The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP; 2008) endeavored to identify instructional practices, parenting practices, and interventions that facilitate early literacy skills from birth through age five. The panel identified six robust predictors of later literacy skills: alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, writing letters, writing one’s name, and phonological memory. Alphabet knowledge refers to knowledge of the names of letters and the sounds associated with them. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to detect, manipulate, and analyze the sound system of a language. Phonological memory is the ability to remember spoken information.

An additional five skills were moderately correlated with later reading performance: concepts about print, print knowledge, reading readiness, visual processing, and oral language. Concepts about print includes aspects of print conventions, including reading from left to right (although this is different in some other languages), starting at the top of the page, knowing the the author is the writer of the words and the illustrator is the creator of the pictures, and recognizing parts of the book, such as the front cover, back cover, and spine. Print knowledge encompasses alphabet knowledge, concepts about print, and early decoding. Reading readiness is comprised of alphabet knowledge, concepts about print, vocabulary, memory, and phonological awareness. Visual processing refers to the ability to match or discriminate visual symbols. The last predictor, oral language, highlights the SLP’s role in working with children with deficits in literacy.

The NELP (2008) revealed that code-focused intervention and instruction, especially when phonological awareness was addressed, had a large effect on later reading performance. Shared book-reading has a moderate effect on oral language, as has been noted in the intervention section of this textbook. Shared book-reading also had a moderate effect on print knowledge, but there were surprisingly few studies assessing this relationship. Parent-implemented home literacy programs had a moderate to large effect on oral language and general cognitive abilities. Preschool and kindergarten literacy programs were found to be most beneficial for the area of reading readiness; that is, these programs helped prepare young children for school entry.

These findings of the NELP (2008) are important for the SLP to understand because children will enter school with diverse experiences with literacy activities. Some children enter kindergarten already reading, whereas other do not know the letters of the alphabet and have had few interactions with books. It is important to identify early experiences that may have contributed to a child’s success or challenges in learning to read. The following section describes scientifically based reading instruction for school-age children.

References

National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy. Available at http://www.nifl.gov/earlychildhood/NELP/ NELPreport.html