The Emergent Literacy In Early Childhood Of Chinese Children:a Case Study

Nowadays, with the deepening of the study on the development of orthographic awareness, especially children’s literal awareness, research on the emergent literacy in early childhood is drawing more and more attention. Most of the studies in past two decades have been engaged in the emergent literacy of the school children whose native languages are alphabetic. Few researches have focused on the development of children’s literal awareness in early childhood, i.e., preschool years. A majority of the subjects of the reported experiments were at the age of4to6. As to Chinese literal awareness development, very small number of the studies documented have been conducted in a bilingual context with Chinese as a non-dominant language. Then in a Chinese speaking environment, what will the development of Chinese children’s emergent literacy in early childhood be like, since Chinese orthographic system greatly differs from alphabetic languages? To find out the possible difference of literal awareness development in an earlier childhood, the present study chose a2,10year old boy as the subject, whose literal awareness development was observed and recorded in a natural environment, and then compared with children with typologically different languages. Our research results suggested that literacy emergence appeared spontaneously and earlier than expected. In addition, the course of emergent literacy in Chinese is also different from that in alphabetic languages.