The Big 5: Teacher Knowledge and Skill Acquisition in Early Literacy

AbstractIn this study, the investigators surveyed 215 early childhood educators throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania to determine teacher knowledge and training in early literacy instruction, with a focus on The 5 Big Ideas in Reading as identified by the National Reading Panel: phonological awareness, accuracy and fluency, alphabetic principle, vocabulary, and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000; Walpole, McKenna, Uribe-Zarain, & Lamitina, 2010). The survey response totals indicated that of the five literacy domains, early childhood teachers were most likely to have had training in phonological awareness and least likely to have had training in the domain of vocabulary. Across all critical domains of early literacy, professional development was the most common training format and mentoring was the least common training format.The Big 5: Teacher Knowledge and Skill Acquisition in Early LiteracyThe National Reading Panel classified precursor skills into five critical domains of reading to include: phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (Pufpaff & Yssel, 2010; Rowe, 2005). Hsieh, Hemmeter, McCollum, and Ostrosky (2009) also include skills in listening, speaking, and writing in the foundations of emergent literacy. To ensure all children have the critical foundations in literacy prior to kindergarten, developers of preschool curricula are focusing their efforts on early learning standards, including emerging literacy outcomes (Hsieh et al., 2009). "Balanced" approaches to emergent and early literacy instruction take into account both the foundation skills for later decoding (including learning the alphabet, awareness of phonological/sound units, and sound/letter correspondence) as well as reading comprehension, vocabulary, and semantic-syntactic skills at the sentence level. The next logical step is to ensure that teachers have the necessary skill set within the critical domains of early literacy to effectively teach reading to preschool students. These skills are particularly warranted for teachers who work with struggling readers.The research highlights specific precursor skills for educators to support effective literacy instruction. Early childhood educators need to have an understanding that speech is composed of phonemes or individual sound segments of speech and that the alphabet represents those phonemes (i.e. phonological awareness and alphabetic principle). Adequate skills for phonological processes instruction requires a teacher to make a conscious disassociation of sound from spelling if they are to think of words and their component sounds as children do before they read and spell. Teachers also need knowledge of linguistic structures beyond letter-sound correspondences. Teachers must demonstrate implicit knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences and their relation to English word structure (i.e., phonics). Fluency/decoding instruction would require teachers to possess explicit knowledge of the rules and conventions of the English language and how recognizing words easily and accurately is essential for rapid decoding. Instruction of vocabulary, facilitated by adequate skill in phonological awareness, requires an understanding of semantic structures, rules of grammar and word structure relationships. Comprehension instruction requires a thorough knowledge of linguistic concepts and complex sentence structures (Cunningham et al., 2004; Mather, Bos, & Babur, 2001; McCutchen, Abbott et al., 2002; Moats & Foorman, 2003).A key area of content knowledge in reading for teachers involves understanding English word structure (Spear-Swerling & Brucker, 2003). This knowledge is vital for effective teaching of word identification, word decoding, and spelling (McCutchen, Abbott et al., 2002; Moats, 2000; Moats & Foorman, 2003; Spear-Swerling & Brucker, 2004). Research addressing teacher preparation and teacher knowledge in early literacy skills has indicated that despite high general knowledge, many literate adults, including preservice and experienced special and general educators, do not possess adequate knowledge of English phonology and orthography (Bos et al. …