But there was so much more for him to learn before he could even begin to decipher the written word. Language is an auditory skill. Children master the spoken word early on, amassing an astounding vocabulary in the first few years. When teaching pre-readers the concepts of print, we must teach them things that we seasoned readers take for granted. Books open in a certain direction.
Text is read from left to right, top to bottom.
Words are separated by spaces. This is quite a lot of information to take in for someone who has previously only experienced language in its spoken form. The obvious starting point in acquiring literacy is the mastery of the twenty-six symbols that we use to construct words. This mastery is accomplished in stages, the first of which is letter recognition. This ups the ante to fifty-two symbols they must recognize.