Enhancing the Early Reading Skills : Examining the Print Features of Preschool Children ’ s Book

The purpose of this study is to examine the uses of print features in preschool children’s books in the US and Turkey, in order to helping adults to understand print features and supporting children’s print awareness. In this context, two hundred children’s books was randomly selected from the US and Turkey. Document analysis was used for examining the children’s books. For the analysis of how to use print features, this study used coding systems adapted from McCarier, Pinnel, and Fountas (2000) and Zucker, Ward, and Justice (2009). After identifying children’s book literature as concept books, theme collections, rhythm’s books of language, and story books, we evaluated print features of books according to six features: labeling/environmental print, visible speech, visible sound, letters in isolation, font changes, and bold or unique fonts in the coding system. Findings of this study showed that examining children’s books in the US contains more print features than examining children’s books in Turkey.


Introduction
Preschool years have an impact role on children's emergent literacy and these years are critical for developing print awareness and transitioning to formal reading (Pullen & Justice, 2003).Therefore, children need more opportunities for learning about print awareness (Neuman & Roskos, 1997).Children's books provide children exposure to print language, such as labels and sings, so that they can learn more print features with books (Neuman & Roskos 1993).Used print features like isolate words or letters, punctuation marks help to children understanding concepts about print.Thus, when books include print features, children built knowledge of the writing language (Learning Media, 1997).The focus of this study is print features in the children's books.This study provides awareness about the importance of the print features of children's books.
Children's books provide interdependence between the printed words and pictures.Considering the print features within children's books, such as typeface colors, lines, and orientation, they support children's emergent literacy (Zucker, Ward, & Justice, 2009).In support of this view, Justice and Ezell (2002) implemented 24 small group sessions of book reading in preschool, and they emphasized the print of the books in these sessions.Children showed significantly increased growth in their alphabet knowledge, concept of word, and word identification.These studies show that print awareness is an important skill for learning to read (McGinty et al., 2012).This is a broad term, consisting of writing rules and writing language, including print concept knowledge (left to right directionality, combinatorial properties of letters to make words), and alphabet knowledge (Justice, Bowles, & Skibbe, 2006;Justice & Kaderavek, 2003, p. 11;Pullen & Justice, 2003, p. 89;Vukelich et al., 2008).Children need to understand variety of prints and they need to expose to different types of printed materials (Dougherty, 1999;Justice et al., 2009).
Printed materials like language cards, book reading, and environmental print improves print awareness, because print in books is read on the page from left to right, and from top to bottom, and the pictures and print on the page are used and organized together (Ruddell, 1999).Children should learn first and last page of a book, and top and bottom page for improving their print awareness (Learning Media, 1997;Dougherty, 1999).Children should also learn the differences between print and pictures, where to begin reading on a page, and the relation between pictures and print (Morrow, 2007).Print awareness is defined as the development of cognizance of the form and function of print.Clay (1979) used books for evaluating early print awareness of children and she asked some questions to children about print, such as "Show me where I can begin to read" (Justice & Ezell, 2002).
Research shows children's print knowledge is one of the better predictors of children's reading ability (Caplovitz, 2005).The National Early Literacy Panel's study (NELP) found that the best predictor of children's early reading success is word decoding and comprehension, before first grade and beyond (Developing Early Literacy, 2002).Storch and Whitehurst (2002) showed that preschool alphabetic skills are an important factor for kindergarten reading ability.These findings show the importance of early print knowledge for subsequent reading skills.
Three and four year-old children begin to recite their favorite books through conventional reading (Caplovitz, 2005).Research (Ezell & Justice, 2000;Justice & Ezell, 2000) has shown that adult-child shared reading of books is an important method for enhancing children's print awareness, including distinct attention on print focus.Adults have a vital role on children's emergent literacy skills and children are very enjoyable reading aloud and storytelling by their adults.Adults have conversation with children for exposing writing language and structure.If genre of books has more quality about print, they are valuable for children and they give visual cues (Learning Media, 1997).
Supporting this view, Sulzby (1985) found and described the developmental process around children's storybook reading.The more children have experiences with storybooks, the more they have opportunity to build their reading ability.In this process, they can first use the books' pictures as an important factor for building the story, and then they can begin to use print knowledge in their developmental reading process (Caplovitz, 2005).
Looking at examined children's books studies, Cecen and Aydemir (2011) examined 50 children's books according to the books readability, such as word and cause length.They found that 24% of children's books were medium in their readability challenge.Gonen (1993) examined children's books according to their concepts, pictures, and physical qualities, and she interviewed preschool teachers about their use of children's books.She found that these books were inadequate for concepts, pictures, and physical quality and teachers did not have any university classes about children's literature or about choosing quality children's books.Cakmak and Gonen (1997) found that children's books are inadequate in terms of these physical properties: bookbinding, quality of paper, and coloration.Ozgider (2010) examined children's books between the England and Turkey and he found no difference in the concept and formal features of children's books.Gonen et al. (2011) examined 100 children's books in terms of concepts, pictures, and physical quality.They found that 98 of these books had punctuation and spelling errors, and 93 had object pictures.They also determined the adequacy of these books according to the books' size and text-image relationships.Studies have usually examined the external and internal features of children's books.However, left to right organization of print, top to bottom organization of lines, special punctuation marks, and print meaning are embedded in the books' content (Ruddell, 1999).
To date, a study that examines the print features of children's books between the US and Turkey has not been published.This study was designed to address this gap in the literature, and it creates awareness about print features and print awareness, and it emphasizes print features of children's books in both countries.
The specific research questions to be examined include: What are the print features of children's books?How many print features are there in examined children's books?

Purpose of the Study
Research showed that when children improve print awareness; they can increase future reading success and can engage early reading development (Ezel et al., 2000;Justice & Ezel, 2000, 2002;Justice & Lankford, 2002;Strickland & Schickedans, 2004;Justice et al., 2009;Zucker et al., 2009;Strickland & Abbott, 2010).The easiest way of developing print awareness on children is to develop children's books (Ozgider, 2010).This study examined the print features of preschool children's books, in order to help adults understand print features and support children's print awareness with books.In addition, adults need to understand which elements are important for print awareness in children's book.This study focuses on the print features of preschool children's books in the US and Turkey.There is no study in the literature about the print features of children's books between the US and Turkey.This study addressed what the print features of preschool children's books are in the two countries.This study is initially crucial for both countries' print features of books; and this study and other similar studies attract attention to print features of children's books.

Method
Document analysis, which is one of the types of qualitative research, was used in the study.Document analysis is a social research method, and documentary work involves reading lots of written materials which give information about the targeted facts and events (Yıldırım & Simsek, 2008).

Documents
Ozgider (2010) compared children's books between Turkey and England, but there is no research about the US and Turkey children's books.This study examined the print features of 200 preschool children's books, including 100 from the US and 100 from Turkey.The preschool books were randomly chosen from bookstores, libraries, and preschool classrooms.The selected children's books were coded for their print features using a coding system developed by the investigators.

Coding System
This study used two coding systems.Before examining print features of children's books, the preschool books were identified for the genre of children's literature that they represent, such as concept books, theme collections, the rhythm of language, and story books (McCarier, Pinnel, & Fountas, 2000).The preschool books were identified under the four headings; (1) Concept book: ABC, color, counting, and various other concept books, etc.
(2) The rhythm of language: song and rhymes, poetry, predictable patterns, and cumulative tales, etc.
(4) Story books The coding system was adapted from Zucker, Ward, and Justice's (2009) study; in which they described the relationship between emergent readers' print knowledge and print referencing.This coding system was used to identify the print features of each child's book.Including print features in a book was coded as a one the opposite as zero.
The following print features were used in the coding system of children's books: (1) Labeling/Environmental Print: The book has a label, word, or letter on it that is often on everyday things, or diagrams, figures, or photos include a print label (2) Visible Speech: The character's words or their speaking are shown in the book.
(4) Letters in Isolation: Letters are printed alone.
(5) Font Changes: The font is changed in color, size, or orientation.
(6) Bold or Unique Fonts: Font is changed to a bold or unique form, such as book, children, book.

Reliability of the Coding
Inter-coder reliability of the preschool level books in term of print features was assessed using Cohen's Kappa.The reliability of the coding protocol was evaluated by double coding fifteen percent of the transcripts.Two investigators independently coded each preschool book in six categories.An item-by-item comparison was made for each coding, in order to calculate an inter-rater agreement score.Inter-rater agreement was 89% for coding children's books' print features, Kappa=.81.Any differences in coding were resolved by the two coders prior to the full analysis.

Data Analysis
Prior to addressing our main research aims, we conducted descriptive analyses of the coding.In this study, the number and proportion of children's books' characterized as a concept book, rhythm of language book, theme book, or story book, was calculated.Then, the number and proportion of print features in books as labeling/environmental print, visible speech, visible sound, and letters in isolation, font changes, and bold or unique fonts was removed.This study exhibited the percentages of the books' print features.

Proportions of Children's Books
In this study, the most examined children's books from Turkey and the US were storybooks (58%).The second most examined children's books were theme books (21%).These results generally represent the use of storybooks in preschool classrooms.The least used children's books were the rhythm of language books (5%) (Table 1).Saracho and Spodek (2009) found that parents most frequently chose modern fantasy books.The least frequently chosen books are the poetry books.For principally aesthetic purposes, children's literature may be preferred, but good children's books also contribute to children's language and literacy learning (Saracho & Spodek, 2009).Therefore, when children's books are selected, their print features should be considered.

Print Features
Print can be embedded in pictures, such as speech balloons, visible sound, and environmental print/print labeling (Zucker et al., 2009).This study examined the print features of children's books: labelling/ environmental print, visible speech, visible sound, letters in isolation, font changes, and bold or unique fonts.Children's books' print features in Turkey showed different percentages according to the coding items.The results are given in Figure 1.According to the figure, visible speech was used more than other print features in the examined children's books in Turkey.Labelling/environmental print was the second most frequently used print features.However, the examined books did not have letters in isolation.Visible sound (3%) and font changes (9%) were lower than others.
According to the print features, the examined children's books in the US showed a higher percentage of font changes (74%).Second, visible speech was 68% in children's books.Also, the results showed a high percentage for visible sound, bold and unique fonts, and labelling/environmental print (39%, 57%, and 48%).However, letters in isolation had the lowest percentage (12%) compared to other print features.Another important result was the total number of print features in children's books in the US.Two percent of the books did not have any print features.Also, two percent of the children's books had all six print features; this result is similar to Turkey.The lowest percentages were seen for these print features in both countries.In both countries, visible speech was coded highly in children's books (62%).The second most coded print features was font changes (41.5%).Also, this study showed that the least used print features were letters in isolation (6%).We also found that children's books had higher percentages of print features in the US.There were significant differences between countries regarding font changes (74%-9%), visible sound (39%-3%), letters in isolation (12%-0%), and bold and unique fonts (57%-18%).Also, another print feature, labelling/environmental print was coded more than twice as often in the US.Thus, print features were coded more in the US children's books and in Turkey.

Discussion
There are a number of studies about enhancing young children's reading through different reading activities in the literature (Justice & Ezell, 2000, 2002;Ezell et al., 2000;Pullen & Justice, 2003, Caplovitz, 2005, Justice et al., 2006, Rochdi, 2009, Justice et al., 2010).In particular, read aloud activities with different reading techniques in preschool prompt children's print-knowledge development (Justice et al., 2010;Rochdi, 2009).Teachers can be more helpful to children by using the print features of books for improving their print awareness (Justice & Lankford, 2002).Zucker et al. (2009) found that when children's books increase their print awareness, emphasizing print awareness by teachers increases.Therefore, having print features in children's books is important for preschool teachers.Naparalla (2002) found that when parents use print references in books, children significantly improve their print awareness.Also, children's early literacy and reading achievement increased due to their shared reading activities (Saracho & Spodek, 2009).Children can improve their basic print awareness skills, such as following words from top to bottom and from left to right, with books (Strickland & Abbott, 2010;Caplovitz, 2005).Therefore, children's books are very important for developing the print awareness skills.
This study answers two research questions: what are the print features of children's books and how many print features take place in examined children's books.Children's books were examined according to labelling/environmental print, visible speech, visible sound, letters in isolation, font changes, and bold or unique fonts.Looking at the comparison (Table 2), examined children's books in the US significantly contains more print features.25 % of the examined children's books in Turkey did not have any print features, and 49% of children's books had one print feature.Looking at the US, only 2% children's books did not have any print features, and 17% of children's books had one print feature.These results show that children's books need to use more print features in Turkey.
Parents and educators choose books carefully for children's encouragement and motivation to be a lifelong reader.Print awareness is important for children's literacy success (Strickland &Schickedanz, 2004).When adults consider print features within children's books, they can see how the author or illustrator used visible language, lines, and orientation (Zucker et al., 2009).For print awareness evaluation, adults can ask questions about the book's print (Strickland & Abbott, 2010).This study was examined font changes and bold or unique fonts in the children's books.Children's books in the US have higher percentages of these features, while children's books in Turkey do not have very much.Font changes and bold or unique fonts need to be more considered in children's books in Turkey for increasing their print awareness.
Books highlight the alphabet and the sounds of the letters for teaching letter knowledge.Some books clearly show the alphabet as both lower and upper case for letter-knowledge (Strickland & Abbott, 2010).This study showed that letters in isolation had the least percentages in both countries (USA-12%, Turkey-0%).High print features of children's books can prompt natural talking for teachers or parents about print features (Zucker et al., 2009).Therefore, if children's books have more print features, they can help to develop children's print awareness.This study informs to adults for choosing children's books and indirectly it provides to publish with more print features of children's books.

Conclusion
This study examined the print features of children's books of the US and Turkey to help understand the print features and to show the supporting print awareness of children.Looking at the children's books in both countries, the examined children's books in the US generally had more print features than those in Turkey.The quality of books is important for children to improve their language skills (Caplovitz, 2005).Clay (1979) claimed, "Without being able to read, children can understand conventions of a book as reading top-to-bottom and left-to-right on a page (in English), the difference between the book being upside-down or right side up, differentiation between pictures and print on a page, and the meaning of punctuation and spacing between words" (Caplovitz, 2005), so children's books can do more than to support children's print awareness.This study was an attempt to understand print features on children's books and focused on two countries.Further research should be conducted to learn how print features of children's books differ in the other countries.

Limitation
This study had some limitations.This study examined 200 children's books from bookstores, libraries and preschools in both countries.Therefore, the results of this study covered 200 children's books, which represent an important limitation to this study.

Copyrights
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Examined children's books print features in Turkey

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Examined children's books print features in the US

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.The percentage of print features examined in children's books in Turkey

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.The percentage of print features examined in children's books in the US Jones in the Dog Hause 16) Hot-Air Henry 17) How Many Ways Can You Cut a Pie Examined children's books list in Turkey,

Table 1 .
Examined children's books' literature in both countries

Table 2 .
Print features of children's books in Turkey and the US