Toward a model of the development of reader resources in the emergence and acquisition of literacy skill

"The purpose of the study was to test empirically a proposed theoretical model of the development of reader resources of young children during the emergence and acquisition of literacy skills resulting in the conventional reading and writing of connected discourse. The proposed model included nine components: home experiences with print, oral language facility, concepts about print, graphemic awareness, simple phonemic awareness, compound phonemic awareness, grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, word reading and writing, and conventional reading and writing. Children from preschool through third grade were randomly selected from two different schools serving two different types of populations. Each child completed a series of reading, writing, and language tasks used to measure each of the constructs. A multivariate analysis of variance show no difference on any of the tasks by gender. There were significant differences by grade level. Univariate analyses of variance and post hoc tests showed that children increase their knowledge of written language as they get older. Structural equation modeling using the LISREL 7 program was performed on the proposed model as well as on several alternative models. The best fitting model was an eight component model with concepts about print and graphemic awareness combined into one component. A tentative theory of periods in the emergence and acquisition of literacy skills was proposed to explain how the model operates."

"Toward a model of the development of reader resources in the emergence and acquisition of literacy skill"
"Toward a model of the development of reader resources in the emergence and acquisition of literacy skill"@en