Early Literacy and Children with Special Needs: An Examination of Resources in the Home Environment

Early literacy development of young children is an area of research that is receiving increasing attention from scholars in the fields of early childhood general and special education. However, researchers in both fields have failed to examine the broad contextual features of the home environment and ways that these features may facilitate or impede literacy development. In an attempt to close the gap on research on early literacy development of young children with special needs, a measurement tool was developed for the purposes of obtaining a more holistic representation of resources available in home environments and gathering information about possible influences of these resources on literacy development of young children with disabilities. Six families were drawn from a subsample of parents who received services from Tennessee's Early Intervention System (TEIS). Two observations were in each home that, together, included a home tour, room mapping, direct observations of individual reading interactions between the child and each parent, and individual interviews with both of the parents. Utilizing this multi-method approach, eight literacy resources were assessed simultaneously for the kinds of information that was obtained from each individual method. The findings were related to literacy information presented in previous research. It was found that the multi-method approach produced a breadth as well as depth of information about resources in home settings that may have important implications for literacy development in young children with disabilities. The findings also suggested that the multi-method approach identified several resources in the home environment of a family in which the parents reported reading to their children daily versus the home environment of a family in which the parents reported reading to their children three times a week or less. Implications for future research as well as early intervention practitioners also were discussed.