Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education (3-8 years)
However, the authors emphasised too that the new term reflected the growing awareness of the concurrent development of oral language, reading and writing. They also emphasised that the emergent literacy perspective ‘ascribes to the child the role of constructor of his or her own literacy’ (p. 729). What is immediately striking about the way in which the term was understood two decades ago is the fact that it did not explicitly embrace the current conception of reading, writing and oral language as wholly interconnected aspects of literacy development. Also, it must be remembered that Vygotskian theory on various aspects of literacy for example, the development of symbolism, was much less well articulated then. Likewise, sociocultural theories of literacy were only just beginning to feature in the literature. We can see the growth in the conception of the notion of emergent literacy by comparing the Sulzby and Teale definition with that of Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998, p. 849) who define emergent literacy as ‘the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are presumed to be developmental precursors to conventional forms of reading and writing’. In contrast to this holistic view of emergent literacy, a developmental model has been proposed by Sénéchal, LeFevre, Smith-Chant & Colton (2001) whereby emergent literacy is viewed as separate from oral language and metalinguistic skills. This view proposes that emergent literacy is composed of two components, children’s conceptual knowledge and their early procedural knowledge of reading and writing. Conceptual knowledge includes children’s knowledge of the acts of reading and writing and their perception of themselves as readers and writers. Procedural knowledge includes letter name, letter sound knowledge and some word reading. The development of oral language which includes listening comprehension and vocabulary, and metalinguistic skills which include phonological awareness are considered as separate constructs. As the interrelations and patterns 43