Competencies that underpin children's transition into early literacy.(Report)

There is a reported association between children's language development and their social and academic success in school (Bishop, 1997; Goodyer, 2000; Hay, Elias, Fielding-Barnsley, Homel, & Frieberg, 2007; Senechal, 2006). In terms of this association the evidence is that lower socio economic status (SES) communities have a greater prevalence of children with early literacy difficulties (Boetsch, Green, & Pennington, 1996; Snow & Powell, 2008) such that low SES is a risk factor in terms of children's initial reading development. Associated with this is a growing belief that appropriate early language and learning experiences can act as a protective factor that has a positive influence upon the cognitive and social development of young children to help alleviate low educational achievement (Cashmore, 2001; Elias, Hay, Homel, & Frieberg, 2006; Hawkins & Catalono, 1992; Paul, 2007).

The evidence is that children's oral language competencies underpin children's transition into literacy, which in turn is a major predictor of academic achievement and school attachment (Barrett & Hammond, 2008; Catts & Kamhi, 2005). Oral language competencies, however, are not the only predictors of reading success and it needs to be acknowledged that there are also other influences (Adams, 1990; Byrne, Fielding-Barnsley, & Ashley, 2000; Scarborough, 2005). For example, Scarborough noted the predictive importance of children's: concept of print, expressive vocabulary, sentence/ story recall skills, and receptive and expressive language, along with the students' phonological awareness and letter naming skills, and that these elements are considered interactive, such that an enhancement in one can have a direct and/or indirect influence on another of the elements. While there are a range of interactive influences on children's early literacy development, the focus of this study is on the interactions of children's early expressive and receptive language and their in-class social behaviour.

When children are delayed in language development the indications are that they are more likely to have difficulty settling into school and classroom routines and develop school attachment (Elias et al. 2006; Senechal, 2006). Compared to their peers they are also less likely to form positive peer social interactions involving advanced play and problem solving communication (Fujiki, Brinton, Isaacson, & Summers, 2001; Lindsay, Dockrel, & Strand, 2007). Reciprocally, children's social and interaction problems have a negative influence on the development of children's language by limiting opportunities for dialogue (Hart, Fujiki, Brinton, & Hart, 2004). That is, delays in language hinder children's social interactions and poor social interactions hinder children's language development. From this perspective, the three elements of: (i) children's language proficiency; (ii) children's social skills proficiency; and (iii) children's behaviour control proficiency are considered to be related because they stem from a common underlying cognitive source that manifests all three proficiencies (Goswami & Bryant, 2007).

The speculation is that the core cognitive proficiency of both language and academic delay is the child's working memory along with processing speed and capacity (Goswami & Bryant, 2007). From this perspective, children's attention related behaviours, language, and social development can not be easily separated from their developing cognitive skills to store, organise, and retrieve information into long-term memory (Bishop, 1997; Cole & Cole, 2001; Paul, 2007). The argument is that children with language delays often struggle with peer interactions, attention tasks, and in social dialogue situations because they cannot quickly or efficiently process or attend to all of the linguistic and non-verbal information needed to interact appropriately with teachers, peers, and others (Catts & Kamhi, 2005; Cross, 2004; Snowling, 2005; Nation, 2005).

Some of the most influential support for the argument that there is a relationship between students' language ability and social behaviour has come from the research of Goodyer (2000) who noted that around 50 percent of children with language development difficulties also had a range of associated social problems. Snow and Powell (2008) also noted the negative impact that poor oral language competence had on the social skills of high-risk boys who were identified as juvenile offenders. Similarly, in a fourteen-year follow-up of children with early language delays with a control group of children, a strong association was demonstrated between ongoing language disorders and ongoing social issues (Beitchman et al., 2001). In contrast to this perspective, Qi and Kaiser (2004) have argued that there is still a lack of compelling evidence of the reported relationship between children's language and behaviour for younger children starting schooling. Barrett and Hammond (2008) and Stanton-Chapman et al. (2007) have argued that even for children identified as having a special language impairment these children have no higher levels of externalising or aggressive behaviours than their classroom peers, although the children with significant language impairment did show more passive peer social relationships.

Much of the debate about the relationship between children's language and social proficiency has centred around children from low socio-economic communities (Lindsay et al., 2007; Tomblin, Zhang, Backwalter, &Catts (2000) with the indication that this relationship is more pronounced in these communities (Harden et al., 2000; Randolph et al., 2000), although Fujiki et al. (2001) were unable to identify this relationship with children from low SES communities.

To some extent the debate about the connections between young children's language levels and in-class behaviour can be attributed to the method of measuring the children's behaviour as well as the children's social context (Cross, 2004; Lindsay et al., 2007; Plomin et al., 2002). To clarify this issue, the main research question being investigated in this study is: What is the relationship between children's in-class behaviour and their language level and beginning reading status? This question will be ...