Early literacy skills: Similarities and differences caused by social environment and school opportunities

Due to the fact that early literacy skills are crucial for reading and writing learning process, it is important to identify them in order to design teaching activities. Most of the former literacy studies have been carried out with middle class children and show that reading and writing learning process begins very early at home. The rate and the way reading and writing are developed is highly related with parents educational level and the kind and frequency of the literacy activities they propose. There are differences between social groups with regard to these activities that may cause knowledge differences at early age that may explain reading and writing learning process failure in low income children. From a developmental perspective there have been numerous studies focused mainly on literacy learning before formal teaching of reading and writing in school. These researches tempt to explore and describe the concepts, knowledge, skills and early actions of reading and writing as well as the social context where these developments occur. In the framework of these observations, the aim of the present study was to compare early reading and writing skills in three groups of child ren from different socioeconomic environment. From theoretical and methodological point of view we have take in account a cognitive psy chology perspective to explore those variables considered early literacy skills such as phonolog ical awareness, early writing skills among others as well as we have adopted as teach ing and learn ing process framework Vigotsky s zone of proximal development as well as Bruner s scaffolding. The groups were described according to different variables such us age (measured up to May, 30th), sex and socioeconomic level. In order to measure the last variable, parents education level and job were considered according Sartu (1992) occupational scale. Using this variables three groups were selected: Group A was formed by 20 children mean age 5.5-year-olds from middle urban income families who attended a public kindergarten school situated in a middle class neighborhood. Group B was formed by 19 kids mean age 5.3-year-olds from low income families who attended to a public kindergarten school in a low income urban neighborhood. Group C was formed by 17 children mean age 5.3-year-olds who attended a public kindergarten school from a low rural income area. Kids were assessed with 11 tasks: Phonological awareness, Letter-sound correspondences, Differences between letters, Words from pictures, Reading words in context, Recognition of writing and reading activities, Early reading and writing performance, Technical vocabulary knowledge, proper usage of books was tested. The results of this study provides empirical information on the early literacy pattern of learning process of Spanish-speaking children as well as differences in knowledge and skills involved in this process between children from different socioeconomic groups. Differences between the three groups were observed in technical vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness tasks performance. There were no differences between socio economically groups in distinguishing letters and words from pic tures, recognizing writing and reading ac tivities and proper using of books. According to Nelson (2007), children have a similar perform ance in those activities based on basic cognitive skills and differ in the ones that involve adult’s instruction. The similar performances of the groups tested seems to indicate that the know ledge involved in early literacy process is develop in a sequence characterized by an emerging knowledge about writing in the social environ ment. The fact that children did not grasp a complete competence in one knowl edge before reaching it in other later ability shows that literacy acquisition is characterized by an overlapping development of different abilities and know ledge.