What SEL Adds to Our Understanding of Literacy Development in Young Children

Despite the research devoted to helping young people with reading acquisition, too many students are doing too poorly in that essential life skill. New brain-based approaches to literacy development in young children were a major focus at the largest social and emotional learning (SEL) conference, the SEL Exchange, hosted by CASEL and held in Chicago in November of last year. These new approaches place greater emphasis on the role of emotion and connection, and they make a lot of sense.

A common framing is that, while it’s never too late to learn how to read, we need to prioritize raising grade three literacy achievement, particularly in students who are falling behind. The more effort it takes to read two pages, the fewer pages will be read. Multiply this over 180 school days, and it’s clear why it is so important to address reading issues from the time students enter formal schooling, especially for children from groups historically affected by achievement and resource gaps.

How SEL Fits Into Developing Literacy Skills

At least three areas of social and emotional learning have direct instructional implications for young readers.

1. Self and social awareness: This includes emotion recognition. Accurate understanding of emotions in others and oneself helps build better relationships, which fosters wider interpersonal and social participation as well as understanding of how people relate to one another in different situations. Being a reader is part of one’s emerging personal identity.

2. Problem solving: Children benefit from applying problem-solving skills to anticipating what will happen in stories, as well as how to respond when they encounter any reading-related difficulties, especially when they don’t understand what they are reading.

3. Emotion regulation: It’s not an easy task for screen-oriented young children to sit in place and focus on the pictures and text in books. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education at the Brain and Creativity Institute, noted at the CASEL conference that interpreting the pictures or representing the storyline comes more easily to most children than reading text and helps young children “hang in” longer when reading.

The following instructional practices build on children’s SEL abilities to improve early literacy, in accordance with emerging brain science.

Read the Pictures First

Immordino-Yang believes that spoken language and pictorial storytelling are natural and long-standing human skills. Reading is more abstract and difficult; symbols must be associated with sounds, combinations of sounds, and grammatical forms and markers. These also must be linked to meaningfulness, experience, and purpose. So why not start with the pictures?

Reading the pictures first—literally reviewing the pictures in a children’s book before reading the text—does several things. First, it expands students’ emotion vocabulary. Second, it teaches them the grammar of emotion in a more accessible way than just learning it at the speed of life. Children can be asked, and helped to focus on, a variety of facial features and postural and other cues that illustrators use to convey emotion and intention. If children can’t read the pictures well, they’re likely to have difficulty reading the emotions of peers and/or adults.

Provide a Chance to Represent What is Being Read

There is a universal desire in children to connect what they are doing to their own emerging identity. So, allow periodic opportunities for them to represent what they are reading and describe it as they relate to it. Don’t worry about the correctness of the representation; rather, emphasize that children explain their representation so that there is a rationale and a relationship between the intention and the representation.

One approach that particularly activates young children’s problem-solving skills is to ask them to draw what they think will happen next in the story, before they read it. For example, in books like The Cat in the Hat, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Three Little Pigs, to name some classics, there are many points in the story where you can ask children to imagine what will happen next and try to draw it, however they can. Even having them anticipate the next part of the story verbally is a form of representation that increases engagement in reading, as well as building understanding of the contours of plotlines and anticipation of consequences.

Build the Identity of Being a Reader

The identity of being a reader or not is shaped strongly and early in school. It’s essential, therefore, to ensure, beginning in early childhood and continuing, that all children believe they are readers, regardless of their objective competence in reading. This is aided by finding early readers’ strengths and preferences and ensuring regular experience with those materials. For some, it may be books about dinosaurs; for others, books about things that go. Some may be drawn to books about their cultural heritage, “their people.” This anchors the development of a reading identity, vital by third grade.

At the CASEL conference, Gholdy Muhammad, associate professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning, emphasized creating joy around reading, so that it is seen as a source of enjoyment, healing, appreciation, wonder, curiosity. She has found that young children like to consider themselves as explorers when reading, to understand both the author’s and illustrator’s intentions. Why did they write this book? What did they want you to learn? What might have made it better, either in pictures or in words? What story would you like to tell? What would you like other people to learn? 

Bringing these insights into early literacy instruction has the potential to reverse current trends about the success of young readers by grade three. It’s a priority worth pursuing.