Emergent Literacy:

Children begin to learn from the first day of born. Their speech and language skills develop
and improve as they grow. They understand how to express their ideas, thoughts, feelings
and communications to others. During early skills development, children learn reading and
writing skills which are used for development of literacy. This development stage is known
as emergent literacy. The emergent literacy period begins from birth and continues the
preschool years.
Children identify and interact with print in environment (books, magazines and signs),
recognize words, use internet and play games. Gradually, children correlates the learning of
speaking and listening with print and become ready to learn writing and reading. Therefore,
emergent literacy is seen everywhere in homes, schools and communities. Adult
intervention is necessary for emergent literacy of children. They require awareness, literacy
practices and phonic knowledge in everyday life.
Emergent reading is process of understanding print and its meaning. It starts with
perceiving print in environment, gradually understanding the meaning and finally become
the reader. Children see the environment print in daily live in form of words, colors and
images on different labels, household items etc. Everything used by the children will be
helpful in understanding of reading. The most important role in emergent learning in case of
reading is through storybooks. Most the storybook are enjoyable for children. They have
numerous benefits. Storybooks deliver awareness of different functions, forms of readings,
book structure, page turning, and language of book to emergent learner. Similarly, it helps in
understanding of language of reading through words, sentences, characters and ultimately
gives the knowledge of letters and their sounds. Although reading is not just decoding the
text word, it is complete understanding of whole sentence and meaning. Therefore, it
requires the full attention of children which a storybook effectively provides.
Sulzby and Rockafellow (2001) have produce a framework regarding the development of
emergent through storybooks. It has been observe during their research that children
initially learning through labeling and commenting the pictures and ultimately refine the
language to read the words. Childrens engagement through poems and rhymes has the
same effects as storybooks. Children will label the picture, repeatedly listen, exposure to
text and print and finally able to read the text.