LITERACY STRATEGY

Literacy could be defined as the ability to develop skills in writing, speaking, listening, thinking, and reading effectively. It is a crucial developmental step that enables young children, adolescents, and adults to encode and decode information clearly.

The development of literacy skills begins at birth, with language development. Parents and caregivers play a critical role in building infants’ and young children’s vocabularies. Studies from the National Early Literacy Panel has shown that children from middle-income families begin kindergarten with a vocabulary of approximately 20,000 to 30,000 words, whereas children from lower-income families start school with about 5,000 words. In other words, literacy gaps appear well before children start school.

The early year pre-school/elementary school is a critical time for children’s literacy development. Through the end of third grade, children are “learning to read,” before making the transition to “reading to learn” in the later elementary grades. Failure to obtain necessary literacy skills in the early grades undermines children’s ability to succeed in school and in life, as they move into the later grades and experience difficulty understanding and achieving in the content areas. Middle and high school pupils’ reading scores are a major predictor of whether they will graduate.

Children who perform poorly in reading achievement tests are 20 times more likely to drop out than those who perform well. Although,the National Early Literacy Panel research has been conducted on literacy, including numerous high-quality evaluations, enabling policymakers and practitioners to identify and focus resources on effective policies and strategies. They are less confident about how best to coordinate and combine these tools to create an effective overall literacy strategy for young learners.

Literacy development begins at birth even before a child enters kindergarten; as babies hear words or language used around them.Successful development of language and literacy skills during the early childhood year’s birth through age 8 is critical to future literacy achievement.

The National Early Literacy Panel focuses on effective strategies for promoting young children’s literacy development (birth through age 5). The panel has identified 11 early literacy skills and abilities that predict children’s later literacy success, as measured by pupils reading outcomes at the end of kindergarten or beginning of first grade. These skills and abilities predict future reading success regardless of cognitive ability or socioeconomic status. Ten skills were highly predictive:

(1) Alphabet knowledge

(2) Early Decoding

(3) Fluency

(4)  Oral Language skill

(5) Phonics Awareness

(6) Phonics

(7) Phonological awareness

(8) Phonological Memory

(9) Print knowledge

(10) Reading Comprehension

CHART: LITERACY TERMINOLOGY

Alphabet Knowledge	The ability to name the letters of the alphabet and recognize the letter symbol in print
Early decoding	The ability to recognize the basic sounds and sound blends (phonemes) that makes up a word
Fluency	The ability to read with speed, accuracy and proper expression
Oral language skills	Refers to fluency in speaking and listening, include vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and narrative- discourse skills
Phonics awareness	The ability to focus on and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words
Phonics	The ability to understand that there is a relationship between the sounds of spoken language, and the symbols and spelling that represent those sounds
Phonological awareness	The understanding that words are made up of sounds and ability to recognize the initial sound of word, the ending part of a word, patterns among word, elements of a sentence and syllabus
Phonological Memory	The ability to remember the sequence of unfamiliar sounds
Print knowledge	The ability to understand print letters, words and book.
Reading comprehension	The ability to understand the content of a text.