Literacy starts with talking: The Art of Conversation Part II
The Foundations of Literacy Alyssa McCabe is a Psychology Professor at the University of Massachusetts, and she has a 40-year background in research into children's narratives: that is, how children tell stories and how it reflects or affects their literacy skills later in childhood. Her list of published research is phenomenal; check it out ! McCabe and David Dickinson have developed the Comprehensive Language Approach (PDF) which describes the interweaving of oral and written language skills in developing literacy. It looks a little like this: That little yellow diamond in the centre is the juxtaposition of four key foundations: Conventions of print : understand how books work, the direction we read in, which is the front and the back, what a letter, a word, a sentence looks like; Vocabulary : having a big word bank that works across many settings and situations; Phonemic/phonic awareness : what we mostly think about whe
