126 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
Literacy knowledge
The third and final element of literacy socialization, literacy
knowledge, refers to information that children acquire from
literacy experiences with artifacts (van Kleeck and Schuele 1987)
including print awareness (an aspect of literacy awareness to
be discussed below) and some basic book reading conventions
( Justice and Pence 2005). For example, children learn about book
orientation, which includes identifying the cover and back of a
book, holding it upright, and turning the pages from left to right.
In English, children learn that reading occurs from top to bottom
and from left to right. However, children reading Arabic, Urdu,
and Hebrew, for example, learn to read from right to left. Sound-
letter correspondence, the knowledge of which graphemes
(letters) represent phonemes (sounds) in words, is another
type of literacy knowledge that can occur within the context of
literacy socialization events. Finally, literacy experiences with
artifacts also teach children about the traditional parts of speech,
namely nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions,
prepositions, and interjections ( Justice and Pence 2005).
Literacy awareness
In addition to the different elements of literacy socialization
presented in the foregoing discussion, the emergent literacy period
coincides with the development of metalinguistic awareness,
sometimes simply called language awareness. Language
awareness for literacy involves a developing understanding of the
written word. Literacy awareness is nurtured in the context of
the literacy socialization events described in the previous section.
Metalinguistic awareness, the understanding of language as an
object in itself as a cognitive construct, rather than as a tool for
communication, plays an important role in emergent literacy and