Letter Teaching in Parent-Child Conversations

Talk about letters is an important part of the home literacy environment. Such talk has been studied primarily through questionnaires, but these are limited in the amount of information they provide. Here we analyzed conversations between 55 U.S. children and their parents who were visited in their homes every 4 months when the child was between 1.2 and 4.8 years old. We examined the aspects of alphabet knowledge that parents and children discussed, the materials they used, and how these varied with the age of the child and the socioeconomic status of the family. Children primarily focused on identifying letters, while parents also emphasized letter writing and spelling. Talk about the associations between letters and sounds, which is critical in learning to read and write, was less common than anticipated based on the results of questionnaire studies. Teachers should thus not overestimate the knowledge of letter sounds that children acquire at home.