Yoga for Emergent Literacy 125Examples include discussing how small tasks apply to larger ones
(e.g. “Knowing these letters will help you read these words”),
describing task components (e.g. “To read this word, you need
to look at each letter”), and aiding children in reflective self-
evaluation (e.g. “How do you think you did?”). Structural scaffolds
refer to aspects of the context in which learning takes place that
help to facilitate children’s learning. Examples include working
in familiar environments, incorporating motivating materials, and
involving peers in shared book reading.
The literacy event of shared book reading also promotes the
development of children’s ability to produce their own stories, a
topic that was introduced in Chapter 2 with the discussion of the
emergence of narratives during the “Later Syntactic-Semantic
Complexity” stage of language development (Gerber and Prizant
2000). Children’s narratives, whether spoken or written, convey
real or fictional events about the past, present, or future. In order
to produce narratives, children must incorporate knowledge
across the different domains of language—morphology, syntax,
semantics, phonology, and pragmatics ( Justice and Pence 2005).
The written narratives contained in early chapter books often
include more explicit, detailed, literate language than that found
in books with an abundance of pictures, which provide a different
source of context. Examples of literate, decontextualized language
include elaborated noun phrases (e.g. “our new boat”), adverbial
phrases (e.g. “after the sunset”), conjunctions (e.g. “although”),
and specific vocabulary (e.g. “stern” and “rudder”). Adults can
facilitate narrative development and literate language by exposing
children to books with stories that contain temporal and causal
sequences ( Justice and Pence 2005).