Oregon Educator Licensure Assessments (ORELA) Practice Exam

Emergent literacy helps children discover what?

1. Mathematics principles

2. New words and meanings

3. Scientific concepts

4. Artistic techniques

The correct answer is: New words and meanings

Emergent literacy is a foundational stage of literacy development that occurs in young children, typically before they are formally taught to read and write. This stage emphasizes exploration and interaction with language, which includes discovering new words and their meanings. As children engage with stories, songs, rhymes, and other forms of spoken language, they expand their vocabulary and develop an understanding of how language works. This process enhances their ability to communicate and express themselves, laying the groundwork for future reading and writing skills. Through activities like reading together, playing with sounds, and discussing pictures in books, children naturally acquire language skills, learn to identify new words, and understand their meanings in context, solidifying the importance of vocabulary development in early literacy. While mathematics principles, scientific concepts, and artistic techniques are vital areas of learning, they do not align as directly with the primary focus of emergent literacy, which is fundamentally about language acquisition and meaning-making.