/ Effective Literacy Practices / Strategies, Practices and Tools (Ages 0-3) (Language & Communication)
Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
- Strategy 1
- Strategy 2
Instructional Strategy
Engage in narrative talk.
Talking about what you and child are doing as you engage in everyday activities strengthens language-rich environments and enhances vocabulary development, while supporting relationship building between adult and child.
Source: ZERO TO THREE
Effective Practices
- Describe what the child is doing (parallel talk) and what you are doing (self-talk) in simple terms as you go through daily routines.
- Describe the actions and results.
- Birth to 6 months: Attach a label to everything the child points to (shared visual gaze/joint attention), then describe what the child is interested in.
- 18 to 36 months: Scaffold language development by building on toddlers’ existing vocabulary.
Tools and Activities
Smart Talk for Early Childhood Professionals
Read On Arizona’s short, interactive learning session is intended to help practitioners understand the importance of back-and-forth interactions with infants and toddlers.
Learn More about Smart Talk
Communicating and Speaking
With support, infants and toddlers can grow in their ability to communicate productively with others.
Learn More from ECE Resource Hub
Parallel and Self-Talk
Learn more about these natural, everyday strategies to help develop language skills.
Watch this video from Welcome to Words
Download from Northern Illinois University
Instructional Strategy
Engage in conversation.
Having responsive, back-and-forth conversations with children, even before they can use words, helps them develop oral language skills and tells them that their communications are important and effective, which motivates them to keep communicating.
Effective Practices
- Ask questions and allow time for either a verbal or nonverbal response (within a 2 or 3 seconds, modeling the normal pattern of conversation).
- Birth to 12 months: Babies take longer to respond than older children. Wait at least 5 seconds for a coo or gesture and then respond.
- 18 to 36 months: Prompt children to interact with you or each other by using words or gestures.
- Converse as if child understands everything you are saying.
- Respond to child’s communication in a way that is relevant and has meaning.
- Birth to 6 months: Respond and put words to baby’s cooing, babbling, gestures, and looks.
- 6 to 18 months: Repeat and expand a child's words into a complete sentence.
- Introduce and model new sounds, gestures, or words for child to use/imitate.
- Keep the back-and-forth going.
Tools and Activities
Smart Talk for Early Childhood Professionals
Read On Arizona’s short, interactive learning session is intended to help practitioners understand the importance of back-and-forth interactions with infants and toddlers.
Learn More about Smart Talk
Supporting Conversations
Get more strategies and activities to help children grow in their conversational skills.
Learn More from ECE Resource Hub
Communicating and Speaking
With support, infants and toddlers can grow in their ability to communicate productively with others.
Learn More from ECE Resource Hub
Babbling Babies: Early Language Development
Watch a webinar about supporting language and literacy development for infants.
Learn More from Head Start Early Childhood Learning & Knowledge Center
Serve and Return
Responsive, back-and-forth interactions help build children’s brains.
Learn More from Harvard University Center on the Developing Child
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.