ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of literacy development in children up to age eight. Literacy is the key survival skill for the twenty-first century, even more than in previous eras when it was possible to find employment and participate in public discourse with limited reading skills. Success in mastering literacy is greatly enhanced for some children by particular experiences and opportunities during early childhood. The chapter sets the stage for the chapters that follow, by reviewing some widely accepted claims about literacy development and instruction, previewing some of the variation that arises as a result of both national differences in the organization of early literacy education and language-related differences in the orthographies used to represent speech in print, and considering why we continue to have so much difficulty ensuring universal literacy despite the long history of relevant research and accumulated list of proven practices.
