Early literacy is the beginning of the literacy development continuum. Children start to grasp the elements of early literacy, such as print and its meaning, early phonological awareness, and basic alphabet knowledge, which are the foundation for later reading and writing development. Consequently, early literacy has a significant impact on later academic success. The development of early literacy in hearing and deaf and hard-of-hearing children follows roughly similar stages, but the latter progress is somewhat more slowly, primarily due to sensory deficits and the consequences of a significantly impoverished linguistic environment.
In the theoretical foundations, I first described the concept of early literacy, placed it in the literacy development continuum, and described its individual stages according to various theoretical models. In addition, I described models of early literacy skills and focused in more detail on the model by G. J. Whitehurst and C. J. Lonigan (1998), which includes spoken language, phonological processing, and print knowledge. I described the specifics of individual skills in the development of hearing children and the development of deaf and hard-of-hearing children. I listed factors of early literacy that influence the course and success of development and emphasized the importance of the role of educators and their choice of methods in promoting early literacy development.
Educators report that they have too little knowledge in this area, so with this research, I examined the difference in the environment and strategies for promoting early literacy among educators of predominantly hearing children and educators of predominantly deaf and hard-of-hearing children. In Slovenia, there is a shortage of the latter group who would have specific knowledge based on the clinical specifications of this population. I was primarily interested in how many books are available to children in classrooms, how often educators conduct activities to promote early literacy, at which times of the day they include them, and which elements of shared reading, one of the most common methods for promoting early literacy, they use when reading to children. For this purpose, I created a questionnaire about the environment and strategies for promoting early literacy in preschool, which was designed based on a questionnaire used in a study by A. M. Moses et al. (2016). I sent this dedicated questionnaire to 33 kindergartens across Slovenia where educators, assistant educators, speech therapists, and surdopedagogues, special rehabilitation educators, or inclusive educators in the role of educators completed these questionnaires.
I found that speech therapists and surdopedagogues, special rehabilitation educators, and inclusive educators in the role of educators use strategies to promote early literacy about as often as educators and assistant educators of preschool children do. However, educators with predominantly hearing children in their groups do this significantly more often than educators with predominantly deaf and hard-of-hearing children. An important finding is also that deaf and hard-of-hearing children have more books available based on the number of children in the group (6.08 books per child), even exceeding the norm (5.00 books per child), unlike groups with predominantly hearing children, which have too few books available based on the number of children in the group (2.33 books per child).
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