Emergent Literacy in Early Childhood

Children start to learn languages from the day they were born. As they grow and develop, their speaking and language skills become complex increasingly. They learn to understand and use language to express ideas, thoughts, feelings, and to communicate with others. During developing speaking and language at the beginning, children learn skills that are important for literacy development (reading and writing). This stage is known as emergent literacy, which starts from birth and continues through the preschool years. Children take a look and interact with print media such as books or magazines long before they start elementary school. Parents can appreciate their children when they begin to recognizing rhyming words, scribbling on crayons, mentioning a few alphabet letters, or pretending to write. Gradually, children combine what they know about speaking and listening to what they know from the results of interactions with the print media to be ready to learn reading and writing.