THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERACY IN MIDDLE‐CLASS PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

Several tests and interviews, including the Sand Test (Clay, 1976), Book Handling Knowledge (Goodman & Attewerger, 1977), “Pre‐school Concepts of Reading” and “Preschool Concepts of Writing” (Goodman & Cox, 1977) as well as the Stanford‐Binet Intelligence Scale (Terman & Merrill, 1973), were administered to twenty preschool children ranging in age from 4 years 1 month to 5 years 11 months in order to investigate the metalinguistic knowledge children have acquired from their environment before formal instruction and to examine the relationship between evolving reading and writing behaviors.

Results indicated that while preschool children may not have fully developed concepts of linguistic terms used in an instructional setting, such as “letter,” “word,” and “sentence,” and may not be able to indicate word‐by‐word matching of spoken/written words, they do have a functional concept for the purpose of reading and writing, as well as immature but developing concepts for terms such as “word” and “letter” and the direction of print both on a page and in a book. Furthermore, results of this study lend support for the existence of a relationship between emerging reading and writing behaviors.