Focusing on the relationship between learning oral language and learning about written language, this book discusses the emergent literacy (EL) of children growing up in a Western, print-oriented society, as well as findings of research conducted during the past 15 years on how children make sense of the way in which literacy works in their culture. Chapter one discusses recent views about and research on EL that represent explicit claims about literacy as a language process, while chapter two outlines the linguistic and social background of EL, detailing the emergence of both oral language and literacy in context. Chapter three focuses on two aspects of EL: the understanding of environmental print and the understanding of continuous text, usually in the form of stories. Chapter four reviews findings of many investigations regarding emergent writing abilities and discusses whether young children have a commitment to writing, understand anything about when and why people write, and know about how people write. Chapter five examines the contrasting views of J. Downing and J. Harste with regard to how children approach reading instruction, while tests and procedures designed to assess emerging literacy in the context of nursery and infant classrooms are discussed in chapter six. The final chapter discusses EL and schooling, focusing on the situations created within schools for teaching children to become literate and whether literacy continues to emerge with the same ease that it did before the transition into school. (A nine-page bibliography is included.) (JD)