ABSTRACT
To those outside the field of education, it must seem like an unnecessary splitting of hairs to debate whether young children's first encounters with print should be called prereading, reading readiness, emergent literacy, or early literacy. However, our view from within the field suggests that shifting terminology reflects more than just a proliferation of new terms for the same concept. Instead, when new terms take hold, we can usually also identify significant shifts in theory, research, and educational practice. The increasing use of the term emergent literacy, beginning in the 1980s, reflects such a shift. As Teale and Sulzby (1986) noted in the introduction to their influential volume Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading, the adoption of a new term-"emergent literacy"-signaled a break with the theoretical concept of "reading readiness," particularly with the notions that young children needed to be taught a series of prerequisite skills prior to reading, and that writing should be delayed until children were reading
conventionally. Although there was by no means unanimous agreement among researchers on the nature of literacy-learning processes, there was general excitement in the field concerning the possibility of uncovering the planfulness behind young children's unconventional scribbles and their early attempts at reading.
