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Australian Early Childhood Teachers’ Training in Language and Literacy: A Nation-Wide Review of Pre-Service Course Content

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Version 1 2021-08-09, 05:27
journal contribution
posted on 2021-08-09, 05:27 authored by Tessa Weadman, Tanya SerryTanya Serry, Pamela SnowPamela Snow
Early childhood teachers are well-positioned to maximise preschoolers’ development in oral language and emergent literacy; both of which are vital predictors of academic success at school. Research investigating their pre-service training in language and emergent literacy remains limited. This issue is addressed in the present study, with the first nation-wide review of the oral language and emergent literacy course content across all 84 Australian early childhood teacher pre-service courses. Qualitative Content Analysis was employed to gain an overview of language and emergent literacy teaching content reported in publicly available course documents. Study findings demonstrated large variation in the oral language and emergent literacy course content reported. The results showed that course content on the structure of language and code-related skills including phonological awareness and concepts of print, do not feature prominently across pre-service course documents. Further, course content on evidence-based strategies to foster children’s oral language and emergent literacy development, such as dialogic book reading, and intentional adult-child interactions were also limited.

History

Publication Date

2021-01-01

Journal

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Volume

46

Issue

2

Article Number

ARTN 3

Pagination

(p. 29-56)

Publisher

EDITH COWAN UNIV

ISSN

0313-5373

Rights Statement

The Author reserves all moral rights over the deposited text and must be credited if any re-use occurs. Documents deposited in OPAL are the Open Access versions of outputs published elsewhere. Changes resulting from the publishing process may therefore not be reflected in this document. The final published version may be obtained via the publisher’s DOI. Please note that additional copyright and access restrictions may apply to the published version.

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