Literacy-Related Play Activities and Preschool Staffs’ Strategies to Support Children’s Concept Development

The purpose of this study is to examine what language-stimulating strategies preschool staff use when supporting children's concept development through literacy-related play activities, such as reading, writing, drawing and spontaneous play.

Overall, the results show that the literacy-related play activities support the children's concept development. The authors find five types of concept unfolded in the interaction between children and adults: 1) concepts of action, 2) concepts referring to specific things, 3) descriptive concepts, 4) concepts of time and place, and 5) specific names of things. Six themes characterise the literacy-related play activities: colour/pattern, word/letter, picture/photo, construction/function, narratives and search/find. The results indicate that activities such as spontaneous play, dramatic play, adult-initiated play and child-initiated play offer numerous opportunities to support children in their concept development. Such activities support children's language expression, and allow expansion of the child's use of concepts.

The data material consist of video recordings of literacy-related play activities in six preschool units with children aged 1-5 years. The preschool units were selected because of their high-quality learning environment, and the preschool staff were selected because they had a high score with regard to language-stimulating strategies in a previous study.

Norling, M., & Lillvist, A. (2016). Literacy-Related Play Activities and Preschool Staffs’ Strategies to Support Children’s Concept Development. World Journal of Education 6(5), 49-63.