A young child picks up a book, holds it right side up, and turns the pages.…

Concept

Emergent literacy is the print and book knowledge a child builds up before conventional reading and writing begin. It covers the concepts about print — that a book has a right way up, that pages are turned in a fixed order, that print runs in a set direction — together with book-handling behaviour, story sense and phonological awareness. Such behaviour is treated as real literacy learning already under way, not as an empty period before literacy starts.

Application

The child in the question does three things: chooses a book, orients it the right way up, and turns its pages in order. None of these requires decoding a single word, yet each one shows that the child has already worked out how a printed book behaves. Behaviour of exactly this kind is what emergent literacy skills name.

Cross-check

Contrast the neighbouring terms by what each one actually denotes:

• emergent curriculum describes how a teacher plans — themes drawn from children's observed interests — so it is a statement about programme design, not about a child's own attainment.

• emergent properties is a systems-theory idea: a quality the whole shows while its parts do not, such as the wetness of water. It has no bearing on a developmental milestone.

• emergent solution skills would point to a child's growing problem-solving strategies, which developmental writing places under cognitive growth and illustrates with trial-and-error and means-end reasoning rather than with the handling of print.

Result

Picking up a book, holding it the right way up and turning its pages demonstrates emergent literacy skills.