Emergent Literacy

  • Maria Clay

    Marie Mildred Irwin was born in Wellington, New Zealand.
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    Maria Clay

  • Bachelors Degree

    She majored in education at University of New Zealand, earning a bachelor's degree in 1946 and a master's degree in 1948.
  • Education

    After studying clinical child psychology at the University of Minnesota as a Fulbright scholar, Clay received her PhD from the University of Auckland in 1966, where she had been on the faculty since 1960
  • International Reading

    In 1992, she was elected president of the International Reading Association and was the first non-North American to hold this position.
  • Induction

    In 1982, Clay was inducted into the International Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame.
  • Maria Clay

    She developed the Reading Recovery intervention program, which was adopted by all New Zealand schools in 1983
  • Reading Discovery

    In 1985, teachers and researchers from Ohio State University brought Reading Recovery to the United States. Reading Recovery is an early intervention for at-risk students in grade one that is designed to close gaps within an average of 12–20 weeks.
  • Dame

    In 1987, to recognize Marie Clay's 's service and successful leadership in literacy education, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
  • Death

    Marie Clay, a New Zealand psychologist whose efforts to identify and help struggling readers before they finished first grade profoundly influenced educators in the United States and other countries, died at an Auckland hospice Friday after a short illness. She was 81.
  • Elements

    The functions of reading often promote the learning of reading. Literacy often develops from the need in real life situations to get something done or to read so that they can learn. Literacy is not a set of isolated skills, but rather a set of processes that children see as a means to achieve goals.
    Children learn literacy through active engagement with books and writing opportunities. Children reconstruct their knowledge by rereading favorite books and by using invented spelling.
  • Elements

    Reading and writing develop at the same time in young children and are interrelated. Children do not learn how to read first and then learn how to write. Writing is often easier for some children to begin with than reading.
  • Emergent Literacy

    Emergent literacy is a term first used by Marie Clay to describe how young children interact with books and when reading and writing, even though they could not read or write in the conventional sense. A vast amount of research has since been done within the fields of psychology, child development, education, linguistics, and sociology.
  • Elements

    The process of learning to read and write begins very early in a child's life. Children have contact with many forms of communication right from the start. Most children can identify common signs and logos by the age of 2-3. They will begin to experiment with written forms of communicating by scribbling long before they can read.
  • Elements

    Listening to books plays a very important role in the literacy development of children. Reading to children each day is one of the most beneficial ways in which a parent can promote literacy. Children develop a feel for the nature of written language at a very early age by listening to books read aloud. They begin to understand the function of reading and develop a positive attitude towards it.
    Children pass through the stages of emergent literacy in different ways and at different ages. These