Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas Lawrence, KS, USA.
Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jun 24;5:632. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00632. eCollection 2014.
When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence children's early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies (Robins and Treiman, 2009; Robins et al., 2012, 2014) of parent-child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about similarities and differences in parent-child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the child's name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names (monograms), but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences (digrams). Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the child's name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent-child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to children's early literacy skills and school readiness.
当正式的读写能力教学开始时，大约在 5 或 6 岁左右，来自社会经济地位（SES）较低家庭的孩子往往不如来自 SES 较高家庭的孩子准备充分。我们的研究目的是探索 SES 可能影响儿童早期读写技能的途径之一：关于字母的非正式对话。这项研究建立在之前的研究（罗宾斯和崔曼，2009；罗宾斯等人，2012 年，2014 年）的基础上，这些研究表明了美国父母和他们的年幼孩子如何谈论写作，并提供了关于 SES 作为父母-孩子对话功能的相似性和差异性的初步证据。我们专注于 3 至 5 岁的父母和孩子，对这些对话进行了五次独立分析，询问 SES 是否以及如何影响之前建立的模式。尽管我们在 SES 较高和较低的家庭中都发现了关于字母的对话，但这些对话的性质存在差异。SES 较低的家庭中，问题式的字母对话比例较低，而且在 SES 较低的家庭中提到的字母名称中，更多的是孤立地而不是连续地出现。SES 较低的家庭尤其可能将字母与孩子的名字联系起来，并且他们更强调字母顺序。我们没有发现 SES 在影响特定字母名称（字母组合）使用的因素方面存在差异，但在两个字母序列（双字母组合）方面存在差异。关注字母和孩子名字与字母之间的关联可能有助于孩子对读写活动产生兴趣，但它们可能无法很好地反映字母与一般单词之间的关系。了解父母与孩子之间关于字母的对话模式是探索其对儿童早期读写技能和学校准备的贡献的重要第一步。
