Running head: IMPROVING LANGUAGE AND LITERACY IN A VPK CLASS 1

Improving Language and Literacy in a VPK Class

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Language and literacy development are fundamental foundations Voluntary

Prekindergarten (VPK) facilitates in the preparation of elementary children in developing

language and literacy proficiency for later success in school. Children who access the

opportunity to establish foundational competencies in language and literacy in a VPK class enter

the subsequent educational levels ready to learn to read and write (Blazer, 2012). VPK classes

programs ought to incorporate an age-appropriate curriculum with a significant focus on early

language and literacy skills, besides accountability and manageable classroom sizes as well as

competent teachers (Florida Department of Education, 2014). The process of developing and

mastering language and literacy constitutes a primary achievement for young children. This

paper explores strategies early childhood educators can employ to help VPK pupils develop

language and literacy skills.

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Teacher should strive to help the children lay a strong foundation in developing ability in

alphabet knowledge. Skills essential for this VPK class stage include recognizing and naming

alphabetical letters (both upper and lower-case) and starting to associate with their respective

sounds that they represent (Sylvester & Kragler, 2012). The task of a toddler is to learn how to

talk, the task of a VPK pupil is to learn how to communicate, which is a complicated practice at

this early stage of development. The whole spectrum of language and literacy development

stretches from learning the particular sounds that stand for certain words, to figuring out the

meaning of these words and determining how to link the words into distinct syntactic strings that

bear a meaning within a given context. At this point, Blazer (2012) observes that the children
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develop the capacity to manipulate the sounds that constitute language, independent of their

actual meaning (phonological awareness).

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The children practice recognizing rhyming words, initial sounds in words, matching

sounds with letters, and listening to syllables with words in the VPK. Teachers can assist VPK

children by offering a systematic, integrated and explicit phonological awareness teaching

(Florida Department of Education, 2014). They should incorporate scheduled individual and

group learning sessions and tailor them to the unique learning needs of the children at all levels

of language and literacy development. After that, the children necessitate understanding myriad

print conventions encompassing left to right and top to bottom, as well as the orientation of the

instructional language (Sylvester & Kragler, 2012). In this aspect, the children start to

comprehend that spaces separate lines and paragraphs and can identify common words within

favorite texts or familiar context (for example, reading the stop sign or a name for a local health

facility). The instructors should ask them to practice reading and writing elements.

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The instructor needs to set the example by producing sounds accurately. He might begin with

simple sounds and words and proceed, but carefully, to harder sounds to produce. On top of that,

this process calls for active tips to help the learners how to model these sounds in the

instructional environments (Blazer, 2012). Pupils tend to benefit from their instructors’ clear
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sound and word pronunciation coupled with appropriate feedback to correct the errors the

learners make, including having the pupils make the correct response. Besides that, a teacher can

combine phonological awareness with letter knowledge acquisition to aid the children learn

alphabetical letters and comprehend the explicit connection between letters and sounds. This

tactic facilitates the application of letter-sound comprehension to read and create sounds

(Sylvester & Kragler, 2012). Consequently, children who acquire these fundamental skills are

well prepared for practicing how to read.

To improve reading comprehension with key ideas and details, to the target students in

my kindergarten classroom, there exist vast great strategies for helping children improving their

language and literacy skills: interactive reading, “Read-Alouds”, dialogic reading, and retelling.

VPK children develop early language and literacy skills when their instructors adopt interactive

teaching strategies (Blazer, 2012). In interactive teaching approach, the learners converse with

the teacher about the story, characters, and pictures. Nevertheless, instructors can aid children

acquire language and reading skills by proactively engaging them before, during and after

reading a given text (Sylvester & Kragler, 2012). For example, the teacher can involve the

children by asking them what might occur next; retell the major events, and modeling interesting

scenes in the story.

Also, teachers can engage the VPK class in “Read-Aloud” – a great strategy for

preschool instruction since children have a profound preference for interesting stories and

nursery rhymes. For instance, before reading, the instructor might ask the children to observe the

cover of the text and tell whether they see anything that can remind them something or someone

else. After that, the teacher lead them through the “read-aloud”, discuss the core idea of the text,

and later ask them to connect with the story (Sylvester & Kragler, 2012). This approach will
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assist the learners comprehend the story with considerable ease since the experience will remind

them an existing person, event or experience.

Another strategy that can be implemented to enhance language and literacy skills for the

targeted children would be dialogic reading. It employs a relatively systematic approach to

scaffold instructor-learner language and literacy interaction around the storybook reading.

Sylvester & Kragler (2012) add that the method is designed to scale up young learners’ language

and literacy proficiency. In the course of this shared reading experience, the teacher, and the

pupil switch roles to enable the learner to the skill of storytelling with the hand of the instructor

who serves as an active listener and interrogator. However, research findings reveal that dialogic

reading bears positive impacts on oral language and no discernible outcomes on phonological

processing (Blazer, 2012).

Although most VPK programs teach letter names, letter-sound orientation is essentially

relevant to cracking the code system for language and literacy development (Sylvester &

Kragler, 2012). Therefore, teachers can shortcut their learners’ development curve by identifying

alphabetical letters by their sounds, rather than a letter’s name. For example, calling “A” as

“aah.” This approach can help learners lay a stable foundation for developing language and

reading skills because it presents simple format starters can easily comprehend and grow as they

delve deeper into the discipline. Also, phonetic word games such as switching out letters, making

children hopscotch board with phonemes, wiring phonetic words on Candyland color cards, and

other advanced games can help children grow their language and reading skills.

Conclusion
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By the end of the VPK class, the majority of the children will understand the upper and

lowercase letters, and understand that letters comprise the sounds in words. They start to sound

out sounds out of phrases in their context or books. They comprehend the primary conventions of

print and can pursue some simple phonetic spelling and pronunciation in early language and

literacy skills. Nonetheless, integrating the above strategies can help a VPK instructor improve

the language and literacy development of his students.

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References

Blazer, C. (2012). Pre-Kindergarten: Research-Based Recommendations for Developing

Standards and Factors Contributing to School Readiness Gaps. Information Capsule.

Volume 1201. Research Services, Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

Florida Department of Education (2014). School, District and State Accountability Reports.

Retrieved on 23 September 2015, from: http://schoolgrades.fldoe.org/

Sylvester, R., & Kragler, S. (2012). A case study of children's literacy development in a

voluntary pre-kindergarten classroom. Journal of Research in Childhood Education,

26(1), 122-140.

U. S. Census (2014) Quick Facts. Retrieved from:

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/12000.html

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (2014) BearFacts. Retrieved from:

http://www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/action.cfm?

geoType=4&fips=12086&areatype=12086