Child Preliteracy Essay

The general topic of this article is about how young children’s preliteracy knowledge and early literacy experiences affect their literacy skills at age seven. To simply put it, it explores the relationship between literacy capabilities in preliterate four year olds and their literacy related abilities at seven years old. Further, this article explores whether or not literacy is only characterized by the environment or if inherited by genes is a probable foundation of literacy. Previous research relating to this issue has shown literacy experience is affected by environmental factors such as exposure to books, songs, and nursery rhymes (Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002; Saracho, 2002) and an understanding of phonological knowledge and letter awareness (Nathan, Stackhouse, Goulandris, & Snowling, 2004; Schneider, Roth, & Ennemoser, 2000; Treiman, Tincoff, Rodriguez, Mouzaki, & Francis, 1998). Some research supports the idea that genetics have an effect on literacy skills. In addition, there is a small amount of evidence suggesting …show more content…
ELE and PK scales were discreetly correlated (.23) and predicted TA reading and TA writing at seven years of age. ELE correlated (.19) with TA reading and TA writing, while PK correlated (.29) with TA reading and (.26) with TA writing. Moreover, PK explained 5-6% of the variance in the literacy outcome measures of ELE. The heritability of ELE estimated from TA reading model as the squared path coefficient leading to ELE was (.22) and the heritability of PK was (.21). The heritability of TA reading was (.59), while TA writing estimated the same heritability as ELE and PK. The heritability for TA writing was (.63). Genetic influences on ELE predicted genetic variance in TA reading (.11) and TA writing (.08), but genetic mediation only accounted for 1-2% of genetic variance. In contrast, genetic influence on PK predicted the genetic variance in TA reading (.12) and TA writing