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What is Emergent Literacy?

Emergent literacy is what children know about reading and writing before they can actually read or write.  From birth through the preschool years, children should develop a knowledge of spoken language, the sounds from which words are formed, letters, writing, and books.  These skills lay the foundation for success when they enter school.

What are Emergent Literacy Skills?

Vocabulary is knowing the names of things.

• Vocabulary begins to develop at birth.

• By 12 to 18 months of age, most children begin to talk.

• Most two-year-old should have vocabularies of 300 – 500 words.

• Children should enter school knowing between 3,000 and 5,000 words.

Print motivation is a child’s interest in and enjoyment of books.

Print awareness includes learning basic rules of the written language.

• Writing flows from top to bottom and left to right.

• Print on the page is what is being read by someone who reads.

• Printed words are associated with sounds.

• Recognizing some familiar words in print.

Narrative skills include being able to understand and tell stories and being able to describe things.

Letter knowledge includes learning that letters are different from each other and that each letter has a name and a sound.

Phonological sensitivity is the ability to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds in words.  Examples include: recognizing whether a series of words rhymes, being able to put two words chunks together to make a word and being able to say words with sounds or word chunks left out.

The Early Literacy Initiative is a partnership between the Public Library Association and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.