Teachers’ beliefs about literacy practices for young children in early childhood education and care settings

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of early literacy beliefs held by early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers in Japan by developing a novel scale. We believed that overviewing ECEC teachers’ beliefs about early literacy from ecological perspectives would contribute to understanding the underlying factors influencing the quality of early literacy instruction and involvement in ECEC. To this end, 349 ECEC and 45 primary school teachers were asked to complete a two-part questionnaire dealing with (1) ECEC teachers’ literacy beliefs and (2) teachers’ general pedagogical beliefs. Exploratory factor analysis extracted three sub-categories of literacy belief – Direct instruction, Natural development, and Social interaction – and two sub-categories of general pedagogical belief – Adult-centred and Child-centred – and the relations between these sub-categories and background factors were then discussed. The results implied that considering the ecological perspectives of ECEC teachers affords a better understanding of effective practices to facilitate the early literacy experiences of young children in ECEC settings beyond differences in their educational tradition concerning early literacy. These perspectives include the influence of the educational tradition in each region, how ECEC teachers differ from primary school teachers, and the values shared by a particular ECEC facility.

KEYWORDS:

• Early literacy
• emergent literacy
• literacy practices
• teachers’ beliefs
• Japanese kindergarten and nursery teachers

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the teachers at the nursery school, kindergarten, and primary school for participating in this study. We also would like to thank Associate professor Motoko Kataoka and Paul Batten (Kagawa University, Japan) and members of the Research Centre for Children, Families and Communities at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Hiroo Matsumoto http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8030-7111

Miho M. Tsuneda http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4431-9326

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [grant number KAKENHI Grant Number 15K04303] and Overseas Research Fund for 2017 of Kagawa University Research Promotion Program.