Pre-Schoolers’ Home Numeracy and Home Literacy Experiences and Their Relationships with Early Number Skills: Evidence from a UK Study

ABSTRACT

Research Findings. It has been proposed that the home literacy environment may influence the development of early number skills. However, the results of studies examining the association between home literacy experiences and early number skills are mixed. This could be due to the way that the home literacy experiences are conceptualized and measured. This study examines the relationship between early number skills and aspects of the home learning environment. Alongside home number experiences and parental mathematical attitudes, two types of home literacy experiences were examined in a sample of 274 pre-schoolers (mean age 4:0, SD 4 months); code-focused home literacy experiences that focus on the phonological and orthographic features of language, and meaning-focused home literacy experiences that focus on sharing the meaning of language and text. Home number experiences and letter-sound interactions (interactive code-focused literacy experiences) were related to the children’s counting, number transcoding, and calculation skills whereas meaning-focused home literacy experiences and parental mathematical attitudes were largely unrelated to these early number skills. Structural equation models indicated that only letter-sound interactions could predict statistically significant unique variance in counting, number transcoding, and calculation. Practice or Policy. These findings suggest that code– rather than meaning-focused home literacy experiences are related to pre-schoolers early number skills. Supporting parents to engage in code-focused home literacy experiences may benefit pre-schoolers number skills as well as their emergent literacy.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the preschool staff, children and parents who participated in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We note that the relationship between counting and cardinality is complex with some models suggesting that cardinality can be understood even if counting knowledge or procedures are not robust (see Bermejo, Morales, & Garcia deOsuna, 2004 for a discussion). However, to use counting to ascertain the numerosity of the set children must first have accurate knowledge of the count-word sequence.

2. National figures based on the proportion of 3-year-olds attending different types of preschool provision in England (Whitaker, 2014).

3. We note that many studies do not find that code-focused home literacy experiences are related to phonological skills independently of alphabetic knowledge and emergent literacy. We view this as reflective of the bi-directional relationship between phonological skills and alphabetic knowledge (see Morais & Kolinsky, 2005; Suortti & Lipponen, 2016) and would anticipate any influence on phonological awareness to occur in tandem with alphabetic knowledge.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation. Grant Reference: EYP/42410.