Using popular culture print to increase emergent literacy skills in one high-poverty urban school district

Abstract

This study has focused on using the text associated with popular culture print to teach early literacy skills to pre-kindergarten students. This study examined whether explicitly using popular culture print to teach alphabet knowledge and print concepts increased the achievement of these skills. Data revealed an increase in the mean rank of the experimental group on the post-test of alphabet knowledge. Also, a statistically significant difference appeared to exist between the control and experimental groups' means on the knowledge of print concepts. At the end of the popular culture print intervention, there was a statistically significant difference between the group in which the children participated (experimental or control) and their early literacy skills of alphabet knowledge and print concepts.

Young Children's Visual Attention to Environmental Print as Measured by Eye Tracker Analysis

“…Therefore, environmental print may be a suitable resource for fostering letter and word knowledge because of its salient visual properties (e.g., size of letters and words) and ubiquitous, meaningful, and functional nature. Moreover, a number of intervention studies have shown that scaffolding preschooler's interactions with environmental print fosters emergent literacy skills such as letter knowledge, print concepts, and emergent writing (e.g., Neumann, Hood, & Ford, ; Prior, ; Vera, ). Thus, further eye tracker research using a pre–post test design will help determine whether providing environmental print strategies (e.g., by pointing to the environmental print letter, saying its name and sound, and tracing the letter with a finger; Neumann et al., ) does in fact increase children's visual attention to and knowledge of letters and words.…”

Mother–Child Referencing of Environmental Print and Its Relationship With Emergent Literacy Skills

“…These skills are important precursors for future reading development (Australian Government, 2005;Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). In addition to shared storybook reading, a potentially important way that young children come to experience print is through shared interactions with environmental print (Enz, Prior, Gerard, & Han, 2008;Neumann, Hood, Ford, & Neumann, 2012;Vera, 2011). Environmental print is defined as surrounding noncontinuous print that fulfills real-life functions and that appears in a variety of fonts, shapes, and sizes and generally in capital letters (e.g., Horner, 2005;Vukelich, Christie, & Enz, 2008).…”

The role of environmental print in emergent literacy

“…Vera (2007) examined the effects of a nine-week environmental print intervention (N ¼ 56) within a pre-kindergarten literacy curriculum. Popular culture environmental print logos familiar to the children (e.g.…”