Chapter 4 Summary – Emergent Literacy
Chapter 4 talks about developing learners’ emergent literacy. Literacy means reading and writing, while emergent means that a child has been involved in writing and reading activities long before joining the school. Therefore, emergent literacy is writing and reading behaviors that come first and develop into conventional literacy (Gunning, 2020).
Understanding Emergent Literacy
Children start developing literacy before starting school, except if they are disabled. Gunning (2020) insists that all school-age children must have gained a fairly comprehensive oral language vocabulary and sophisticated syntactic system before beginning school. Besides, children see several things, such as billboard advertising, traffic signs, and print messages, that help enhance their literacy.
The Development of Emergent Literacy
As stated earlier, children’s emergent literacy develops before they begin school. This then develops as they observe peers and family members writing and reading, and they also try to write and read while making theories about how the process works. For example, based on a child’s experience with picture books, they might know that pictures rather than words are to be read. This means there are vital skills that help develop children’s understanding of emergent literacy. The first skill is understanding how prints work. This helps children understand the roles it plays in their lives, called seeing the “big picture.” Gunning (2020) says the big picture is the basis for all the information concerning writing and reading. Additionally, children should also be conversant with the categories of language utilized in books and gain a deeper understanding of how stories are developed. Children must also improve their phonological awareness to understand the alphabetic principle finally.
Parents’ Role in Developing Emergent Literacy
Gunning (2020) affirms that parents play a vital role in developing children’s emergent literacy. Therefore, parents should often read to their children when they are young or before they begin school to develop their children’s emergent literacy. Parents who have not begun can foster their children’s literacy development by talking to them, giving answers and explanations, reciting rhymes and singing songs, and reading labels, menus, and other things daily. Parents can also support early trials at writing and reading. Parents or family members reading to children is important because it helps develop children’s literacy skills, such as writing and reading. Essentially, as parents communicate with the child, the child can use context to construct the meaning of a situation. Parents also use illustrations and explanations to help the child understand the story’s meaning.
Fostering Emergent Literacy
According to Gunning (2020), irrespective of where the learners regard literacy, a vital step in further development of their literacy is creating an environment that promotes active writing, speaking, and listening. Getting children to participate in literacy activities is part of a conducive and appealing setting. Therefore, teachers can foster emergent literacy by using every opportunity to show what print is used for and how it works. Teachers should ensure they develop various centers in a class to improve learners’ literacy. Teachers can also foster learners’ literacy by reading to students, reading informational books, and using a theme approach.
Using Writing to Develop Literacy
Writing can effectively assist learners in growing their basic literacy abilities. The novel ideas of developing writing promote the use of discovered spelling so that children can start communicating themselves through writing even at early stages of life by learning to write and read. Therefore, teachers can use various writing strategies to develop literacy: shared interactive writing, modeled on experience stories, and shared reading, where students and teachers compose a story. Other strategies are individual interactive writing, encouraging children to write, teaching children the beginning of writing, stages of spelling, and the power of invented spelling.
Developing Alphabetic Knowledge and Phonological Awareness
Setting the stage for the development of writing and reading is vital, and arranging for several writing and reading opportunities is important (Gunning, 2020). At the pre-kindergarten level, informal activities, exploratory with sounds and letters, are favored. However, as students progress through first grade, explicit teaching is blended with informal learning opportunities to enhance alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. Therefore, letter names and English learners develop alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. This strategy helps students recognize letters in upper case and lower case only, naming both lower and upper case, and being able to write alphabet letters. Here, children also learn the common sounds of most letters. The other strategy is developing phonological awareness skills such as segmenting, manipulating, blending, rhyming, and alliteration. Developing blending that prepares learners for isolating and segmenting the beginning sounds in words is also important. Lastly, learners should learn to perceive and isolate beginning consonant sounds.
Fostering Language Development
While phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and concepts of print and phonics are all vital literacy skills, language development predicts learners’ ultimate literacy development (Gunning, 2020). Therefore, as learners progress through various grades, language skills play a vital role in developing their literacy skills. Teachers can foster language development by listening keenly to what students say, being open to what children want to talk about, and helping students extend their comments by encouraging them.
Emergent Literacy in Kindergarten and Prekindergarten
Kindergarten and pre-kindergarten form the basis of emergent literacy development. Kindergarten has increased emphasis on literacy instruction, and kindergartens are now considered the first grade. Therefore, kindergarten and pre-kindergarten are important learning levels for developing language, background, and cognitive skills (Gunning, 2020). Thus, building background knowledge of vocabulary, language, and thinking skills must be emphasized in preschool. It is achievable by planning a preschool reading program and using systematic instruction to assist underachieving learners. The underachieving learners are often called low-readiness and fail to know reading by the end or middle of kindergarten; they can be assisted by reading to them and encouraging shared reading.
Assessing Emergent Literacy
The final part of the chapter gives a guide on assessing emergent literacy in class. First, it can be assessed through careful observation and using a checklist. Both formal and informal assessments can also be used to assess students’ emergent literacy. Teachers need not purchase informal assessment materials but make them (Gunning, 2020). Some informal assessment measures for testing emergent literacy are testing for letter knowledge, both lower and upper case. If a child knows at least ten, their letter knowledge is good. Another formal assessment is a writing sample where a learner should write the letter independently; the other is print familiarity and phonological awareness. Once the assessment is done, the teacher should use the assessment results to plan instruction. Therefore, by the end of Pre-K or the start of kindergarten, a sensible expectation should be that learners would be able to clap, count the syllables in words, and identify at least ten upper-case letters of the alphabet, among other things.
Reference
Gunning, T. (2020). Creating Literacy Instructions for All Students, (10Th Ed.). New York: Pearson.
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Question 
Chapter 4 Summary – Emergent Literacy
A detailed summary of Chapter 4. Please list each heading and subheading section and discuss each heading/section in the summary. Book: Gunning, T. (2020). Creating literacy instructions for all students, (10th ed.). New York: Pearson.