Examining the effects of home literacy and numeracy environment on early reading and math acquisition

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Highlights

  • Parents’ teaching predicted reading through the effects of letter knowledge.

  • Book exposure predicted reading through the effects of vocabulary on phonological awareness.

  • Home numeracy environment predicted math fluency through the effects of verbal counting.

  • Parents engaged more frequently in numeracy activities than in literacy activities.

Abstract

The present study examined how the home literacy and numeracy environment in kindergarten influences reading and math acquisition in grade 1. Eighty-two Greek children from mainly middle socioeconomic backgrounds were followed from kindergarten to grade 1 and were assessed on measures of nonverbal intelligence, emergent literacy skills, early math concepts, verbal counting, reading, and math fluency. The parents of the children also responded to a questionnaire regarding the frequency of home literacy and numeracy activities. The results of path analyses indicated that parents’ teaching of literacy skills predicted reading fluency through the effects of letter knowledge and phonological awareness. Storybook exposure predicted reading fluency through the effects of vocabulary on phonological awareness. Finally, parents’ teaching of numeracy skills predicted math fluency through the effects of verbal counting. These findings suggest that both the home literacy and the home numeracy environments are important for early reading and math acquisition, but their effects are mediated by emergent literacy and numeracy skills.

Introduction

It is well documented that early childhood experiences are critical for later academic achievement (e.g., Duncan et al., 2007, Sylva and Roberts, 2010, Torppa et al., 2007). Research has also documented that children come to kindergarten with some knowledge of letters and numbers that is presumed to be the result of parent teaching (e.g., Al Otaiba et al., 2010, Manolitsis and Tafa, 2011, Passolunghi and Lanfranchi, 2012, Sylva et al., 2010). Interactions between parents and their children have also been an integral component of Bronfenbrenner's (1995) bioecological model. The strength of these interactions depends not only on the structural characteristics of the environmental context (e.g., social class), but also on the characteristics of each child. Several researchers have subsumed parent–child interactions under the overarching concept of home-based parental environment that includes facets such as home-learning, warmth/responsivity, and management/discipline (Morrison, 2009, Pomerantz et al., 2007).

The home-learning environment has been found to be a significant predictor of reading and math achievement (Anders et al., 2012, Melhuish et al., 2008, Rodriguez and Tamis-LeMonda, 2011, Sylva et al., 2010). However, because the home-learning environment is broad by its own nature and includes aspects that are conceptually and factor-analytically unrelated to each other (Manolitsis et al., 2011, Sénéchal, 2006), the possible links between specific aspects of the home-learning environment and reading or math achievement remain unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine the role of specific home literacy and numeracy experiences on reading and math acquisition. The examination of the effects of these early experiences takes into account not only the children's early cognitive and academic skills, but also mother's educational level, which is used here as an index of the environmental context (to borrow Bronfenbrenner's (1999) terminology).

Home literacy environment (HLE) has been conceptualized as an umbrella concept that encapsulates all the possible facets of experiences with written speech that children engage in with their parents interactively (Burgess et al., 2002, Frijters et al., 2000, Kirby and Hogan, 2008, Sénéchal et al., 1998, Tafa, 2011). Sénéchal et al. (1998) grouped the activities taking place at home into two broad categories: formal and informal literacy activities, which have been found to be independent of each other. A group of studies (Buchs et al., 2011, Schmitt et al., 2011, Umek et al., 2005) has adopted a broader conceptualization of HLE that includes a combination of home literacy activities and contextual variables (e.g., demographic characteristics), child characteristics (e.g., temperament), mother–child interactions (e.g., maternal responsiveness), and parent–child joint activities (e.g., watching TV). In order to be consistent with our previous work on this topic, we used Sénéchal et al.’s (1998) conceptualization of HLE in the present study.

Formal literacy activities are those that directly engage children in print concepts through the teaching of letters or teaching of reading and writing of words. These activities can be found in the literature under different terms such as “parental mediation” (Aram & Levin, 2002) or “zone-of-proximal-development stimulation” (Umek et al., 2005). Several studies have shown that parents’ direct teaching contributes to reading ability through the effects of letter knowledge and phonological awareness (Evans et al., 2000, Foy and Mann, 2003, Hood et al., 2008, Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, Stephenson et al., 2008). In turn, informal literacy activities are those that expose children to print incidentally through activities such as shared book reading and visits to the library. These activities contribute to reading through the effects of vocabulary (Roth et al., 2002, Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, Torppa et al., 2007). Although previous studies have suggested an indirect relationship between formal/informal literacy activities and reading ability, they have not incorporated both types of home literacy activities in a single statistical model. Doing so would allow us to test the extent to which the hypothesized mediators (letter knowledge, vocabulary, and phonological awareness) explain the relationship between home literacy and subsequent reading.

Most of the existing studies have assessed HLE at the end of kindergarten (Evans et al., 2000, Foy and Mann, 2003, Hood et al., 2008, Manolitsis et al., 2011), which is problematic for two reasons: first, the effects of HLE on emergent literacy skills are confounded with instruction that children receive in kindergarten to the point that they become indistinguishable (Galindo & Sheldon, 2012). Second, parents may alter the frequency of teaching specific literacy components, and consequently what they report on the HLE questionnaire, because of the feedback they receive from teachers regarding their children's performance (Kim, 2009, Silinskas and Leppänen, 2010).

Home numeracy environment (HNE) is an umbrella concept that encompasses all the possible facets of experiences with numeracy (e.g., counting, number recognition, logical games) that children engage in with their parents interactively (LeFevre et al., 2009). LeFevre et al. (2009) grouped HNE activities into two broad categories: direct and indirect numeracy activities. For consistency purposes, in the present study, we will use the terms formal HNE to refer to the direct activities and informal HNE to refer to the indirect HNE activities. Formal HNE involves activities that engage children in explicit teaching of numbers and counting skills. In turn, informal HNE involves incidental exposure to numeracy through “real-world tasks” (LeFevre et al., 2009) such as card games, measuring cooking materials, counting money, or playing with calculators. Similar to HLE activities, the two types of HNE activities are assumed to be independent of each other. Historically, HNE activities have been provided to the children less frequently than the HLE activities (Anders et al., 2012, LeFevre et al., 2009, Skwarchuk, 2009, Tudge and Doucet, 2004).

Compared to the relatively long history of research on HLE, research examining the role of HNE on math acquisition is still in its infancy. Recently, Anders et al. (2012) found that HNE practices predicted the children's numeracy skills at the age of 3 and that an early advantage of children with high HNE was maintained until the age of 5. To our knowledge, only three studies have examined the role of specific aspects of HNE on math acquisition (LeFevre et al., 2009, LeFevre et al., 2010, LeFevre et al., 2009, Skwarchuk, 2009) and have provided mixed findings. For example, LeFevre et al. (2009), in a cross-sectional study that covered the developmental period from kindergarten to grade 2, examined whether formal and informal HNE experiences were related to children's math performance. They found that informal HNE activities accounted for a significant amount of variance in math knowledge and math fluency skills, even after controlling for the effects of vocabulary, working memory and home literacy environment. In contrast, working with a group of Greek and Canadian kindergarten children, LeFevre et al. (2010) found that informal HNE activities were infrequent and they did not correlate significantly with the early numeracy skills. In both studies, however, formal HNE contributed significantly to early numeracy, after controlling for the effect of cognitive skills or parents’ education.

A group of studies has also demonstrated that broader aspects of the home-learning experiences are associated with early math skills (LeFevre et al., 2002, Melhuish et al., 2008, Stylianides and Stylianides, 2011). For example, Melhuish et al. (2008) found that a general measure of the home-learning environment predicted numeracy achievement at the age of five and underachievement in mathematics at the age of seven. In addition, some studies have reported that math skills are associated with home literacy experiences at least as strongly as with home numeracy experiences (Anders et al., 2012, LeFevre et al., 2009, LeFevre et al., 2010). These counterintuitive findings have been explained in terms of the language skills that are necessary for solving math tasks and the limited numeracy activities taking place at the preschoolers’ home (Anders et al., 2012).

Previous studies on HNE have at least three limitations. First, with one exception (Anders et al., 2012), none of the studies examining the role of HNE on math acquisition was longitudinal. Thus, it is difficult to draw any conclusions on the developmental relationship between the HNE activities and math acquisition. Second, although several studies have reported that early numeracy skills are robust predictors of later math ability (Aunola et al., 2004, Krajewski and Schneider, 2009, Stock et al., 2009), none of the HNE studies has examined if the effects of the HNE activities on math acquisition are indirect through the effects of early numeracy skills (that would mimic the relationships observed with the HLE activities). Finally, despite the strong relationship between nonverbal intelligence and mathematics (e.g., Fuchs et al., 2010, Kyttälä and Lehto, 2008), none of the HNE studies has controlled for the effects of nonverbal intelligence.

The purpose of the present longitudinal study was to examine how HLE and HNE activities – assessed at the beginning of kindergarten – predict reading and math achievement in grade 1in Greek. Because ‘time’ is a significant factor that may influence the effects of home-learning environment on early literacy and math acquisition (Bronfenbrenner, 1999), we purposely chose to assess HLE and HNE before children's exposure to any systematic reading or math instruction at school. In addition, we used reading fluency measures in grade 1 as reading outcomes because reading accuracy reaches ceiling by the end of grade 1 in Greek due to the transparency of the orthography (95% consistent in the direction of reading; Protopapas & Vlachou, 2009). To our knowledge, this is the first study to test a mediational model of the relationship between HNE and math acquisition. This model is rooted to empirical findings showing that (a) early mathematical skills in kindergarten predict mathematics ability in grades 1 and 2 (Aunola et al., 2004, Stock et al., 2009), (b) formal HNE predicts early mathematical skills in kindergarten (Anders et al., 2012, LeFevre et al., 2010) and (c) formal HNE predicts mathematics ability in grade 1 (LeFevre et al., 2009, Melhuish et al., 2008).

We sought to examine the following hypotheses:

  • (1)

    Formal literacy activities will predict reading fluency in grade 1 through the effects of letter knowledge and phonological awareness.

  • (2)

    Informal literacy activities will predict reading fluency in grade 1 through the effects of vocabulary and phonological awareness.

  • (3)

    Formal numeracy activities will predict math fluency in grade 1 through the effects of early math concepts and verbal counting. Because the informal numeracy activities were not assessed in the present study (see below for reasons), we did not formulate a hypothesis regarding their role.

  • (4)

    Formal literacy activities will predict math fluency in grade 1 through the effects of early math concepts and verbal counting.

The present study makes four important contributions to the literature: first, we examined the effects of HLE and HNE on reading and mathematics in grade 1, after controlling for the effects of early reading ability (assessed at the end of kindergarten). This responds to the call of previous studies for a more conservative test of the effects of HLE on future reading (Manolitsis et al., 2011) and also takes into account recent evidence showing that reading measures are significant predictors of future mathematics ability (Purpura, Hume, Sims, & Lonigan, 2011). Second, we examined whether the two types of HLE activities would predict early math skills. This would be expected given that solving math tasks requires some level of language processing (Anders et al., 2012) and on the basis of findings showing that early math acquisition is influenced by broader home-learning experiences (Melhuish et al., 2008). Third, the inclusion of math outcomes in our study serves as a control to the possible effects of orthographic transparency on reading. In other words, if the contribution of HLE on reading in Greek is minimized because of orthographic transparency, then the effect of HLE on math should not be affected because math is minimally influenced by the orthographic characteristics of a language. Finally, we examined the effects of HLE and HNE on reading and mathematics, after taking into account the effects of nonverbal intelligence and mother's educational level.

According to the parental investment model (Haveman, Wolfe, & Spaulding, 1991), mother's education is associated with the children's literacy skills, because it enables parents to build their children's human capital by providing increased resources, services, and time for interaction in stimulating activities. A number of studies have shown that HLE mediated the influence of parents’ socioeconomic status (educational level and income) on early literacy skills (Foster et al., 2005, Silinskas et al., 2010, Yeung et al., 2002). In addition, there are findings suggesting that mother's education may be differently related to the two facets of HLE; higher-educated mothers choose to provide a more ‘child-centered’ approach of HLE (e.g., reading books; see Evans et al., 2000, Hartas, 2011, Umek et al., 2005), because they feel they act as role models infusing the value of reading to their children (Saracho, 1997). In contrast, lower-educated mothers choose a more ‘traditional’ approach of HLE (e.g., direct teaching of letters; Phillips and Lonigan, 2009, Stipek et al., 1992, Tracey and Young, 2002), because they have fewer resources to provide to their children (e.g., buy fewer books) or less opportunities to access educational services (e.g., infrequent visits to libraries with large book collections; Hartas, 2011, Neuman and Celano, 2001, Silinskas and Leppänen, 2010). In the present study, we used mother's education as a control variable and not as a predictor of HLE or HNE, in order to be able to compare our findings to those of previous studies that used similar measures and tested similar hypotheses (Gest et al., 2004, LeFevre et al., 2010, Roberts et al., 2005, Sénéchal, 2006, Silinskas and Leppänen, 2010).

Section snippets

Participants

Ninety-nine Greek kindergarten children (63 males and 36 females; Mean age = 64.32 months, SD = 3.23, at the first time of measurement) from Heraklion, a typical urban city in Greece, were followed from kindergarten to grade 1. The children were randomly selected from six kindergarten schools (serving children ages 5–6 years old), which were, in turn, selected with a stratified randomized approach in order to represent a range of demographics. The children were native speakers of Greek, Caucasian,

Preliminary data analyses

The descriptive statistics for the home literacy and numeracy questionnaire are presented in Table 1. The home literacy questionnaire indicated that, on average, parents in the present study reported having between 25 and 99 children's books at home, that storybook reading occurred at home a couple of days a week, and that children were taught to read words a few times a month. In turn, the home numeracy questionnaire indicated that, on average, parents taught their children to identify the

Discussion

The purpose of the present longitudinal study was to trace the effects of HLE and formal HNE activities on reading and math achievement. In line with the findings of previous studies (Burgess et al., 2002, Frijters et al., 2000, Hood et al., 2008, Kirby and Hogan, 2008, Sénéchal, 2006, Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, Stephenson et al., 2008, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998), we found that HLE consisted of two distinct facets and that each facet predicted reading indirectly through partly distinct

Conclusion

The findings of the present study add to a growing body of research examining the role of home literacy and numeracy activities on reading and math acquisition. Both forms of HLE and formal HNE predicted reading and math fluency indirectly through the effects of emergent literacy and numeracy skills. Given the strong correlation between parent numeracy and literacy teaching as well as the association between the parent literacy teaching and early numeracy skills, it is reasonable to argue that

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