Abstract:

Besides teachers, parents also play a crucial role in children’s literacy development by exposing them to a rich home literacy environment (HLE). However, previous studies on the associations between home literacy environment and children’s literacy skills were mostly investigated among children in the early childhood years. Parents continue being involved in their children’s learning later on, in elementary school, but less research is available on the associations between HLE and children’s literacy skills in elementary school. Consequently, the present study investigated the extent to which different aspects of home literacy environment (HLE) relate to the literacy skills among Grade 2 students. In the present study, HLE was operationalized as teaching of reading, reading to a child, access to literacy resources, and child’s independent reading, whereas children’s literacy skills were operationalized as sentence reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling. Participants were Grade 2 students acquiring literacy skills in Lithuanian (n = 522; 48% girls; Mage = 8.29 years, SD = .32) and their parents (88.3% mothers). Children were tested in their language and literacy skills; parents completed questionnaires concerning HLE. We ran three hierarchical regression models to predict children’s sentence reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling skills. Control variables (parental education, child gender, vocabulary and word reading fluency skills) were entered at the first step; the four variables of HLE (teaching of literacy, reading to a child, access to literacy resources, child’s own independent reading) were entered at the second step. Overall, he results showed that HLE variables added a significant amount of explained variance to the regression models (5.4% for sentence reading fluency, 4.9% for reading comprehension, and 4.8% for spelling). First, the results showed that teaching of reading weakly negatively predicted sentence reading fluency and spelling skills and reading to a child weakly negatively predicted reading comprehension. Second, access to literacy resources significantly positively predicted reading fluency (not reading comprehension or spelling). Third, children’s independent reading consistently emerged as the strongest positive predictor of all literacy outcomes. In sum, the results suggest that in order to promote children’s literacy skills in Grade 2 most effectively, parents should provide access to literacy resources and create opportunities for children’s independent reading.

Keywords:

Home literacy environment, parents, literacy skills.