Contributions of the Home Literacy Environment and Underlying Language Skills to Preschool Invented Writing

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to enhance our knowledge of the constituent variables affecting invented writing skills in 5-year-olds by investigating the concurrent relationships among home literacy, underlying language skills, and invented writing. The study comprised 111 Norwegian-speaking children (mean age: 5.7 years; 58 girls) and their parents. The children’s language skills were tested individually. The results showed that, on average, children achieved low scores on tests of word writing; however, the within-group variations in the children’s invented writing performances were large. The statistical modeling showed that parental education was significantly related to the home literacy environment, which was, in turn, directly related to both vocabulary and phonological awareness and indirectly related to invented writing skills. Implications of the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Invented writing
• preschool
• home literacy
• early literacy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the children and parents for their participation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To further investigate the relationships, an alternative Model II was run. In this model, phonological awareness was related to letter knowledge, which, in turn, was related to invented writing. However, this model had a poorer fit than Model II, showing that this alternative model should not be preferred (χ² = 178.94, df = 99, χ²/df = 1.81, RMSEA = .085, CI₉₀ = .06–.11, CFI = .920, TLI = .903, SRMR = .092).