Investigating the Relationship between Home Literacy Environment (HLE) Activities and Emergent Literacy Skills Development

Abstract

Early intervention is thought to be necessary to stimulate children's word knowledge. Children will be unable to encode and decode inputs on their own without adult assistance. As a result, interventions play a critical role in literacy development at all levels, especially during the emerging literacy phase, and parents are often the first to cast such interventions. The goal of this study is to identify the types of HLE Activities that parents regularly use, as well as the characteristics that contribute to the success of such activities in supporting the development of emerging literacy abilities in preschoolers. The current study surveyed 107 parents with preschoolers at home using a descriptive approach. The HLE activities in this study are limited to parent-child contact, phonological awareness, and decoding skills. The activities that parents most commonly carry out to promote the growth of emergent literacy skills are Phonic Awareness, which involves pointing out letters in isolation and words, and Decoding Skills, which involve introducing letters/words and their sound or pronunciation in songs or other fun ways. Then, in order to ensure the success of the implementation, parental education becomes a crucial aspect. Other issues, such as who raises preschoolers at home and infrastructure availability, become non-negotiable factors in determining the degree of HLE implementation. Overall, the study proposes that further research be done to help parents with less education and non-kinship caregivers practice HLE to help preschoolers develop their emergent reading abilities.