OSAT Reading Specialist (115)

Literacy development begins before formal schooling. Children acquire foundational skills through exposure to language, print, and literate behaviors in their environment. Understanding these developmental foundations is essential for reading specialists who must identify where students fall on the literacy continuum and design appropriate instruction.

Emergent literacy refers to the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that precede and develop into conventional reading and writing. This view replaced earlier "reading readiness" models that assumed children needed to reach a certain maturational level before literacy instruction could begin. Current understanding recognizes that literacy development is continuous from birth and that early experiences shape later reading success.

Key emergent literacy skills include print awareness, alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, oral language development, and concepts about print. Print awareness involves understanding that print carries meaning, that it differs from pictures, and that it follows specific conventions. Children develop print awareness through exposure to environmental print, shared reading experiences, and watching adults engage with text.

Concepts about print encompass understanding that books have fronts and backs, that pages turn from right to left in English, that text reads from left to right and top to bottom, that spaces separate words, and that punctuation marks serve specific functions. Marie Clay's work on concepts about print assessment remains foundational for evaluating these understandings in young readers.

Oral language forms the foundation upon which reading is built. Children must understand spoken language before they can decode and comprehend written language. The connection between oral language and reading involves vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness, narrative skills, and pragmatic understanding.

Vocabulary development in early childhood predicts later reading comprehension. Children from language-rich environments hear more words, more varied words, and more complex sentence structures. This exposure builds the mental lexicon necessary for understanding text. Reading specialists must recognize vocabulary gaps and implement systematic vocabulary instruction.

Syntactic awareness involves understanding how words combine to form meaningful sentences. Children who understand complex sentence structures in speech more easily comprehend similar structures in text. Oral language activities that expose children to varied sentence patterns support reading development.

Narrative skills include understanding story structure, sequencing events, identifying characters and settings, and recognizing cause-effect relationships. Children who can tell coherent stories demonstrate organizational skills that transfer to reading comprehension. Story retelling activities build these connections.

Reading development progresses through identifiable stages, though individual variation exists. Jeanne Chall's stages of reading development provide a useful framework:

Writing development parallels and supports reading development. Early writing begins with drawing and scribbling as children explore making marks on paper. Gradually, children differentiate drawing from writing and begin using letter-like forms.

Developmental spelling stages reveal children's growing phonological and orthographic knowledge. Pre-communicative spelling involves random letter strings without sound-symbol correspondence. Semi-phonetic spelling shows emerging sound-symbol awareness with one or two letters representing words. Phonetic spelling demonstrates systematic sound-symbol correspondence, though unconventional. Transitional spelling shows growing orthographic knowledge with conventional patterns appearing. Conventional spelling reflects mature understanding of English orthography.

Writing instruction should be integrated with reading instruction. Writing reinforces phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, and vocabulary. The act of encoding supports decoding, and composing text supports reading comprehension.