print features and supporting children's print awareness. In this context, two hundred children's books was randomly selected from the US and Turkey. Document analysis was used for examining the children's books. For the analysis of how to use print features, this study used coding systems adapted from McCarier, Pinnel, and Fountas (2000) and Zucker, Ward, and Justice (2009). After identifying children's book literature as concept books, theme collections, rhythm's books of language, and story books, we evaluated print features of books according to six features: labeling/environmental print, visible speech, visible sound, letters in isolation, font changes, and bold or unique fonts in the coding system. Findings of this study showed that examining children's books in the US contains more print features than examining children's books in Turkey.

Characteristics of print in books for preschool children

“…It has been suggested that books that contain a good deal of such print are an important vehicle for early literacy learning because they support the development of print awareness (Cetin & Bay, 2015; Zucker, Justice, & Piasta, 2009). This idea is based on the finding that preschool children pay more attention to writing that is large or bold or embedded in pictures than writing that does not have these characteristics (Neumann, Acosta, & Neumann, 2014; Neumann, Summerfield, & Neumann, 2015; Smolkin, Conlon, & Yaden, 1988; Smolkin, Yaden, Brown, & Hofius, 1992).…”

“…In the only other study, to our knowledge, to have examined these issues, Cetin and Bay (2015) examined the print in 100 books designed for US preschoolers. They found that most of the books contained several instances of visually salient print.…”

“…Children prefer bright colors over black (e.g., Malter, 1948), and colored print has been considered visually salient (Cetin & Bay, 2015; Zucker et al, 2009). We coded whether words were printed all in black or whether they included colored letters.…”

“…The latter styles have been described as visually salient (Cetin & Bay, 2015), and studies suggest that they draw preschoolers’ attention (Neumann et al, 2014). We also coded whether the letters of the randomly chosen word were in a serif font (e.g., ‹k›) or a font without serifs (e.g., ‹›).…”

“…Words in which the letters have an arrangement other than the standard horizontal have been considered to be high in salience (Cetin & Bay, 2015; Zucker et al, 2009). We examined the frequency with which alternative arrangements were used.…”