Print Awareness - Print Awareness Interventions

Print Awareness Interventions

Since print awareness has been identified as an important precursor to literacy, numerous interventions have been designed to enhance the print awareness and preliteracy skills of at-risk children. Many of them focus on storybook reading or joint-book reading. This is a common practice in print-rich homes and some simple alterations of daily routines can have a huge impact on the child's preliteracy skills.

Storybook reading can improve a child's print awareness when the parent (or other adult such as a teacher) uses a technique referred to as print referencing. Print referencing occurs when verbal or non-verbal cues are used to encourage a child's attention or interaction with print. An example of this is a parent asking the child to point to the first word on a page or to ask "Where are the words on this page?"