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• Myths About Literacy Development
• He Has A Summer Birthday: The Kindergarten Entrance Age Dilemma

Myths About Literacy Development

Judith A. Schickedanz

We all know that before children walk, they sit, crawl, and pull themselves up to stand. We know too that before children use mature speech, they coo and babble, and then use holophrases and telegraphic sentences. We take for granted that motor skills and oral language develop continuously over a period of years. A long history of continuous development is typical in the area of literacy learning too, although it has taken educators and child development experts a remarkably long time to begin to think about literacy in this way.

Why did it take so long for everyone to realize that literacy learning begins years before children receive specific instruction in first grade? Why does it sound strange to many people even now when this claim is made? Some longstanding myths may have prevented our seeing that reading and writing do not simply appear suddenly at a single point in time but emerge slowly over the course of several years.

Myth #1. Oral language must develop before written language can begin. Children are still in the process of mastering some of the basic aspects of oral language until the age of 5 or 6. For this reason, people once thought that written language development should not begin until after that age (e.g., Mattingly 1979).

Evidence: Although oral language development is essential to good written language development, it is not a prerequisite in the way once believed. Oral and written language skills develop simultaneously, with each supporting the other. For example, a good oral vocabulary helps children understand stories adults read to them and, later, stories they read to themselves. But children also learn many new words from listening to stories (Elley 1989; Adams 1990; Robbins & Ehri 1994). Similarly, sensitivity to the individual sounds of language, which develops as children hear and recite nursery rhymes and sing songs, aids in learning to read and write because it helps children become aware of the unit of sound represented by alphabet letters. Then, seeing the sequence of letters used to write words, such as the child’s name or the words in a favorite book title, further increases children’s sensitivity to the sounds that various words contain (Ehri 1975).

Myth #2. Children learn oral language naturally, but they acquire literacy-related knowledge only through direct instruction. The belief that children do not learn about aspects of written language somewhat as they develop oral language results from misunderstandings about the development of both oral and written language. First, the experiences needed to support oral language learning have often gone unrecognized. Second, the beginnings of literacy development have often been completely overlooked or ignored. Ask parents when their child began to talk, and they give the age at which their child first used some well-articulated words, not the age when the child began to read or write. But ask parents when a child began to read or write, and they are reluctant to give the child credit until such behaviors match the conventional, or adult, models.

Because they overlook many of children’s emergent literacy behaviors, considering them to be unrelated to later literacy behaviors, adults believe that children do not begin to learn about literacy until they get formal lessons in school. Thus, we tend to overestimate the extent to which oral language learning simply unfolds through maturation, regardless of social circumstances, while we underestimate the extent to which written language learning can occur in day-to-day functional contexts starting long before children receive formal instruction in the classroom.

Evidence: The kinds of social interaction necessary to support oral language learning have often gone unrecognized because parents and other caregivers talk to children in order to communicate, not because they are trying to teach their children to talk. Nevertheless, when we take a close look, we find that oral language does not occur without considerable interaction with adults or older children. If infants were placed in rooms with television sets but no responsive human beings, we would see how dependent oral language learning actually is on social interaction. Language develops when adults include infants and young children in conversation and when they treat them as conversational partners (Wells 1985; Huttenlocher et al. 1991; Hart & Risley 1995; Huttenlocher 1995). In fact, tutoring is embedded in these interactions, as young children and adults communicate for a variety of purposes. Progress in language development is impeded, sometimes significantly, if children are not frequently engaged by adults in language interactions (Akhtar, Dunham, & Dunham 1991; Huttenlocher et al. 1991; Hart & Risley 1995; Oller et al. 1995).

The child is certainly predisposed—indeed wired—to learn language. However, it is misleading to claim that language emerges spontaneously in a child or that being surrounded by talk is enough. Being included in talk and having talk adapted to your current level of talking are required for optimal learning of oral language. Many adults speak to babies and very young children in a way that makes language more salient to them and perhaps easier to learn. This special way of talking to very young children has been called child-directed speech (Fernald et al. 1989).

Children learn about written language in a similar, socially mediated way. This means that written language learning also depends upon interactions and that tutoring is embedded in these interactions. A great deal of explicit literacy instruction is typically provided to young children in context, often in response to children’s requests for information and help. For example, when given paper and crayons with which to draw, children many times try to write their names. In the course of these attempts, they frequently enlist adult help. When adults respond to these requests, they often name the letters needed to spell the child’s name, demonstrate how the letters are formed, and even relate the letters to the sounds heard when the name is spoken. Children also learn about the functions of written language as they observe and help parents make lists, write letters to family members or friends, or read menus in a restaurant.

Myth #3. Children must achieve a certain level of physical and mental readiness before written language learning can occur. Some children mature early in the ways needed; others mature late. Variations in rates of literacy development are due primarily to individual differences in children’s learning rates rather than to differences in children’s early literacy experiences.

Evidence: First, in instances where considerable progress in literacy development has occurred before a child enters school, environments have provided children not only with physical resources but also with social resources—with people who give children information and demonstrations and answer children’s questions (Durkin 1966; Read 1975; Teale 1978; Bissex 1980; Baghban 1984; Schickedanz & Sullivan 1984; Schieffelin & Cochran-Smith 1984; Schickedanz 1990; Schickedanz 1998). Teale (1982) explains the conditions which need to be met for literacy learning to occur:

In one respect there is a literacy environment "out there" from which children might abstract features of reading and writing. Considerable print exists in the preschooler’s world, and virtually every child in literate societies like ours has the opportunity to observe others reading and writing. But...children who learn to read and write before going to school do not do so simply by observing others engaged in literacy events and by independently examining and manipulating a written language. In an important sense the child’s literacy environment does not have an independent existence; it is constructed in the interactions between the child and those persons around him or her.... In fact, the whole process of natural literacy development hinges upon the experiences the child has in reading and writing activities which are mediated by literate adults, older siblings, or events in the child’s everyday life (p. 559).

For many years, few researchers who were very interested in literacy development looked closely at the interactions between children and adults (Hiebert & Raphael 1998). Instead, they interviewed the parents after a child displayed high levels of literacy development—usually when the child entered kindergarten or first grade. Researchers asked parents to recall what they did during the preschool years that might be responsible for their child’s precocious literacy development (Durkin 1966; Read 1975; Price 1976). Parents often reported that they had done nothing in particular to help their child learn to read or write, although they typically recalled engaging the child in specific kinds of experiences such as story reading. They often reported that the children memorized favorite storybooks and then learned to actually read the words first in these, and then in other, books "all on their own." Because many parents are unaware of the learning they promote when they read a story, write the child’s name on a drawing, or engage in countless other literacy activities with their children, the interviewed parents almost certainly underreported what they did. Their behaviors seem so natural and ordinary to parents—so much a part of their daily lives—that they do not even realize they are providing many informal literacy lessons each day (McLane & McNamee 1990).

These studies (Durkin 1966; Read 1975; Price 1976), and others like them, were misinterpreted for a number of years, contributing to the false impression that early literacy development is a natural development. Readiness to "soak up" literacy knowledge was in turn considered to be a matter of the child’s maturational timetable.

When researchers actually watch parent-child interactions, or when they ask parents to keep a diary record of what they do to support their child’s literacy development, a fuller picture of adults’ role in children’s literacy development emerges (Schickedanz 1998). Parents vary considerably in the extent to which they mediate print for their children and in the specific ways they do it. (Scollon & Scollon 1981; Heath 1983; Teale 1986). Preschool teachers also vary considerably in the ways they interact with children, for example, when reading stories. There are specific consequences associated with these variations (Heath 1983; Dickinson & Smith 1994). Clearly, some ways of interacting with children are more helpful to them than are other ways.

Children who acquire a lot of literacy knowledge and skill before entering first grade are most likely to be those who have had a rich history of skillfully mediated literacy experiences. Children do vary, of course, in terms of the extent that they can benefit from specific experiences. Some children learn quickly from experience and thus need fewer experiences than do other children to make a specific amount of progress. However, the astonishing variations we see among children as they enter kindergarten and first grade seem to be due to wide variations in the amount and kinds of literacy experience different groups of children have during their early years. Opportunities for learning about reading and writing are simply more prevalent when children live in some circumstances than when they live in other circumstances. Parents with more education and greater financial resources often are able to provide more opportunities than are parents with fewer resources. Of course, socioeconomic and other circumstances do not necessarily define opportunities. Among families living in similar circumstances, parents vary in terms of literacy experiences they provide to their children.

References

Adams, M.J. 1990. Beginning to read. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Akhtar, N., F. Dunham, & P.J. Dunham. 1991. Directive interactions and early vocabulary development: The role of joint attentional focus. Journal of Child Language (18):41-49.

Baghban, M. 1984. Our daughter learns to read and write. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Bissex, G.L. 1980. GYNS AT WRK: A child learns to read and write. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dickinson, D.K., & M.W. Smith. 1994. Long-term effects of preschool teachers’ book readings on low-income children’s vocabulary and story comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly 29 (2):105-22.

Durkin, D. 1966. Children who read early. New York: Teachers College Press.

Elley, W.B. 1989. Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories. Reading Research Quarterly (24):174-87.

Ehri, L. 1975. Word consciousness in readers and prereaders. Journal of Educational Psychology 67:204-12.

Fernald, A., T. Taeschner, J. Dunn, M. Papousek, B. deBoysson-Bardies, & L. Fukui. 1989. A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers’ and fathers’ speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language 16:477-501.

Hart, B., & T. Risley. 1995. Meaningful differences. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

Heath, S.B. 1983. Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hiebert, E.H., & T.E. Raphael. 1998. Early literacy instruction. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Huttenlocher, J. 1995. Input and language. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, March 3 - April 2, Indianapolis, IN.

Huttenlocher, J., W. Haight, A. Bryk, M. Seltzer, & R. Lyons. 1991. Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology 27 (2):236-48.

Mattingly, I.Q. 1979. Reading, linguistic awareness, and language acquisition. Paper presented at the Reading Research Seminar on Linguistic Awareness and Learning to Read, Victoria, British Columbia.

McLane, J.B., & G.D. McNamee. 1990. Early literacy. The Developing Child Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Oller, D.K., R.E. Eilers, D. Basinger, M.L. Steffens, & R. Urbano. 1995. Extreme poverty and the development of precursors to the speech capacity. First Language 15:167-87.

Price, E. 1976. How thirty-seven gifted children learned to read. The Reading Teacher 30 (1):44-48.

Read, C. 1975. Children’s categorization of speech sounds in English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Robbins, C., & L.C. Ehri. 1994. Reading storybooks to kindergartners helps them learn new vocabulary words. Journal of Educational Psychology 86 (1):54-64.

Schickedanz, J. 1990. Adam’s righting revolutions. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Schickedanz, J.A. 1998. Emergent writing. In Theoretical models and process of writing, eds. L. Indrisano & J. Squires. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Schickedanz, J.A. & M. Sullivan. 1984. Mom, what does u-f-f spell? Language Arts 61 (1):7-17.

Schieffelin, B.M., & M. Cochran-Smith. 1984. Learning to read culturally: Literacy before schooling. In Awakening to literacy, eds. H. Goelman, A. Oberg, & F. Smith, 3-23. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Scollon, R., & B.K. Scollon. 1981. Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Teale, W.H. 1978. Positive environments for learning to read: What studies of early readers tell us. Language Arts 59:922-32.

Teale, W.H. 1982. Toward a theory of how children learn to read and write naturally. Language Arts 55 (6):555-70.

Teale, W.H. 1986. Home background and young children’s literacy development. In Emergent literacy: Writing and reading, eds. W.H. Teale & E. Sulzby, 173-206. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Wells, G. 1985. The meaning makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. Porstmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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The above article is excerpted from Judith A. Schickedanz’ Much More Than ABCs: The Early Stages of Reading and Writing (Washington, DC: NAEYC, 1999, pp. 2-7), and is reprinted with the permission of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The organization may be reached at 1509 16th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20036-1426; by telephone at (800) 424-2460; by fax at (202) 328-1846; and by e-mail http://www.naeyc.org

He Has A Summer Birthday: The Kindergarten Entrance Age Dilemma

Sandra Crosser

David would be 5 in July. Full of enthusiasm, he confidently underwent spring kindergarten screening. The school psychologist explained that David completed the screening with average and above-average skills, but he had a summer birthday and he was a male. The psychologist and the gym teacher agreed that David would be more successful in school if he were to postpone kindergarten for 1 year.

David’s experience has been repeated over and over by many children across the country. Educators are commonly recommending that children born during the summer months be given an extra year to mature so that they will not suffer from the academic disadvantages of being among the youngest children in a class. Terms such as "academic red-shirting" and "graying of the kindergarten" have been invented to describe the practice and effects of holding children back from kindergarten (Bracey, 1989; Suro, 1992).

Small-scale studies of limited geographic areas suggest that delayed kindergarten entrance involves anywhere from 9% to 64% of the eligible kindergarten population (Meisels, 1992). However, data collected for the large-scale National Household Education Survey (National left for Education Statistics [NCES], 1997) indicated that 9% of the first- and second-graders had been held back from kindergarten. Surveyed parents reported that children who had delayed kindergarten entrance 1 year were most likely to have been male (64%), white (73%), and born between July and December (70%). Compared to children born in the first quarter of the year, children born in the summer months were twice as likely to have delayed kindergarten entrance 1 year after they were first eligible.

Substantial numbers of parents and educators believe that children born in the summer months will gain an academic advantage if kindergarten entrance is delayed 1 year. Is it a disadvantage to be among the youngest, rather than the oldest, in a kindergarten class?

What does the Research Reveal?

A review of the relevant literature reveals that few studies have been undertaken to examine whether or not children with summer birthdays do better academically when they postpone kindergarten entrance 1 year. Problems also arise because some of the research often cited in support of delayed entrance is poorly designed, has focused on children with learning disabilities or on early entrants, has relied on subjective parent or teacher reports, or has not looked specifically at children born during the summer months.

The related research is meager and somewhat contradictory. In general, studies indicate that the youngest children in a class may score slightly below the oldest children in a class, but any differences tend to be small and may be transitory (Morrison, Griffith, & Alberts, 1997; Cameron & Wilson, 1990; Kinard & Reinherz, 1986; Smith & Shepard, 1987; NCES, 1997).

The sparsity of evidence related specifically to summer-born children prompted an investigation comparing the academic achievement of two groups of children born in June, July, August, or September: those who entered kindergarten just after turning 5 and those who were held out 1 year and entered kindergarten at age 6 (Crosser, 1991). Each child who delayed entrance was matched with a child of like intelligence who had not delayed entrance. Boys were matched boys, and girls with girls.

All of the children took standardized achievement tests during fifth or sixth grade. Those test scores were used to compare the achievement of summer-born children who had entered school on time.

Results of the study indicated that, given similar levels of intelligence, boys with summer birth dates tended to be advantaged academically by postponing kindergarten entrance 1 year. The advantage was greatest in the area of reading. Reading scores for females and math scores for both males and females did not show significant statistical differences.

Results of such small-scale studies need to be replicated before educators will be able to make informed recommendations about optimum kindergarten entrance age. There is no clear-cut evidence that delaying kindergarten for the youngest entrants will provide some magical academic advantage. Because there is so little entrance age evidence, and because some of that evidence is conflicting, there does not appear to be a strong academic basis for delaying kindergarten entrance for summer-born children.

A responsible physician would not recommend any treatment that had not been scientifically tested and retested for effectiveness. She would need to know the specific symptoms for which the treatment was effective. She would need to know the success rate of the treatment and what complicating side effects and interactions were possible before prescribing the treatment.

Responsible educators also have a need to know the facts before recommending treatment for a child whose only symptoms are being born in July and being male. Nevertheless, the reality is that both teachers and parents are accepting the idea that delaying school entrance for summer birth date children is sound practice.

How Does Holding Out Affect the Kindergarten Experience?

It has been reported that affluent parents tend to hold out their summer-born children more often than do low socioeconomic status parents (Meisels, 1992). If that is the case, the children who may be at academic risk from factors associated with poverty face the additional hurdle of being compared to advantaged children who are 12 to 15 months older. We should expect that the economically disadvantaged children may be outperformed by their classmates who are both chronologically and developmentally their seniors.

In the real-life kindergarten classroom, the youngest children may appear to be immature and unready to tackle the tasks that their significantly older classmates find challenging and intriguing. As the curriculum and academic expectations increase to meet the needs of the 6-year-old children, there is a real danger that the kindergarten program will become developmentally inappropriate for the very young children it is meant to serve.

Did David’s Parents Make the Right Decision?

David is 15 now. When he was 13, he towered above his classmates as he walked through the halls. The school desks just didn’t fit his 6’3" body, and many of his teachers assumed that he must have been retained since he was older than the other students. When asked what grade he is in, David always makes it a point to explain that he started kindergarten late.

But David is well liked by students and teachers. He moved into both puberty and formal operational thought sooner than his classmates, earning their admiration. Academically, David does average and above-average work with minimal effort. Did David’s parents make the right decision in holding him out from kindergarten? They don’t know. They will probably never know, but David thinks he knows the answer.

Conclusion

Academic achievement is only one piece of the school entrance age puzzle. The child’s physical, social, and emotional development are key pieces, as well. It would seem to be the course of wisdom to consider the whole child in all of his or her aspects when making decisions about school entrance. The answers are not simple. They are further complicated because each child is different biologically and emotionally. Each child brings his own special characteristics with him as he lives and works through his unique life experiences.

The counsel of educators can bring about life-changing events in a young child’s world. Blanket recommendations to hold back one group of children only serve to change who will be part of the youngest group. As educators, we must resist the urge to follow the unfounded advice of those who would recommend uniform practices that would exclude any group of children from our schools. Educators must consider the individual child as we continue to build a stronger knowledge base upon which to make entrance age decisions.

For more information

Bracey, G.W. (1989). Age and achievement. Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9), 732.

Cameron, M.B., & Wilson, B.J. (1990). The effect of chronological age, gender, and delay of entry on academic achievement and retention: Implications for academic redshirting. Psychology in the Schools, 27(3), 260-263. EJ 419 713.

Crosser, S. (1991). Summer birth date children: Kindergarten entrance age and academic achievement. Journal of Educational Research, 84(3), 140-146. EJ 426 449.

Kinard, E.M., & Reinherz, H. (1986). Birthdate effects on school performance and adjustment: A longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Research, 79(6), 366-372. EJ 338 335.

Meisels, S.J. (1992). Doing harm by doing good: latrogenic effects of early childhood enrollment and promotion policies. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 7(2), 155-175. EJ 450 523.

Morrison, F.J., Griffith, E.M., & Alberts, D.M. (1997). Nature-nurture in the classroom: Entrance age, school readiness, and learning in children. Developmental Psychology, 33(2), 254-262. EJ 543 395.

National left for Education Statistics (NCES). (1997). The elementary school performance and adjustment of children who enter kindergarten late or repeat kindergarten: Findings from national surveys (NCES Publication No. NCES 98-097). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Smith, M.L., & Shepard, L.A. (1987). What doesn’t work: Explaining policies of retention in the early grades. Phi Delta Kappan, 69 (2), 129-134. EJ 359 345.

Suro, R. (1992, January 5). Holding back to get ahead. The New York Times, p. 4A 30-32.

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The above article is reprinted from the ERIC Digest, September 1998, EDO-PS-98-7. References identified with an ED (ERIC document), EJ (ERIC journal), or PS number are cited in the ERIC database. ERIC Digests are in the public domain and may be freely reproduced. The ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education may be contacted at the University of Illinois, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, IL 61820-7469, (800)-583-4135 [NAECS Editor's note (01-08-04): ERIC/EECE is no longer in existence. For more information, contact the Early Childhood and Parenting Collaborative's Information Technology Group at (877) 275-3227], e-mail: ericeece@uiuc.edu

This page last updated: December 13, 2007