Home Literacy Activities and Children’s Reading Skills, Independent Reading, and Interest in Literacy Activities From Kindergarten to Grade 2

Abstract

According to the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, 2014), young children can be exposed to two distinct types of literacy activities at home. First, meaning-related literacy activities are those where print is present but is not the focus of the parent-child interaction, for example, when parents read storybooks to their children. In contrast, code-related literacy activities focus on the print, for example, activities such as when parents teach their children the names and sounds of letters or to read words. The present study was conducted to expand the Home Literacy Model by examining its relation with children's engagement in literacy activities at home and at school as Finnish children transitioned from kindergarten to Grades 1 and 2. Two facets of children's engagement were examined, namely, children's independent reading at home and their interest in literacy activities. Children (N = 378) were tested and interviewed at the ends of kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Mothers completed questionnaires on their home literacy activities at each test time, and they reported the frequency with which their children read independently twice when children were in grade school. Tested was a longitudinal model of the hypothesized relations among maternal home literacy activities (shared reading and teaching of reading), children's reading skills, independent reading, and their interest in literacy activities/tasks as children progressed from kindergarten to Grade 2. Stringent path analyses that included all auto-regressors were conducted. Findings extended previous research in four ways. First, the frequency of shared reading and teaching of reading at home predicted the frequency of children's independent reading 1 year later. Second, children with stronger early literacy skills in kindergarten read independently more frequently once they were in Grade 1. Third, parents adapted, from kindergarten to Grade 1, their teaching behaviors to their children's progress in reading, whereas shared reading decreased over time. Fourth, children's own reports of interest in literacy activities were mostly not linked to other variables. Taken together, these results add another layer to the Home Literacy Model.

Parental Teaching of Reading and Spelling Across the Transition From Kindergarten to Grade 1

“…In particular, the teaching of reading before primary school has been found to be related to children’s early literacy skills, such as print concept awareness, letter knowledge, and decoding abilities ( Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002 ; Torppa et al, 2006 ). These associations have been demonstrated in opaque languages, such as English ( Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002 ; Hood et al, 2008 ; Stephenson et al, 2008 ) and French ( Sénéchal, 2006 ), and similar results have been obtained in orthographically transparent languages, such as German ( Lehrl et al, 2013 ; Niklas and Schneider, 2013 , Niklas and Schneider, 2017 ), Greek ( Manolitsis et al, 2011 , 2013 ), and Finnish ( Silinskas et al, 2020a , b ).…”

“…To better understand our correlational results, we took an approach similar to the one in previous analyses in the domain of reading ( Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2014 ; Silinskas et al, 2020a ) and continued investigating the mean-level differences between the teaching of reading and spelling activities for groups of children with different levels of skills. Participants with missing values for either teaching activities at any time point or skills at T3 were excluded from the analyses.…”

“…Early reading and spelling skills become relatively stable at the beginning of primary school and continue to improve thereafter ( Lerkkanen et al, 2004a ; Entwisle et al, 2005 ; Duncan et al, 2007 ; Torppa et al, 2017 ). Although schools are responsible for the development of children’s reading and spelling skills, parents and the home learning environments they create may be equally important in their development ( Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002 , 2014 ; Manolitsis et al, 2013 ; Niklas and Schneider, 2013 ; Silinskas et al, 2020a , b ). Although a plethora of studies on the effect of parental teaching on children’s skills exists, there are some limitations in the previous research that should be noted.…”

Effects of a Home Literacy Environment Program on Psychlinguistic Variables in Children from 6 to 8 Years of Age

“…With this, we intend to contribute new data to science on the effects of an HLE (A) program on a series of psycholinguistic and cognitive variables in a sample of children aged 6 to 8 years. As mentioned, there are many studies that have focused on the beneficial effects of HLE on these types of variables in samples of children under 6 years of age [ 12 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ], among others; however, there are fewer studies that seek to analyze these types of variables at older ages. Considering that these are variables that evolve, are related to and are affected by specific reading processes—such as decoding, which benefits from adequate phonological awareness and vice versa—we believe that they should also be studied in the early years of primary education (between 6 and 8 years of age).…”

Getting Books in Children’s Hands: Creating a Citywide Book Distribution Policy Using a Mixed-Methods Geospatial Approach

“…GIS include a collection of practices for producing geographic knowledge through the representation and analysis of spatial data (Elwood & Cope, 2009). Often recognized as an innovative way to highlight the ''geography of opportunity'' (Tate, 2008), geospatial analysis uses a data visualization process to uncover the structural inequalities historically entrenched in particular urban areas (Tate, 2008). Complementing this geographic analysis, in Phase 2 we then use qualitative methods to generate a more contextualized understanding of how the policy is working among the people for which it is intended.…”