Is Print Awareness Part of the Science of Reading?

 

Teacher question:    

With all the talk about the science of reading (phonics, phonemic awareness, knowledge building, etc.), I’m not hearing anything about print awareness. Should we still teach that and, if so, how do we do that?

Shanahan response:  

I don’t hear much about print awareness these days either, though I think it is included in every set of state educational standards. But I never (until now) get asked about it.

I think there are many reasons for the lack of interest.

First, is its transience. It only matters for a brief window of time. Once kids are reading, print awareness can be assumed and there’s no more reason for concern.

Also, it is kind of a grab bag. “Print awareness” or “concepts of print” are terms used to describe a disparate collection of knowledge and skill:

• Recognition that print (not pictures) tells the story,
• Print represents words,
• Words are made up of letters,
• Blank spaces separate words,
• Words don’t include numbers,
• Print has orientation,
• Directionality,
• What to do at the end of a line of print,
• Distinguishing front and back book covers,
• Etc.

Some schemes even toss letters and letter names into this pot. Print awareness lacks conceptual clarity.

My first foray into research – more than 50 years ago – was of print awareness. It wasn’t a great study (maybe not even a good one), but I did come to understand that not all those skills are essential to learning to read. Some of them are probably more like side effects or trivial outcomes of learning to read. Honestly, I don’t think distinguishing book covers or recognizing that words don’t include numbers play an important role in reading development.

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Those kinds of items can be safely neglected – even if your school tests them. Those especially trivial items are likely tested so often because they are so easy to evaluate. That something is easy to assess is a poor reason for assessing it.

Nevertheless, some items in that list are essential to learning to read – such as recognizing that we read print and that print represents words. Other items play a functional role in reading and do have some value (directionality).

Another confusing thing about print awareness has to do with where it fits. Think of the “simple view of reading” or “Scarborough’s rope.” In those frameworks, print awareness would most likely be categorized as a decoding element. That’s interesting because analyses of actual data show it to be more implicated in reading comprehension and language than in decoding (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). I don’t understand that either. Don’t ask, I can’t explain it.

Accordingly, researchers have paid much less attention to print awareness than to other aspects of reading. A quick keyword check (PsycInfo) revealed that print awareness or concepts of print show up 11% as often as phonics/decoding and 4% as reading comprehension. There is some print awareness science, but – relatively – not much.

Above I noted two types of print awareness that play a role in reading development.

One category includes skills implicated in the mechanics of reading, including directionality or knowing what to do at the end of a line of print. These skills aren’t difficult to learn, but they are learned behaviors. Directionality is an arbitrary convention of print. In English we read left-to-right. Other scripts do it differently: Hebrew is read right-to-left, and the vertical scripts of Chinese and Japanese are read top-to-bottom.

The truly essential parts of print awareness are more conceptual. They are fundamental understandings or insights (awareness), more than skills to be implemented. An important example of this is the recognition that reading involves print not pictures.

I remember when I first became aware of this. I was reading Ferreiro and Teberosky’s (1982) magnificent study of early reading development. Their interviews and observations of preschoolers in Argentina revealed that young children often have no idea why print is on the page.

My oldest daughter was 3. I’d been reading to her almost daily since her debut. I was certain that any child read to that much would easily have gained that necessary insight. I couldn’t wait to get home to check that out.

When being read to, my daughter looked at the book and often touched the pictures. When she blocked the words I’d simply move her hand or read through the interference. But not this day. No, now when she inadvertently covered the print… I stopped. Dead in my reading tracks. I didn’t even try to finish the sentence.

“Why did you stop? What’s the matter, Daddy?”

I explained that I had to stop because she was covering the words. I couldn’t read because I couldn’t see the words.

She looked at the pages, puzzled. “You read this?” she asked pointing at the print.

“Yes, those are the words that I read.”

We didn’t talk about the different roles the print and pictures play, and I didn’t elucidate on how print does its work. But for the next several reads, she conducted numerous “experiments.” She’d look at my eyes when I was reading and then would try to plop her fingers down where she thought she might bring things to a halt. If I stopped reading, she laughed uproariously. If I didn’t she’d try again.

To tell the truth, I was as surprised as she was.  She was astonished that those black squiggles were what was read, and I was flabbergasted that this brilliant product of my genes who I’d read to hundreds of times had no idea that print told the story.

Research helps explain why this is (Justice, et al., 2012). Children being read to rarely look at the print. Only about 6% of the time. Looking at the print doesn’t reveal how print references language, but it is a necessary step in the process.

The awareness that print is what is being read raises some interesting questions. “Where does it say ‘dragons’”? for instance. If the print shows what to say, how does what we say match with what’s on the page?

Research, including mine, shows that kids formulate all kinds of hypotheses to answer such questions. Sometimes they assume that each letter must stand for a word or syllable. The idea that multiple letters are needed to represent most words is not immediately obvious. The purpose of blank spaces isn’t immediately apparent either. I’m referring to the “concept of word.”

Let’s say the children have memorized Mary Had a Little Lamb. They can recite it from memory. Now we show them text and want them to match their recitation to the print, pointing to the words as they say them (“fingerpoint reading”).

That requires the recognition that words are separated by blanks, that “Mary” and “little” are words (“Mare,” “ree,” “lit,” and “tle” are not words), that “had” and “a” are two separate words and not one (“hada” is very popular with the young’uns), and so on.

Darrell Morris has published provocative data suggesting that concept of word is an understanding that expedites growth in phonemic awareness – and that knowing the consonant sounds facilitates development of the concept (e.g., Morris, 1993).

I’m sure that sequence may upset those who think learning to read proceeds in a straightforward order… with kids mastering phonemic awareness, then taking on letters, sounds, and decoding, eventually confronting words in text.

Nevertheless, most data analyses of early literacy describe this seemingly haphazard developmental pattern. For instance, Linnea Ehri has long explained how learning phonemic awareness and phonics are intertwined. Her data would argue against delaying phonics instruction until kids have accomplished the necessary levels of phonemic awareness. Seeing the relationship between letters and phonemes helps kids to perceive the phonemes within words, just as phonemic awareness contributes to decoding. Likewise, there is no reason to delay exposing beginning readers to print – including engaging them in reading decodable texts and texts with lots of word repetition.

Laura Justice and her crew (2008) have convincingly demonstrated the benefits of pointing at the print when reading to children. Parents can easily do this with a child in their lap or close at their side, while teachers can do it with big books and the like. Dr. Justice reports that such reader behavior contributes to print awareness. She also has shown that talking about text during those read-alouds can be beneficial, too. The readers in their study might point to a word and tell the child, “This says danger.” (I bet Laura’d approve of my refusal to read when the kids’ fingers cover the text.)

When I taught first grade, I used a lot of language experience. The children would dictate, and I would transcribe. Then I’d read it back to them multiple times, and they’d try to join in with me. I not only pointed to the words as we read, but they got to see that the transcription – the writing – went in the same direction as the reading. (That first study mentioned earlier found that my kids were more aware of these aspects of print than was true of the kids in the studies that had already been published on that topic.)

The short answer to your question is:

• Yes, teach print awareness.
• Let kids see the text you are reading (or writing) and bring their attention to it.
• Talk about those spaces between words, and don’t hesitate to point to the words that you are reading.
• But don’t spend a lot of time on fronts and backs of books or how to turn pages or whether numbers and letters are different, those are more likely to be side effects than facilitators in learning to read.
  
  

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References

Chung, S. C., Geva, E., Chen, X., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Do we ‘laugh’ or ‘La8gh’? Early print knowledge and its relation to learning to read in English and French. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(6), 519–533. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2020.1863970

Ferreiro, E. & Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Portsmouth, NMH: Heinemann.

Hiebert, E. H., Cioffi, G., & Antonak, R. F. (1984). A developmental sequence in preschool children's acquisition of reading readiness skills and print awareness concepts. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 5(2), 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/0193-3973(84)90012-1

Justice, L. M., Pullen, P. C., & Pence, K. (2008). Influence of verbal and nonverbal references to print on preschoolers' visual attention to print during storybook reading. Developmental Psychology, 44(3), 855–866. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.855

McGinty, A. S., Justice, L. M., Piasta, S. B., Kaderavek, J., & Fan, X. (2012). Does context matter? Explicit print instruction during reading varies in its influence by child and classroom factors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(1), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2011.05.002

Mesmer, H. A. E., & Lake, K. (2010). The Role of Syllable Awareness and Syllable-Controlled Text in the Development of Finger-Point Reading. Reading Psychology, 31(2), 176–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710902754341

Morris D. (1993). The relationship between children’s concept of word in text and phoneme awareness in learning to read: A longitudinal study. Research in the Teaching of English, 27(no. 2), 133-154.

Morris, D., Bloodgood, J., & Perney, J. (2003). Kindergarten Predictors of First- and Second-Grade Reading Achievement. The Elementary School Journal, 104(2), 93–109.

https://doi.org/10.1086/499744

Nevo, E., & Vaknin-Nusbaum, V. (2018). Enhancing language and print-concept skills by using interactive storybook reading in kindergarten. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 18(4), 545–569. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798417694482

Storch, S. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2002). Oral language and code-related precursors to reading: Evidence from a longitudinal structural model. Developmental Psychology, 38(6), 934–947. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.38.6.934

Uhry, J. K. (2002). Finger-point reading in kindergarten: The role of phonemic awareness, one-to-one correspondence, and rapid serial naming. Scientific Studies of Reading, 6(4), 319–342. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532799XSSR0604_02

 

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