Early Childhood Education Students’ Emergent Skills in Literacy Scaffolding

An Annotation by Andrea Wondra

As a teacher in the Department of Education and Schooling at Mount Royal University in Canada, Jodi Nickel conducted a research study of the effectiveness of four student teachers during story time.  She was looking for the teaching of critical emergent literacy skills in the areas of print awareness, phonological awareness, oral language enrichment and story comprehension.  At the conclusion of her research, she learned that she needed to model the appropriate skills needed by new teachers in order for them to develop them in the classroom.  Within this study attention was given to the importance of teaching nursery rhymes to children to strengthen phonological and print awareness.

This article is relevant to my research because I am a cooperating teacher with student teachers in my classroom.  I must model the effectiveness of quality teaching strategies so that my student teachers will learn quality techniques to use as new teachers.  This article stresses the importance of teaching nursery rhymes and it validates the importance of the implementation of “rhyme time” in my classroom.

This is a high quality resource because it is from Canadian Children, which is a journal of The Canadian Association of Young Children. Its content is overseen by an Editorial Review Board which includes Education Directors, Doctors and Faculty of Education department heads from many Canadian universities and Education Boards.

Nickel, J. (2011). Early Childhood Education Students’ Emergent Skills in Literacy Scaffolding. Canadian Children, 36(1), 13-19.