engleski

The relationship of family literacy and digital environment with letter recognition in preschool age and later academic achievement

Research clearly emphasizes the importance of children’s home literacy environment for letter learning in preschool age, and letter recognition is a good predictor of later academic achievement. But, since the lives of children today are getting more and more saturated with digital technology, it is important to monitor how and if this changes modern families literacy environment, and how these changes are related to children’s emergent literacy skills, and later academic achievement.In this research we report preliminary findings from a small scale longitudinal study aiming to investigate the relationship of children’s use of digital devices in home environment, as well as family literacy environment and their letter recognition in preschool age, as well as their school achievement in Croatian language one year later. The study included 92 children from Croatia, mean age 6 years. The children were tested for letter rec-ognition and their parents filled out a questionnaire, thus providing us with information on the amount of time children use different digital devices during working week or weekends, as well us with the ba-sic information regarding home literacy environment. One year later, for 54 children from the original study, we obtained their average grades from written and oral language skills in Croatian language, as well as their final grade in Croatian language after finishing the first grade of elementary school. Letter recognition at preschool age has been posi-tively related to the number of books the family owns, and the number of children’s books (Spearman’s rho value .240* and 332** respectively), and negatively related to time the children spent using a comput-er during weekends (Spearman’s rho=-.286*). There were no relations between the time parents spent with their children in joint reading, teaching children letters or reading and letter recognition. Furthermore, there was a moderate negative relation between time children spent using mobile phones during weekend and their final grade in Croatian lan-guage one year later (Spearman’s rho=-.407*). The time parents spent reading with their children was positively related to oral language skills in Croatian language one year later (Spearman’s rho=.291*).Further research is needed that will in more detail monitor how young children’s digital technology use in home environment is affecting different aspects of more traditional family literacy environment and how this might affect children’s emerging literacy skills and later academic achievement.

family literacy environment, digital media, letter recognition, academic achievement

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