6 Domains of Early Literacy to Inform Your Work

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Decoding the National Report on Early Literacy
Christina Satkowski -

Last week, the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) released the results of its six-year effort to review and synthesize all available research about what works in preparing young children, from birth to age 5, to read. The fact that the report was released on the seventh anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act is no accident - the report serves as a reminder that early literacy programs work, and they are crucial if we are to achieve the law's goals of improving student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps.

This is strictly a research report, one that does not come with specific policy recommendations. But the findings are meant to inform policy. When the National Institute for Literacy released the report during a press conference last week, panel members weren't shy when asked for their own impressions of the policy implications of their research, and, of course, we have a few of our own.

To set the foundations for their study, the researchers looked at different measurements of pre-reading skills and identified six domains of early literacy that can serve as valid indicators of later reading skills.

* Knowing the names and sounds associated with printed letters (known as "alphabet awareness")
* Ability to detect and manipulate the auditory aspects of spoken language ("phonological awareness")
* Rapid auto-naming of a sequence of letters or digits
* Rapid auto-naming of objects or colors cued by pictures of the objects
* Ability to write individual letters and write one's own name
* Ability to remember spoken information for a short period of time

These 6 inicators are supplemented by a second set of skills that were found to have positive, though lesser, correlations with later reading skills. They include the ability to talk about a story and to distinguish the front of a book from the back, and they are just as important to a child's cognitive development as the six skills identified by the panel, but as this report showed, they are less predictive of later reading ability and fluency. Both skill sets should form the basis for standards and assessment of literacy skills in early education. As we discovered earlier, state guidelines for early education instruction vary greatly when it comes to what children are expected to know by age 5, and many states don't have any guidelines at all.

Using these indicators, the NELP researchers identified which types of early literacy intervention - namely, which teaching strategies -- most frequently produce positive results in experimental or quasi-experimental research. (They did not evaluate results from case studies or short-term trials.) They were also able to tie interventions to the specific domains of early literacy mentioned above. One finding that may surprise some is that popular programs involving adults reading books to children were found to have positive impacts on children's oral and general cognitive skills, but little correlation with improved performance in the six fundamental indicators of early literacy. More effective were programs that encouraged children to learn to decode words (seeing the relationship between sounds and letters within a word), along with educationally-intensive pre-kindergarten programs (like the Abecedarian Project).

In our view, what sets these types of intervention apart is that they are more heavily dependent on quality interactions between teachers and students. There is great potential in our early education teaching corps, but preschool teachers will need ongoing professional development (and can learn much from assessments like the Classroom Assessment Scoring System) to stay up-to-date with the best research-based instruction. Similarly, the report's findings underscore the need for more and better early education teacher preparation programs.

While most of the NELP's research focused on children aged 4 and 5, it included some studies on children aged 3 and under. These revealed that nearly all types of interventions have similar effects on early literacy regardless of age. The one exception was that language enhancement initiatives were found to have greater results among younger age groups. The broad scope of the NELP report reminds us that the conversation about early literacy is not only about pre-k. The fact that many research studies found positive impacts of parent-based intervention programs, especially when it came to boosting oral language skills and print awareness, is encouraging. Moreover, these findings remind policymakers and the public that parents are a child's first teachers, and the most effective early childhood programs need to be a family affair.

Finally, according to NELP, the most effective interventions occurred in small-group settings. This is an obvious reason for keeping teacher-student ratios low, and it has more subtle implications for classroom structure. Low teacher-student ratios, though often a good indicator of program quality, can't tell us how much one-on-one time students have with lead instructors or if activities are designed to maximize student engagement.

There are also two important points to note about what the NELP report doesn't tell us. First, meta-analysis of this size always comes with a caveat about the weaknesses of the original studies. In this case, be aware of the lack of data disaggregated by socio-economic status (including students who are English-language learners) and the reliance on an overwhelming number of studies that focused on decoding in particular.

Second, literacy is only one piece of the larger early learning puzzle. Efforts to improve children's early literacy skills must be integrated with broader goals for children's development, such a their social and emotional growth and their exposure to new ideas and content. Strong early literacy programs should be coupled with strategies that emphasize the whole child.