Parental writing support and preschoolers’ early literacy, language, and fine motor skills

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Highlights

  • We observed parents’ support for preschoolers’ writing during a joint writing task.

  • Most parents provided low-level support for children's writing.

  • Parents did not encourage children to choose or print letters independently.

  • Parents often accepted children's errors rather than asking for corrections.

  • Graphophonemic support predicted children's decoding and fine motor skills.

Abstract

The current study examines the nature and variability of parents’ aid to preschoolers in the context of a shared writing task, as well as the relations between this support and children's literacy, vocabulary, and fine motor skills. In total, 135 preschool children (72 girls) and their parents (primarily mothers) in an ethnically diverse, middle-income community were observed while writing a semi-structured invitation for a pretend birthday party together. Children's phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, word decoding, vocabulary, and fine motor skills were also assessed. Results revealed that parents provided variable, but generally low-level, support for children's approximation of sound-symbol correspondence in their writing (i.e., graphophonemic support), as well as for their production of letter forms (i.e., print support). Parents frequently accepted errors rather than asking for corrections (i.e., demand for precision). Further analysis of the parent–child dyads (n = 103) who wrote the child's name on the invitation showed that parents provided higher graphophonemic, but not print, support when writing the child's name than other words. Overall parental graphophonemic support was positively linked to children's decoding and fine motor skills, whereas print support and demand for precision were not related to any of the child outcomes. In sum, this study indicates that while parental support for preschoolers’ writing may be minimal, it is uniquely linked to key literacy-related outcomes in preschool.

Introduction

Writing activities provide a unique opportunity for young children to practice fundamental early language, literacy, and fine motor skills in a meaningful and engaging context (Levin, Share, & Shatil, 1996). As a child begins to write, he or she must first generate and articulate an idea, which reinforces vocabulary and background knowledge (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). In addition, the child must employ code-related skills such as letter and sound knowledge to decide which marks to place on the page and in what order, translating units of sound into units of print. Further, the child must make decisions about punctuation and other writing conventions and reflect, even implicitly, on the value of print as a vehicle for conveying meaning (Clay, 1975, Clay, 1987, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998). Finally, in holding and moving the writing implement, the child practices and improves his or her fine motor skills. Writing is thus a unique context in which to take advantage of and further refine foundational language, literacy, and motor competencies. Further, writing may be even more beneficial when accompanied by support from a parent or other adult (DeBaryshe, Buell, & Binder, 1996). The current study examines parents’ writing support during a joint task and its relations with three skill sets that are fundamental in writing development: (1) fine motor skills, (2) spelling and decoding skills, and (3) the use of language to compose meaningful text (Berninger et al., 2006).

Strong writing skills are associated with a number of positive outcomes, including early literacy skills as well as long-term educational and career success (Graham & Hebert, 2010). Correlational research demonstrates that children with stronger writing skills have more sophisticated letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and spelling competence, as well as larger vocabularies (Bloodgood, 1999, Levin et al., 1996, Molfese et al., 2006). In addition, writing skills have been found to strongly relate to fine motor skills – as strongly as they relate to children's letter knowledge (Gerde, Skibbe, Bowles, & Martoccio, 2012). Advantages associated with early writing proficiency appear to endure over time. Children's word writing skills at the end of kindergarten uniquely predict children's literacy skills including spelling, reading comprehension, and oral reading at the end of first grade, controlling for vocabulary, IQ, and concepts of print (Levin et al., 1996). More recently, a comprehensive meta-analysis concluded that being able to write letters and one's own name during preschool and kindergarten predict and support decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling achievement in first grade and beyond (Lonigan, Schatschneider, & Westberg, 2008).

Writing activities encourage children to practice literacy and fine motor skills, which may engender a cascade of positive learning outcomes (Puranik, Lonigan, & Kim, 2011). For example, activities that involve early letter and sound learning are associated with growth in phonological sensitivity, alphabet knowledge, and knowledge of letter sounds (Evans et al., 2000, Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, Sénéchal et al., 1998), which leads to later improvements in both word reading and comprehension (Al Otaiba et al., 2009, Bus and van IJzendoorn, 1999, Ehri, 2004, Ehri et al., 2001). Recent work also suggests that because writing activities combine fine motor movements and visual processing, they may foster children's literacy skills (Neumann, Hyde, Neumann, Hood, & Ford, 2012). More striking still, an intervention study with children ages 3–5 showed that when children practiced writing, their emergent literacy skills improved significantly in comparison to peers who only interacted with storybooks (Aram & Biron, 2004). Although the import of writing has been established for a number of literacy-related outcomes, many questions remain regarding what parents can do to support children's writing.

In addition to examining children's decoding, sound awareness, and alphabet knowledge skills, we investigate how children's fine motor skills and vocabulary relate to the supports that parents provide during writing activities. Fine motor skills place limits on how much text children can produce and how quickly they can produce it (Berninger, 1999), as well as how much attention children can focus on meaning-related aspects of writing as opposed to the mechanical aspects (Puranik and Al Otaiba, 2012, Puranik and Apel, 2010). For language skills, we sought to replicate and extend the findings of Sénéchal and colleagues (Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, Sénéchal et al., 1998), who used parent-report measures to assess parents’ support for children's writing and letter learning and found no links with children's vocabulary skills.

Given the complexity of the writing process and its short- and long-term relations to valuable early outcomes, it is important to understand how children develop and integrate these component skills over time. Writing has its earliest beginnings in children's drawings, which use physical marks to communicate about objects and ideas (Levin & Bus, 2003). Children form ideas first about the universal features of writing (e.g., linearity, symbolic function of letters for spoken sounds) and subsequently the features of writing that are specific to a given language (e.g., directionality, conventional spelling; Puranik and Lonigan, 2011, Tolchinsky, 2003). Throughout this process, children's written products progress through a relatively predictable series of stages, from scribbling to scribble writing to forming letter-like shapes to using conventional letters (Puranik and Lonigan, 2011, Sulzby, 1992). Children's progress is characterized by increasingly sophisticated compositions with gradually more accurate approximations of conventional writing, with concerns about precise letter formation and appropriate spelling becoming relevant only in the final stages. Congruent with these stages, the current study examines writing using an emergent literacy perspective, which is based on evidence suggesting that children acquire many skills associated with literacy and writing development before kindergarten (Teale and Sulzby, 1986, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998).

A major factor in the development of early literacy skills, including writing, is social interactions with and observations of caregivers and other adults (Aram and Levin, 2011, Teale and Sulzby, 1986, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998), especially parents (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (NICHD-ECCRN), 2004). There is evidence that parents of preschoolers practice writing letters and words with their children on a regular basis (Hindman and Morrison, 2012, Levy et al., 2006). These efforts appear to benefit children. One of the earliest studies of parent–child writing activities examined the quality of 5- and 6-year-old children's production of a letter (i.e., a letter to a friend, relative, or fictional character) both with and without the help of their mother (DeBaryshe et al., 1996). Children produced longer letters, followed writing conventions more closely, and used better spelling when they had help than when they wrote independently. Similarly, other research has observed that when parents provide more directive instruction in a joint writing task with their preschoolers, children produce more conventional writing output (Burns & Casbergue, 1992). Given the role of writing as an opportunity to practice other skill sets, parents’ efforts may transfer to other areas; for example, Evans and Shaw (2008) reviewed evidence showing that parents’ writing with children was linked to stronger letter knowledge, phonological awareness, concepts of print, and printed words. Several concurrent and longitudinal studies have confirmed these findings (Hindman and Morrison, 2012, Hood et al., 2008, Levy et al., 2006, Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002).

Yet, to date, few studies have unpacked parent–child writing interactions to observe what parents actually say and do to teach their children about writing and, in particular, how parents might differ from one another in these efforts. Parent–child writing interactions in English have seldom been observed during the preschool years; however, when studied directly, parents vary in how they support children's writing (Bennett, Weigel, & Martin, 2002). To understand these nuances, the current study uses a fine-grained paradigm that was developed for directly observing the content and quality of mothers’ writing support in low-SES Israeli families (Aram and Levin, 2001, Aram and Levin, 2004). The paradigm involves analyzing videotaped observations of mothers and children during a joint writing activity, focusing on two major tasks: isolating sounds within words to match them with corresponding letters (i.e., graphophonemic support), and producing letter forms on paper (i.e., print support). Although parents sometimes choose to write down children's ideas for them (Burns & Casbergue, 1992), the current coding system also gauges the parent's efforts to involve the child in actively producing writing using the same techniques as expert writers, including segmenting the words into sounds, connecting those sounds with the appropriate letters, and forming letters and words on the page (Ehri et al., 2001).

In addition to graphophonemic and print support, the current study investigates an aspect of parents’ writing support that has received little attention: demand for precision. As children progress through the stages described above, their writing is often unconventional with respect to the shapes of the letters, the spacing between the letters, the horizontal and vertical alignment of the letters, and the size of the letters (Ehri et al., 2001, Puranik and Lonigan, 2011). Demand for precision captures how parents react to mistakes in children's written products, specifically assessing the degree to which parents point out errors in children's writing and request that the child make corrections (Aram, 2007). Although parents have been observed to demand precision from children's writing in Hebrew (Aram, 2010), European American parents do not appear to focus as strongly on correct form during writing activities (Huntsinger, Jose, Larson, Krieg, & Shaligram, 2000).

Studies have used this paradigm to examine mothers’ support for kindergarteners’ writing in different countries and have found substantial variation across mothers on nearly all aspects of the coding system (Aram and Levin, 2001, Lin et al., 2009). For example, in a sample of 41 kindergarten children, the quality of mothers’ assistance during the writing process was associated with concurrent word writing, word recognition, and phonological awareness skills, when accounting for the overall home literacy environment (Aram & Levin, 2001). Furthermore, findings from other work with similar samples (n  50) of Hebrew-speaking families suggests that parents who utilize greater demand for precision have children with higher early literacy skills, including word writing, letter knowledge, and phonemic awareness (Aram, 2007, Aram, 2010). Similarly, longitudinal links have been demonstrated between these three aspects of parents’ writing support during the preschool and kindergarten years and children's spelling, word reading, reading comprehension and linguistic knowledge as late as at the end of second grade in other orthographies (Aram, 2010, Aram and Levin, 2002, Levin et al., 2013, Lin et al., 2009).

These studies provide strong evidence that parents vary in what they say and do to guide preschool children's efforts during writing activities, and that the support that parents provide can have a unique effect on children's emergent literacy development during kindergarten and the early elementary school years. However, this work has focused largely upon orthographies other than English. Because English is a deep orthography in which rules of sound-symbol correspondence are frequently irregular, parental support and guidance might be different from that observed using other orthographies. When parents have been observed to engage in joint writing with their children in English, they do not always promote letter-sound correspondence, and instead sometimes choose to dictate letters to their children (Burns & Casbergue, 1992) or encourage them to copy letters from their surroundings (Neumann, Hood, & Ford, 2012). The current study investigates what types of writing support English-speaking parents use with their preschool children and whether the levels of writing support used are related to children's vocabulary, decoding, and fine motor skills.

It is possible that writing one's name elicits different types of support from caregivers than other types of writing, which is one focus of the current study. Children's earliest explorations of writing tend to focus on their own name, which is particularly meaningful for them (Bloodgood, 1999, Treiman et al., 2001). In addition, children tend to learn the letters in their name sooner than other letters in the alphabet and are especially likely to write and identify the first letter in their first name (Treiman & Broderick, 1998). Children are likely to hear, see, and practice their own names with far greater frequency than other words, meaning that their name writing skills might be quite different from their more general writing skills (Aram & Levin, 2002), particularly as the difficulty of the writing task is related to the writing output that children produce (Puranik & Lonigan, 2011). The current study investigates whether parents provide different support when helping children to write their own names as opposed to other words.

In light of the emerging research base on the role of writing in refining children's skills around alphabet, phonological, vocabulary, and fine motor skills, as well as the open questions regarding how parents’ support for writing might be linked to these foundational skill sets, the current study examined three broad research questions in an English-speaking sample.

  • (1)

    What is the nature and variability of parents’ support when working with their preschool-aged children on a semi-structured, joint writing activity?

Parents are expected to provide a variety of supports to children, but are generally predicted to use lower levels of graphophonemic and print support with preschool children than have been reported for kindergarteners and elementary school students in previous work (Aram, 2010, Aram and Levin, 2001). In terms of demand for precision, we predict that parents of preschoolers will be less insistent than parents of older children, aiming to help children produce the correct letters in the correct positions, but making allowances when children have difficulties (Aram, 2007).

  • (2)

    Does parents’ support differ for the child's own name versus other words?

Parents are hypothesized to provide higher levels of support for children's own names as compared to other words, as children's knowledge about writing their own name tends to be more advanced than their skills for writing other words (Bloodgood, 1999, Levin et al., 2005, Puranik et al., 2011).

  • (3)

    How does parental writing support relate to preschool children's concurrent literacy, language, and fine motor skills?

It is hypothesized that parents’ support will be positively related to children's literacy and fine motor skills (Aram, 2007, Aram and Levin, 2001, Lin et al., 2012), but not to their vocabularies (Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, Sénéchal et al., 1998).

Section snippets

Participants

The sample included 135 preschool children (72 girls) and their parents (126 mothers, 9 fathers) who participated in a longitudinal study (n = 353) of children's academic and social development. Families resided in a suburban area near a major Midwestern city in the United States. All preschool children in one public school district were recruited through parent orientations and backpack mailings in the fall of two consecutive school years. Children were selected for the current analyses if they

Question 1: nature and variability of parents’ writing support

Our first aim was to explore the nature and variability of writing support that parents provided. Descriptive statistics and correlations for parents’ writing support and the child's age at the home visit, maternal education, and the home learning environment composite are presented in Table 1, Table 2. It should be reiterated that for both graphophonemic and print support, the letters that children successfully isolated or printed without any parental support (i.e., a score of 10 was assigned)

Discussion

The current study investigated parents’ writing support during an invitation-writing task that took place as part of a semi-structured, pretend birthday party activity in the home. In contrast with much of the previous work using this coding system, which has examined parents as they help children to write pre-determined lists of words (Aram and Levin, 2001, Aram and Levin, 2004), this task provided a naturalistic window into parents’ spontaneous writing support. In addition, the

Conclusion

As writing has received increased attention from recent policy reports (Lonigan et al., 2008), it is important to understand how parents support children's participation in writing activities at home. The current study demonstrates that parents of preschoolers tend to provide low levels of support when helping their children to complete a writing task. Although these findings may be due to parents’ reactions to their children's skill levels, they may also reflect parents’ beliefs and knowledge

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grant number HD27176-13 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to Frederick J. Morrison. The authors would also like to extend their gratitude to the families and teachers who participated in the Pathways to Literacy Project.

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