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Literacy: Theories and Early Childhood Education Practices
Last modified: 2016-11-01
Abstract
Literacy is a complex ongoing process that starts at birth. It includes a child learning in four basic areas: language, listening, writing, and reading. It is believed that the early years of childhood play an important role for literacy development. Teachers, parents, and adults surrounding children play a very important role to develop children’s literacy skills, especially to scaffold children literacy experiences. Before entering the preschool years children need to receive literacy practices. Parents, teachers, and community must work together to adopt childhood literacy as a common goal. In so doing they need to have a good understanding of literacy development. There are a number of theories of literacy development in children and they have become the principles for current practices in literacy development. They include Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, Maturation Theory, Theory of Literacy Development, Stage Models of Reading, Emergent Literacy Theory, and Family Literacy Theory. By understanding more literacy development theories, teachers, parents, and adults can work best in helping children to develop their literacy skill. There literacy activities believed to be effective to develop literacy skills such as shared reading, nursery rhymes, songs, and other variety of interactive literacy games.
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