Early Literacy under the focus of language and cognitive development

Interdisciplinary Workshop, March 22-23, 2012 at ZiF Bielefeld

As an umbrella term, ‘literacy‘ refers to a number of children‘s abilities, such as linguistic literacy (the ability to read and write), literary literacy (the ability to produce and interpret narratives) and visual literacy (the ability to produce and interpret pictures). In ‘early literacy‘, relating to the preschool years, these abilities develop in a cross-fertilizing way, accompanied and steered by other processes of cognitive, sensomotoric and interactional maturation and learning. As a first step towards understanding these complex processes, the workshop will bring together scholars from linguistics, cognitive psychology, and children‘s literature research. The topics raised in this workshop will be discussed along three basic assumptions:

  1. Children‘s literacy is a specific input; a theory of language acquisition has to account for how this form of input influences learning processes.
  2. A crucial property of children‘s literature is that it considers children‘s cognitive and language skills; a theory of children‘s literature has to explain this property.
  3. Cognitive abilities develop within complex situational acts; a theory of cognitive psychology has to explain how language acquisition and emerging literacy are fostered in such complex situations. Our discussion will lead to a road map for a hitherto neglected and unknown territory.

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