Inside-out Domain

Phonological sensitivity

Phonological sensitivity refers to the ability to detect and manipulate the sound structure of oral language. Phonological sensitivity might be revealed by a such things as child's ability to identify words that rhyme ("What rhymes with cat?"), or to delete words from compound words to form a new word ("What word would we have if we took 'cow' away from 'cowboy'?). It is very important to understand that phonological sensitivity is an oral language skill that can develop without any exposure to print or letters. It is NOT phonics, which is a teaching method that emphasizes the relationship between letters and corresponding sounds. Thus phonological sensitivity is something that can and should develop in the preschool period.

Phonological sensitivity promotes the development of reading skills because letters in written language correspond to speech sounds at the level of phonemes. If children cannot perceive the individual sounds in spoken words, they will have difficulty identifying the correspondence between print and the language it represents.

Here is a question that four-year-olds will answer correctly if they are developing phonological awareness at an appropriate level for their age:

This is a zebra, a shoe, a wall, and a leaf. Point to the one that rhymes with ball.

Print knowledge

Print knowledge refers to a child's developing understand of the writing system. It progresses from very simple understanding of things like how to hold a book, to understanding that print in English runs from top to bottom and left to right across a page, to functions of written language such as what a menu is for, to the ability to name letters of the alphabet. Knowledge of print is half the equation of the writing code. Children need to know how print works if they are going to be able to link units of sound to units of print.

Here is an example of a question that four-year-olds would be able to answer correctly if they were developing print knowledge at an age-appropriate level:

Find the picture that has a word in it.

Emergent writing

Another route to print awareness and letter knowledge is through writing. Emergent writing includes pretending to write and learning to write one's name. Similar to phonological awareness and print knowledge, it too goes through a developmental progression over the preschool years for children who are raised in literate homes. At the earliest stage young children learn to hold and use crayons and other writing instruments to draw. Later they will begin to write letters.

Here is an example of a question that four-year-olds with age-appropriate levels of emergent writing would be able to answer:

Some children wrote their name. Find the one that is written the best.

Poverty and pre-reading skills

By one estimate, 35% of children in the United States enter public schools with such low levels of the skills and motivation that are needed as starting points in our current educational system that they are at substantial risk of early academic difficulties. This problem is strongly linked to family income. When schools are ranked by the median socioeconomic status of their students' families, socioeconomic status correlates .68 with academic achievement. Socioeconomic status is also one of the strongest predictors of performance differences in children at the beginning of first grade.

Children from low-income families are substantially behind their more affluent peers in both the outside-in and inside-out components of pre-reading. For instance, the typical child in some urban public schools enters kindergarten at the 5th percentile in vocabulary knowledge, and does not know words such as chicken, leaf, and triangle.

Children raised in poverty are also substantially behind on inside-out skills such as letter naming and phonological awareness. For instance, the typical child enters Head Start as a four-year-old being able to name no more than a single letter of the alphabet. How many letters do you think this typical child can name on exit from preschool a year later? One. By way of comparison, a typical middle-class child would be able to name all the letters on entry into kindergarten. Is this important? Reading scores in 10th grade can be predicted with surprising accuracy from knowledge of the alphabet in kindergarten.

Pre-reading experiences and poverty

Not surprisingly, the delays and gaps in pre-reading skills evidenced by preschoolers from low-income backgrounds are mirrored in their exposure to experiences that might support the development of pre-reading skills. Numerous studies have documented differences between low-income and other children in availability of children's books, frequency of shared book reading, and the quality of language interactions between children and parents. These are all experiences that have strong effects on outside-in skills. I am reminded of some of the remarkable findings of the ground-breaking Meaningful Differences study by Hart and Risley, mentioned earlier by Mrs. Bush. Over a 2.5 year period, these investigators recorded naturally occurring conversations in the homes of professional, working class, and welfare families with young children. There was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour between professional and welfare parents. The professional families' children at age 3 actually had a larger recorded vocabulary than the welfare families' parents. I will say that again. The 3-year-olds from the affluent families had larger spoken vocabularies than the parents from the welfare families. Children who aren't talked to, who aren't engaged in rich language interactions with their parents, are going to have low levels of vocabulary and conceptual development, and this will affect their later reading and academic achievement.

These differences extend to experiences that could support development of inside-out skills. For instance, Jana Mason found that there were no alphabet materials available for preschoolers in the homes of about half of the welfare families she studied. These materials were found in the homes of nearly all children of professional parents. We know that a child does not learn the name of the letter A or what sound it makes or how to print it through osmosis. Children learn these things because adults encourage them to do so.

Children who don't have the environmental supports for learning outside-in and inside-out skills fall way behind those that do. Preschoolers from low-income homes are particularly likely to be bereft of these supporting experiences, but the problem is not confined to a single social strata, and many low-income parents do an excellent job in this area.

We need to be very concerned about children who enter school way behind their peers on pre-reading skills because the relation between the skills with which children enter school and their later academic performance is strikingly stable. For instance, the probability that a child will remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if he or she is a poor reader at the end of the first grade is .88.

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