2173 words | 10-minute read
As the parent or caregiver of a young child, you can have a tremendous impact on their early literacy development. Leading up to the release of new early literacy resources on our Caregivers Resource Hub, we have been in conversation with researchers who study the impact caregivers can have on their children’s literacy development, asking them how their research findings can translate into practical tips for caregivers. We start with an interview with Dr. Ece Demir-Lira, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the director of the Development, Experience, and Neurocognition Lab at the University of Iowa.
Iowa Reading Research Center (IRRC): What Is Your Background in Research? What Areas of Study Do You Focus On?
Demir-Lira: I received my BA in Psychology from Koç University in Türkiye. I then earned my PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago, and I did my postdoctoral work at Northwestern University in Communication Sciences and Disorders. I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist. Broadly, my research aims to address the long-standing question of why certain children fall behind in school when others succeed. We combine behavioral methods that reveal children’s home experiences with neuroimaging measures that reveal the neurocognitive basis of children’s academic performance. Our research leverages naturalistic, longitudinal observations and experimental designs to examine how the early parental input in the home environment relates to children’s later literacy and numerical skills. We complement this approach with structural and functional neuroimaging measures to analyze how parental background and parental input relate to the neurocognitive basis of children’s literacy and numerical skills, and how these neurocognitive correlates, in turn, relate to children’s academic success.
IRRC: What Sparked Your Interest in These Areas of Study?
Demir-Lira: I was born and raised in Türkiye. My mother was an elementary school teacher there for 35 years. In Türkiye, elementary school teachers stay with the same group of students from 1st through 5th grade, so we would get very close with the families, get to know the children very well and even babysit them when parents were busy! Over the years, I got to see the very different developmental trajectories these children took. Some children went on to have very successful academic paths, while others ended up not finishing high school. I became very interested by the reasons behind these differences, and when I was in middle school, I decided to study psychology in college. At the time, not many people knew about doing research in psychology, and my teachers and principal even tried to convince me to go into law or medicine instead. But I was very interested in understanding these questions through research, and I am very glad I chose the path I did!
IRRC: How Early in Child Development Can Parents/Caregivers Have an Impact on Their Children's Literacy Development?
Demir-Lira: Parents play a very important role in introducing their children to basic literacy concepts. Parents are children's first teachers, and even from the earliest stages of life, the everyday experiences parents share with children can have strong implications for children’s literacy development. One important aspect of literacy development is having strong language skills. We know that kids with rich language skills become strong readers. And the foundation of strong language skills starts very early, even in the first weeks and months of life when parents attend to their infant and interact with them or talk to them. What matters most is the small moments of responding to a child's sounds, words, questions, or gestures. So, parents do not need to provide formal instruction to their children or purchase expensive items to support their children’s development. And the encouraging news is that most parents are already doing this naturally, all the time. It's important to acknowledge that parents are busy with many other aspects of life, and these rich interactions can happen right in the thick of that busy life. Parents can talk about what they are doing while cooking dinner or doing laundry or driving to school, using rich language, and they can ask children questions during these activities to encourage the children to join the conversation. They can point out letters or words while driving or while looking at a restaurant menu. Everyday informal interactions are a surprisingly rich context for supporting children's literacy development. These recommendations apply in any language; rich conversation in the family's home language can be just as supportive.
IRRC: What Can Parents/Caregivers Do to Support Their Children's Acquisition of Letter Sounds and Names?
Demir-Lira: Parents play an important role here as well. To support their children’s learning of letter sounds and names, parents can take time to highlight the letters children see in their environment and say the letter names and sounds aloud. Our own research, for example, shows that parents talk about letters in everyday conversations starting from very early ages. In one study, we followed parent-child dyads from child[ren] age 14 to 50 months, and parents talked about some letters especially often, particularly letters that are common in English words, and the first letter of their own child's name. These conversations came up during all kinds of activities at home: book reading, toy play, and even eating dinner. We found that moments when parents were producing a written or drawn product (on paper or in some other form) with their child were especially rich contexts for letter talk. For example, when their little ones drew a picture of themselves, parents wrote the child’s name or just the first letter of the child’s name in this drawing. We also saw that the extent to which parents talked about the child's initial letter in the later sessions of the study was related to the children's kindergarten letter identification skills. So again, taking time to highlight letters during everyday interactions like mealtimes or drawing can really help.
IRRC: What Can Parents/Caregivers Do to Support their Children's Phonological Awareness (i.e., the ability to recognize and distinguish the different sounds in spoken language and understand how those sounds can be combined to create language)?
Demir-Lira: Phonological awareness is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success, and the good news is that parents can again support it through playful, everyday interactions. Rhyming is a wonderful starting point. Reading books with rhymes, singing nursery rhymes and songs, or making up silly rhyming games during a car ride all draw children's attention to the sound structure of words. In addition, parents can also play simple sound games: "What sound does ‘ball’ start with?" or "Can you think of a word that rhymes with ‘cat’?" Clapping out the syllables in a child's name or in favorite words is another fun way to help children notice that words are made up of smaller sound units. Alliteration and wordplay like "Let's change the ‘b’ in ‘bat’ to ‘c,’ what word do we get?" also help children tune in to individual sounds. The key is that this doesn't have to feel like instruction. Songs, rhymes, and sound games during bath time, meals, or bedtime are genuinely powerful, and children tend to love them. Importantly, playing these sound games in any language will support children's phonological awareness. So, if your native language is not English, feel free to sing a nursery rhyme in your own language to your baby!
IRRC: What Can Parents/Caregivers Do to Support Their Children's Early Vocabulary Development?
Demir-Lira: The evidence here is strong and growing for this. We know that from the earliest months, even the earliest days, parental conversation with children is crucial for vocabulary development. What's also especially important is the back-and-forth quality of these conversations. Research suggests that beyond just the amount of talk parents produce, it's the conversational turn-taking, the serve-and-return rhythm between parent and child that most strongly supports language development. Even before babies can use words, these exchanges matter: a baby coos, a parent responds with a coo or a word, the baby vocalizes again. These early conversations lay the foundation for later vocabulary growth. This is also why interaction is much more helpful than passive exposure to language, such as language on a screen. During these interactions, especially with younger children, infants and toddlers tend to benefit more when parents talk about objects the child is already attending to or looking at. Another important feature parents can use is co-speech hand gesture. These aren't necessarily baby signs, but just simple gestures like pointing. We know that the extent to which parents point to a toy car when they say "car" tends to predict stronger vocabulary outcomes.
As children move into their second and third years, the kind of talk parents use becomes especially important, possibly more than its quantity. Beyond labeling the here and now, parents can start talking with their children about the "there and then,” including past events ("Remember our trip to the zoo?"), future plans, pretend scenarios ("Let's pretend this block is a phone!"), and simple explanations ("We need a jacket because it's cold outside"). Our longitudinal research found that the more children engaged in this kind of talk with their parents during toddler years, the higher their language skills were in elementary school and beyond!
As children get older, exposing them to a diverse vocabulary also becomes important. One great way to do this is reading books together. Our own research shows that the vocabulary children hear during parent-child book reading is much richer than the vocabulary they hear in everyday conversation. Parents use richer language when reading books, more varied vocabulary, longer sentences, not only when reading the text, but also in the conversation around it. So, books simply expose children to words they wouldn't encounter otherwise. Book reading also creates natural opportunities for back-and-forth exchange: Parents can pause to ask questions, such as "What do you think will happen next?" or "Why is he feeling sad?" and then wait for the child to respond. Those moments of asking, waiting, and listening are where a lot of the language learning happens, as well as a lot of socio-emotional learning. Similarly, as children get older, they also benefit from hearing even richer sentences with longer, more complex words.
IRRC: How Can Socio-Emotional Support From Parents/Caregivers Impact Their Children's Literacy Development?
Demir-Lira: This is an important issue as well. Like any new skill, learning to read and write can be stressful for our little ones. There will be moments of frustration and mistakes. So, as with any new skill, parents should try to encourage children through the process and create a warm, supportive environment around literacy activities. Praising effort rather than just outcomes, such as saying "I love how hard you worked on sounding that out" instead of only "You are so smart" helps children develop a sense that reading is something they can grow into, rather than something they either are or aren't good at. It's also helpful for parents to be patient when children struggle, to let them make mistakes without feeling the need to correct them every time. The emotional tone of these early experiences really matters for the long run: Research shows that the more parents read with their children when they are young, the more likely those children are, later in life, to report reading on their own because they enjoy reading! So, cuddling up for a bedtime story and laughing together at a silly picture book not only enriches children’s language but also encourages the love of reading in children. My hope for parents is that they can feel good knowing that in sharing those stories, they are already raising readers.
IRRC: What Is a Takeaway You Would Like Caregivers to Know About How They Can Impact Their Children's Literacy Development?
Demir-Lira: The biggest message I want parents to hear is that they are important for their children’s literacy development and also that they are already doing so much, often more than they realize. Parents are their children's first teacher, and children learn an enormous amount from them simply through the rhythms of everyday life. Parents don't need to necessarily carve out time from their already busy lives to instruct their kids or purchase expensive apps or toys to support their children's development. Everyday parent-child interactions, mealtime, bath time, the drive to school, a trip to the grocery store, can be rich contexts for literacy development if we pay attention especially during the first years of life. So, my takeaway is really one of reassurance: Trust what you're doing, keep talking and interacting and responding to your child, and know that these small, ordinary moments add up in powerful ways. It's also worth remembering that children develop on their own timelines, and families have their own unique styles of interaction. There is no one single right way to support a child's literacy, but many different ways in which we can create rich contexts to support our little ones. What matters is the warmth, responsiveness, and everyday conversation that's already part of parent and child interactions.