ABSTRACT
The assessment of children in the areas of basic concepts, oral language, phonological processing skills, and print awareness provides family literacy programs with the ability to determine which children may be at risk for developing reading difficulties, compared to those children whose emergent literacy skills are developing at a rate consistent with their peers. During the past decade, a growing body of research evidence has highlighted the significance of the preschool period for the development of critically important emergent literacy skills. Data from these research studies indicate that oral language, phonological processing skills, and print knowledge are strongly predictive of how well and how easily children will learn to read and write once they are exposed to formal reading instruction from kindergarten through the third grade. Many children arrive at kindergarten with low levels of these skills, making it less likely that they will benefit from instruction they will receive in the early elementary grades. These data also emphasize that these skills are very stable individual differences, in the absence of targeted intervention (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002).
