Exploring Teachers’ Use of Print Salient Features in Preschool Classrooms

Abstract

Early literacy skills such as print knowledge are essential building blocks for children’s later reading and academic outcomes. Shared book reading activities in early childhood classrooms offer rich opportunities through which educators can support children’s print knowledge development by explicitly referring to a book’s print. Such references occur more frequently in naturalistic contexts when the books utilized during reading events contain visually salient features. This study explored how these features were utilized by preschool teachers in ways that relate to print knowledge learning targets. Nine teachers were provided with a textset of 12 books that ranged in their amount and inclusion of specific print salient features and video-recorded reading each book aloud to their students. The resulting 108 videos were coded for print references and results showed that teachers had higher averages of print references while reading books that contain print salience than those that do not. In addition, teachers referenced specific features more frequently than others, suggesting that some features may be more naturally provocative of teachers’ attention than others. A closer examination of two specific features, Visible Speech and Environmental Print, revealed that while teachers more often utilized print salience to discuss print knowledge learning targets considered to be “lower level” in their developmental complexity, these references also frequently related to aspects of story comprehension. Thematic analyses of teachers’ references related to print salience suggest that these features offer unique opportunities to connect print and comprehension learning, a concept supported by scholarship and research on multimodal aspects of children’s books. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.