A look at emergent and beginning literacy learners and strategies to help them develop as readers.

1. Emergent and Beginning
Literacy Learners
Katie Miller
Walden University
Instructor: Dr. Jann James
READ 6706R-1 Literacy Development PreK-3

2. Meet my Emergent Literacy Learner
▪ Kindergarten Student
▪ Male
▪ 6 years old
▪ English Language Learner (ELL)
▪ Hispanic
▪ Low Socioeconomic Status
▪ Parents actively involved in school environment

3. About Emergent Literacy Learners
▪ Emergent Readers:
– Connect information from text to their own experiences
– Building the foundational skills that will help them in their reading
development
▪ Areas to focus on when getting to know these learners:
– Oral Language
– Concepts of Print
– Phonemic Awareness
– Listening Comprehension
– Noncognitive Characteristics

4. Assessing the Emergent Literacy Learner
▪ Oral LanguageAssessment
– Student Oral Language Observation Metrix
(SOLOM)
– Allowed me to observe his normal classroom
activities where he was comfortable, creating a
genuine assessment (Reutzel & Cooter, 2016)
– This test tells me that the student:
▪ Has Limited language Proficiency
▪ Possesses a limited vocabulary
▪ Has halted fluency skills
▪ Uses incorrect words without being aware that they are
incorrect

5. Assessing the Emergent Literacy Learner
▪ Phonemic Awareness
– The inability to identify a difference or similarity in the phonemes of
words can inhibit student’s understanding of words in context,
causing comprehension to suffer (Wren, et al., 2013).
▪ Rhyming Word PairTask
– Student must identify rhymes and non-rhymes
– Kindergarten average is 75% correct
– My learner scored a 30% success rate
– Tells me that the student needs individualized instruction in rhyming
and phonemic awareness skills

6. Assessing the Emergent Literacy Learner
▪ Concepts of Print
– Important skill for readers to have because it shows that they understand language as
a tool and how to use it.
▪ M0w MotorcycleTask
– Shows if the student has an understanding that printed words should be the same
length as spoken words (Reutzel & Cooter, 2016)
– Student shown word pairs, differing in length, and must correctly identify the word.
– 7 out of 10 correct
– Student did not have confidence or automatic recall to identify all words correctly
– Student needs environmental print resources

7. Strategy for this learner:
▪ Describe a Picture
– Student draws a picture and is asked to
write a sentence about the picture and
describe it to a peer (Wren, et al., 2013).
– Practices writing and phonemic
awareness skills through writing
– Builds oral language skills
– Student is able to pull from their own
background knowledge to describe
picture

8. Meet my Beginning Literacy Learner
▪ First Grader
▪ Female
▪ Low Socioeconomic Status
▪ Parents very involved in school environment
▪ Asian-American
▪ Quiet and reserved in class

9. About Beginning Literacy Learners
▪ Moving into a more complex skill set regarding
– Comprehension
– Fluency
– Vocabulary
▪ Students have more of an identity as an individual
in terms of interests regarding text and feelings
towards school

10. Assessing the Beginning Literacy Learner
▪ Comprehension
– Informal Reading Inventory (IRI)
– Gives the teacher the opportunity to use passages at student level
and determine comprehension level based on teacher
questioning.
▪ Student was able to answer most questions with accuracy
▪ Would benefit from more detailed comprehension
strategy instruction to work on drawing conclusions from
text

11. Assessing the Beginning Literacy Learner
▪ NoncognitiveAssessment: Interest Inventory
▪ Perceives herself as a good reader and enjoys reading
▪ Feels as though she is a bad writer
▪ Likes to read about animals, space, and make-believe
creatures
▪ Has a goal that she wants to read chapter books by
the end of the year so that she can read a mystery
chapter book

12. Assessing the Beginning Literacy Learner
▪ Fluency
– Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)
▪ 37 words per minute (WPM)
▪ Goal for first grade is 60
▪ Student falls above mid-year-goal and should participate in
repeated readings as well as shared readings to enhance
her accuracy and speed in reading (Reutzel & Cooter, 2016).

13. Strategy for this learner:
▪ Close Reading
– Repeated reading of text, asking students to
think critically about the text (Fisher & Frey,
2012)
– Nonfiction text about a topic of interest of the
student
– Repeated reading to help with fluency and
automaticity
– Building comprehension skills with every reading
of the text

14. Selecting Texts for Students
▪ Text sets can help students build literacy skills while being
exposed to a variety of print types and text structures.
▪ All of my texts were narrative/semiotic texts
– Focus on factual information and use a lot of pictures to help
reader comprehend text in a more complex way (Laureate
Education, 2014a)
▪ Texts:
– Here we go Round theYear by Jane Belk Moncure
– Spring is Here by ShaunTaylor
▪ Digital text from Raz-Kids.com
– The Seasons by Ian Smith

15. Research Based Practices for Emergent
Literacy Learner
▪ Direct Listening-Thinking Activity (DL-TA)
– As students read the text, the teacher poses questions and ideas for discussion
that the students respond to in a group setting (Camp, 2000)
– Students are asked to make predictions about the text and then participate in
discussion about if their predictions were correct or not
– Helps students to synthesize information learned from the text and use that
knowledge to inform their further learning
– Students extended the activity by writing about a season that they learned about
to promote writing skills
– Students were able to effectively comprehend what they had read and were able
to make meaning from the text that could be accessed in the future (Reutzel &
Cooter, 2016)

16. Research Based Practices for Beginning
Literacy Learner
▪ Web Graphic Organizer
– Students started by creating a KWL to organize their prior learning and goals
for learning before the lesson
– As students were reading, teacher lead discussion on new learning and big
ideas to keep students on track
– Student worked to create a web graphic organizer to connect their learning
and organize the learning in a concrete way that made sense to them
(Reutzel & Cooter, 2016)
– Built metacognition as students were actively assessing their own learning
while creating the web and they were analyzing their own understanding of
the text

17. Reflection
▪ Similarities between my learners:
– Teacher scaffolding of strategies and skills must be prevalent with both
types of learners
– Both learners can accomplish a great deal with teacher modeling and
support
– Text sets can be helpful with both readers (even non-readers) and can be
used with both readers in a variety of effective ways
▪ Differences between my learners:
– Emergent learners are focused more on the fundamentals of reading
(vocabulary, phonemic awareness) while beginning learners are working
more towards comprehension skills.

18. Reflection
▪ Insights gained:
– The importance of using text sets, especially informational text,
with all learners
– Text complexity needs to be accurate for the specific learner being
targeted
▪ My understanding of a literate environment:
– Environment should work to build multiple aspects of reading
development
– Environment should be challenging and work to build on
foundational reading skills

19. Reflection
▪ How can my digital story help others?
–Other educators can learn strategies and
assessments to use with emergent and beginning
literacy learners
–Digital stories can be easily shared with colleagues
across our profession
–Resources from digital stories can be accessed for
other teaching professionals to grow in their own
learning

20. References:
Camp, D. (2000). It takes two:Teaching with twin texts of fact and fiction. ReadingTeacher,
53(5), 400–408.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Close reading in elementary schools. ReadingTeacher, 66(3), 179–
188.
Laureate Education (Producer). (2014a). Analyzing and selecting texts [Video file]. Baltimore,
MD: Author.
Reutzel, D. R., & Cooter, R. B., Jr. (2016). Strategies for reading assessment and instruction:
Helping every child succeed (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Wren, S., Litke, B., Jinkins, D., Paynter, S.,Watts, J. & Alanis, I. (2013). Cognitive elements of
reading. In Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read: A Framework.