124 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
toys, and food packages. Logos, a particularly important type of
literacy artifact, expose children to the importance of print.
Literacy events
Literacy events, situations in which people engage with reading or
writing (Heath and Street 2008), enhance and expand children’s
world knowledge of concepts as varied as cultural diversity, money,
nature, and life issues such as birth and death. As children’s
worlds are often limited to their immediate environments of
home, school, and community, storybooks introduce them to the
broader world in which they live. For example, for children living
in a land-locked area such as the central part of the United States,
storybooks can teach them about coastal regions that include
beaches, boats, and buoys.
Shared book reading is an established, well-researched literacy
event that allows adults to create meaningful, motivating contexts
for children to learn such skills ( Justice and Pence 2005). Adult
scaffolding of these interactions helps children attain increasingly
independent, higher levels of emergent literacy. Justice and
Pence (2005) identified four different types of scaffolds that
adults provide during the literacy event of shared book reading:
distancing, linguistic, regulatory, and structural. Distancing
scaffolds involve comments on children’s immediate (e.g. “I like
the way you did that!”) and prior past (e.g. “Remember, you’ve
done this before”) performances. Linguistic scaffolds provide
more advanced models of language and literacy that build upon
children’s current level of knowledge or skill. Examples include
asking open-ended questions (e.g. “What do you think this book
is about?”), describing unfamiliar concepts (e.g. “The elephant is
very big. It’s gigantic!”), and extending children’s talk (e.g. Child:
“It’s the letter T”; Adult: “It’s an uppercase T”). Regulatory
scaffolds help children learn how one task applies to another.