Defining emergent as the process of becoming and literacy as the interrelatedness of reading and writing in young children's development, this paper reviews emergent literacy research and relates it to beginning reading and writing instruction. The first section of the paper describes the social and linguistic contexts for literacy, reviewing research that shows communication patterns and practices and parent-scaffolding of literacy for preschool children to be critically important events for literacy development. The second section deals with oral and written language distinctions and describes why literacy is not a simple extension of oral language. The third section reviews research on the acquisition of emergent reading and writing skills and knowledge, while the fourth presents examples of landmark instructional studies that adopt an emergent literacy perspective. (Author/FL)