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This text-based course is a written transcript of the event, “Literacy Development in Infants and Toddlers: Best Practices for the SLP”, presented by Margot Kelman on January 12, 2012.
>> Amy Hansen: All right, let's go ahead and get started this afternoon. Good afternoon to all of you and welcome to today's expert seminar, “Literacy Development in Infants and Toddlers: Best Practices for the SLP” presented today by Dr. Margot Kelman. We're so pleased to have her back with us. Dr. Kelman is a speech‑language pathologist in private practice and a clinical supervisor at Wichita State University. She authored a chapter, Acquisition of Speech Sounds and Phonological Patterns in Barbara Hodson’s text, Evaluating and Enhancing Children's Phonological Systems: Research in Theory to Practice. In 2004, she co-authored with Ken Oppel, The Effects of a Multiple Linguistic Perspective Approach to Spelling Instruction, a case study in Communication Disorders Quarterly, and earned manuscript of the year for that. With Mary Louise Edwards, she wrote Phonogroup, A Practical Guide for Enhancing Phonological Remediation. So welcome back, Margot, and thank you so much for joining us today.
[Applause]
>> Dr. Margot Kelman: Thank you, Amy. I welcome the opportunity to speak with all of you today about literacy development in infants and toddlers. This presentation is Part II, Best Practices for the SLP. I will cover the practical application of incorporating literacy skills in your speech and language interventions. Part I provided an overview of research in literacy development for children birth to 3 years of age. Maybe some of our participants today were also listening to that presentation last week. Part I is available as a recorded, podcast or text course.
The focus of today's presentation is on infants and toddlers. Many of the principles and ideas can be used with preschoolers and even some with school‑aged children, so I encourage you to take this information and apply it to the population you work with and adapt it if necessary. Currently, I am at Wichita State University, and am supervising a toddler group. It is called the Toddler Emerging Literacy Playgroup for children who are 18 to 36 months of age. They’re all language delayed and we're including literacy in all of our group sessions. So I'm going to share some of those practices with you today.
Infants and toddlers can't read so why focus on literacy development? Well, because reading to children younger than age three influences their language development and their later ability to learn to read (Neuman, 1999; Watson, 2001; Whitehurst et al.,1994). Learning to read and write is critical to a child's academic success. The attainment of early literacy skills serves as a strong predictor of later reading ability and this information is well documented in the research literature. The infant, toddler and preschool years are when children take their first critical steps towards learning to read and write (National Association for the Education of Young Children [NAEYC], 1998, p.32).
