ABSTRACT
For as long as literacy has been studied, interactions and relationships between children and adults have been recognized as the primary medium through which literacy is acquired. From birth, children engage in increasingly elaborated and symbolically mediated interactions with caregivers in which emotion, cognition, and communication are intertwined and organized. The capacity, skill, and interest to read, understand, and produce written language emerge out of this complex, dynamic, multisystem process (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). In this sense, literacy, both broadly conceived and narrowly viewed, is only one marker point along a broad and long developmental progression in which children’s capacities and skills emerge from child-adult relationships.
