Praxis Early Childhood: Reading and Language Arts & Social Studies (5027) Study Guide

1. Recognizes various stages of language acquisition (e.g., oral language, written language -- including spelling)

Stages of oral language development

Oral language development is the process by which children move from reflexive sounds to full spoken sentences in a predictable order. The order is consistent across children and languages, while the age at which a child reaches each stage varies by several months. Receptive language (what a child understands) develops ahead of expressive language (what a child can say), so a child at any stage typically comprehends more than they produce.

The stage sequence

Figure 1. Oral language stages from birth to school age. Age ranges are approximate and overlap.

What defines each stage

During the move into complex sentences, children produce overgeneralization (also called overregularization), the application of a regular grammar rule to an irregular word, as in "goed," "foots," or "mouses." These forms show that the child has extracted a rule (add -ed for past tense, add -s for plural) and is no longer only imitating adult speech.

Oral language stages in the classroom

Teachers support movement to the next stage through talk that models slightly more advanced language than the child produced. Correction by direct criticism is not part of these techniques. Children learning English as an additional language follow a separate sequence of second language acquisition stages.

Second language acquisition stages

Second language acquisition is the process of learning a language in addition to the home language. Young English learners move through a predictable sequence of five stages. The model is based on Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell's Natural Approach, which described the early stages (preproduction, early production, and speech emergence); intermediate fluency and advanced fluency were added by later teacher-education writers who built on that work. The sequence is separate from the first-language milestones (cooing, babbling, one-word speech) that infants pass through. At each stage, receptive language (what a child understands by listening) runs ahead of productive language (what the child can say or write).

The five-stage model

The five stages a young English learner moves through, with typical time ranges and what the child can do at each step.

Why progress varies

The time ranges are averages. Children can move quickly through one stage, stay longer in another, or show features of two stages at once. Rate depends on factors such as age, amount of exposure to English, strength of the home language, prior literacy experience, and temperament. A kindergartner who has been in an English-speaking classroom for two months and answers by pointing is in preproduction; a classmate with the same arrival date may already use short phrases.

Social language and academic language

Jim Cummins distinguished two kinds of proficiency. BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills) is the everyday social language of the playground and lunchroom, which commonly develops in about 6 months to 2 years. CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency) is the abstract language of instruction and texts, which commonly takes 5 to 7 years. This gap explains why a child's social conversation can sound fluent early on, while academic language proficiency, as seen in advanced fluency, commonly takes 5 to 7 years to reach. Children at intermediate fluency (about 3 to 5 years) still have gaps in academic language.

2. Differentiates approaches in the planning and implementation of instruction for all students with diverse needs, including English learners (ELs), students with special needs, and gifted and talented students

Literacy supports for English learners

An English learner (EL) is a student whose home language is not English and who is acquiring English while also learning academic content. In prekindergarten to grade 3, an EL learns to read and write in a language still being acquired orally, so literacy instruction pairs each reading or writing task with oral language support. Scaffolding is temporary support, such as pictures, gestures, real objects, sentence frames, and modeling, that makes a grade-level task reachable and is withdrawn as proficiency grows. The home language is an asset: language transfer is the use of knowledge from the first language, such as concepts of print, phonemic awareness, and shared letter sounds, when learning the second.

Matching support to the stage of English acquisition

Six literacy strategies and how each supports an English learner

Six literacy strategies, with a definition and the support each gives an English learner.

The three cueing systems

Meaning, structure, and visual cues are the three information sources a reader combines to identify a word.

Meaning cues come from background knowledge, pictures, and context. Structure cues come from knowledge of English grammar and word order. Visual cues come from the letters and their sounds. An EL often has weaker structure cues because English grammar does not yet sound right or wrong to the child, and weaker meaning cues when vocabulary or background for the text is missing. A first-grade EL who reads "The dog run fast" for "The dog runs fast" is using meaning and visual cues, and the miscue reflects oral language development, not a decoding weakness.

Differentiated literacy instruction

Differentiated instruction is the planned adjustment of teaching so that students with different starting points reach the same learning goal. In prekindergarten to grade 3 literacy, the goal comes from the grade-level standard and stays fixed. The route to it changes according to assessment data on each child. Three groups are named on the exam: English learners (ELs), students who are acquiring English in addition to a home language; students with special needs, who have identified disabilities; and gifted and talented students, who perform or show potential well above age expectations.

What a teacher adjusts

Carol Ann Tomlinson's model names four classroom elements that can be adjusted. The adjustment is based on a student's readiness (current skill level relative to the goal), interests, or learning profile (the ways a student prefers to take in and show learning).

One lesson, three sets of adjustments

The diagram shows a second-grade read-aloud lesson on retelling. Each group works toward the same goal with different supports or extensions. Language-specific methods for ELs are treated under literacy supports for English learners.

One retelling lesson with distinct adjustments for three groups of learners.

Key practices by group

The planning cycle

Differentiation depends on flexible grouping, the practice of forming small groups for a specific skill and re-forming them as data change, in contrast to fixed ability groups that stay the same for the year.

In a kindergarten class, a mid-year letter-sound check may show one group still learning consonant sounds, one blending three-sound words, and one reading simple sentences. The teacher meets each group at the teacher table with matched materials while the other children rotate through literacy centers.

3. Knows how to help students develop an understanding of print awareness (e.g., environmental print, print concepts)

Concepts of print

Concepts of print are the understandings a child holds about how written language is organized and used: that print carries a message, that books are handled in a set way, and that English text is read in a fixed direction. They form the convention-based part of print awareness, the broader recognition that print exists in the world and has meaning (environmental print, such as signs and logos, is the other part). These understandings develop before conventional reading, typically from age 3 through kindergarten, and they are learned through experience with books and writing, not through maturation alone.

The parts of a book and a page of print

A big book cover and page. English print runs left to right along a line, sweeps back to the left edge of the next line, and moves from the top of the page to the bottom.

The component concepts

Typical order of development

Instruction and assessment

Instruction is explicit and embedded in real reading and writing. In print referencing, the teacher draws attention to print during a read-aloud through comments, questions, and pointing. In a prekindergarten class, the teacher might hold up a big book and ask where the reading starts, then ask a child to show which way to go next. In a kindergarten class, children use a pointer to track a familiar poem on chart paper, frame one word with their hands, or count the words in a sentence cut into word cards. Dictation, in which the teacher writes a child's spoken sentence under the child's drawing, connects speech to print.

Assessment is individual and observational. The most widely cited tool is Marie Clay's Concepts About Print (CAP) task, in which the teacher reads a small book with one child and asks the child to show the front of the book, where to begin reading, which way to go, one letter, one word, and the meaning of a period. A checklist kept during shared reading serves the same purpose. A child who points to the picture when asked where to read needs further modeling that the print, not the picture, carries the message. A child who slides a finger once across a line while saying several words needs further modeling of voice-to-print matching, the concept of word.

Environmental print

Environmental print is the written language that surrounds children in daily life outside of books: traffic signs, food packaging, store signs, logos, menus, labels, and street names. It is usually the first print a child recognizes, often by age 2 or 3, and it is a main route into print awareness, the understanding that written marks carry a consistent message. The mechanics of how books and text work (directionality, spacing, book handling) belong to concepts of print, a separate topic.

How young children "read" environmental print

A preschooler who says "stop" at a red octagon is using context cues, the color, shape, picture, and location that accompany a word, instead of the letters. Linnea Ehri's model of word reading calls this the pre-alphabetic phase (also called logographic reading), in which a word is recognized as a visual whole with no letter-sound connections. Studies in which the letters inside a familiar logo were altered found that many preschoolers did not notice the change, and that the same children often could not read the word once it was printed in plain type.

Familiar environmental print, the context cue a young child relies on, and the teacher-led lesson that shifts attention to the letters.

From logo to letters: the teacher's role

Recognizing a sign in its setting does not by itself produce alphabet knowledge or decoding. The benefit comes from adult mediation, in which a teacher or family member points to the letters, names them, and connects them to sounds. A common instructional sequence is decontextualization, the gradual removal of color, shape, and picture cues until only the letters remain.

Classroom practices

Environmental print also serves as informal assessment. A teacher who shows a first-semester kindergartner a familiar label and then the same word in plain print learns whether the child is reading from context or from letters.

4. Understands the role of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness in literacy development

Phonological awareness continuum

Phonological awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the sound structure of spoken language, independent of meaning and print. It is an umbrella term covering sound units of several sizes. Phonemic awareness is the most advanced part of phonological awareness: the ability to hear and work with phonemes, the smallest individual sounds in spoken words (the word "ship" has three: /sh/ /i/ /p/). The phonological awareness continuum is the developmental sequence in which children gain control of these units, moving from larger units to smaller ones.

Levels of the Continuum

The continuum as a staircase: each step works with a smaller unit of spoken sound, and phonemic awareness is the top step.

The levels overlap. A child does not need mastery of one step before starting the next, and instruction in the early grades commonly works on several levels in the same week. Phonological awareness activities are oral and auditory: they can be carried out with no letters in view.

Task Difficulty Within a Level

Difficulty depends on two things: the size of the sound unit and the mental operation performed on it. At any level, putting sounds together is generally easier than taking them apart, and both are easier than changing a word by removing or swapping a sound. Position also matters: a first sound is usually easier to isolate than a final sound, and a medial sound is the hardest.

Role in Literacy Development

English is written with an alphabet in which letters stand for phonemes. A child who cannot hear separate sounds in a spoken word has nothing to attach letters to. Phonemic awareness, measured in kindergarten, is one of the strongest predictors of later success in word reading and spelling, and weak phonemic awareness is a common feature of early reading difficulty. Oral blending supports decoding (reading a printed word by sounding it out), and oral segmenting supports encoding (spelling a word by writing a letter for each sound).

Phoneme manipulation tasks

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in spoken language that distinguishes one word from another, such as the /k/ that separates cat from hat. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with these individual sounds in spoken words. Phoneme manipulation tasks are the oral activities through which children show and build that ability: they combine, pull apart, add, remove, or exchange the sounds in a word. The tasks are auditory. No print is required, and a child can complete them with eyes closed.

The four core tasks

Four phoneme tasks performed on the spoken word "cat." Slashes mark sounds, not letters.

Two simpler tasks usually come first. In phoneme isolation, the child names a single sound in a word ("What is the first sound in sun?" "/s/"). In phoneme identity, the child names the sound shared by several words ("man, map, mud" share /m/).

Order of difficulty

Adding, deleting, and substituting are the most demanding because the child must segment the word, change one part, and blend the result, with the whole sequence held in working memory. Sound position also affects difficulty: the initial phoneme is the easiest to work with, the final phoneme is harder, and the medial phoneme (usually the vowel) is the hardest. Words with two or three phonemes are easier than words with consonant blends such as "stop."

Teaching the tasks to young children

Instruction is brief, oral, and playful, usually a few minutes at a time in small groups. Concrete objects and movements make the invisible sounds visible.

Elkonin (sound) boxes: the child pushes one chip into a box for each phoneme heard.

Teachers model each task ("I do"), practice it with the group ("we do"), and then listen to individual responses ("you do"). An individual oral response doubles as informal assessment: a child who blends accurately but cannot segment needs segmenting practice before deletion or substitution is introduced. Blending and segmenting have the strongest link to later reading and spelling, and the tasks transfer more readily to print once letters are paired with the sounds, at which point the activity becomes phonics.

Onsets, rimes, and syllables

Spoken words can be divided into sound units larger than a single phoneme. A syllable is a unit of pronunciation built around one vowel sound, with or without consonants around it. Within a syllable, the onset is the consonant or consonant cluster that comes before the vowel, and the rime is the vowel together with whatever sounds follow it. Awareness of these units is part of phonological awareness, and it develops before the ability to isolate individual phonemes.

How words divide

The onset (blue) is the consonant sound or sounds before the vowel. The rime (gold) is the vowel and what follows it. A multisyllable word divides first into syllables, and each syllable has its own rime.

The rime itself has two parts: the vowel sound, called the nucleus, and any consonants after it, called the coda. A syllable can lack an onset or a coda, but it cannot lack a vowel sound. Onsets and rimes are defined by sounds, not letters, so the onset of "ship" is the single sound /sh/ even though it is spelled with two letters.

Role in literacy development

Children typically notice larger sound units before smaller ones. Syllables are the easiest to hear because each one corresponds to a distinct pulse of the voice. Onset and rime form an intermediate step: the child splits a syllable into two parts before being able to separate it into individual phonemes. Skill with rimes also supports later decoding and spelling. A printed rime pattern shared by a group of words is a phonogram, the spelling of a rime such as -at or -ight, and the group of words built on it (cat, hat, sat) is a word family. A child who can read "cat" and recognizes the rime can read "flat" by analogy.

Instruction with young children

Syllable and onset-rime tasks are oral. They require no print, and they are commonly taught with movement, pictures, and objects.

Other common syllable supports include tapping on the table, jumping once per syllable, and placing a hand under the chin to feel the jaw drop for each vowel sound. Sorting picture cards by the number of syllables or by shared rime keeps the task oral for children who do not yet know letters.