| This study examined the strategies that young children used to identify print that was both a meaningful and functional part of their preschool environment (their names and classroom labels). Previous researchers, using environmental print such as advertising logos, had found that children relied on contextual cues to identify words, but similar to Share and Gur (1999), I found that four- and five-year olds identified words attending to cues in the print itself. Children's strategies ranged from prephonetic (attention to contextual and visual cues) to phonetic (attention to cues that contributed letter and sound information) with more than three quarters of the children using letter sound knowledge to some extent for real reading, an example of naturally-occurring use of phonetic strategies as reported by Share and Gur. Some children employed a combination of strategies which were both prephonetic and phonetic, a pattern of use not observed previously, illustrating a continuum of learning as children become readers. This was further supported by children's relative levels of letter/sound knowledge, suggesting that as children integrate their understanding of letters and sounds into working system, it becomes a reliable tool to read print. The orthography of written English was also a factor in word identification with children relying more on the initial (uppercase) letter cue to identify a name than on either the initial (lowercase) letter cue of a label or a final letter cue. In contrast, Share and Gur found that children learning to read Hebrew (a language with no uppercase) did not rely exclusively on either initial or final letter cues, but distributed their attention across the letter string. This combination of results points to the possibility of some very real differences in how children with different written languages approach the process of learning to read. |
