Home literacy as a special language environment to prepare children for school

The present study examined the relationship between language and literacy activities at home and the emergence of so called academic language in a sample of 68 four-year-old Dutch children. The focus was on children’s understanding and production of narrative texts, seen as a common age-appropriate pre-academic text genre. Home language and literacy was measured with a short questionnaire, administered in personal interviews with the mothers. Other measures were the family’s socioeconomic status (SES), children’s receptive vocabulary and working memory. Children’s productive language in narrative text (re)telling already revealed many features of academic language. Furthermore, moderate to strong correlations were found between children’s emergent academic language and the language and literacy activities at home. Multiple regression analyses indicated that, in addition to working memory, home talking and reading predicted children’s vocabulary, and especially children’s text comprehension and text (re)telling. Finally, main and interaction-effects of working memory and home language and literacy on emergent academic language were examined. Although the results were not conclusive regarding the expected moderator effect of working memory, they revealed that children with both low working memory capacity and low academic language input were most disadvantaged.