Many of today’s preschool teachers face a major tug of war.
They are under pressure to meet rising academic standards, including introducing letter sounds and sight words early, while child development experts continue to emphasize the importance of learning through play.
Our recent systematic review of 26 studies published between 2018 and 2025 suggests that both approaches are correct. Emergent literacy instruction works best when explicit teacher guidance and intentionally planned play-based activities happen together. They are not competing philosophies. They can serve as partners within the same lesson.
What Emergent Literacy Means
Emergent literacy refers to the foundational skills children develop from birth through preschool before learning to read and write conventionally. Researchers organize emergent literacy skills into seven domains.
| Emergent literacy domain | Definition |
| Oral language | The practice of listening and speaking to communicate and learn |
| Vocabulary development | Learning new words and meanings through repeated exposure and instruction |
| Phonological awareness | Awareness of the sounds of language, including rhyming and segmenting |
| Alphabet knowledge | Understanding the alphabetic principle and identifying letters and their sounds |
| Concepts of print | Understanding how print works, including book orientation, directionality, and the difference between words and letters |
| Listening comprehension | The ability to understand oral language, including stories read aloud |
| Emergent writing | The development of written composition through drawing, letter strings, and transcription |
Each of these domains develops differently depending on how instruction is delivered. Understanding those differences was central to this review.
Why Adult Guidance Matters During Play
One of the review’s central findings is that children make significantly greater literacy gains when an adult actively guides or facilitates their play than when children are left to explore entirely on their own.
Researchers describe this adult as a “knowledgeable other.” This is someone who enters a child’s play to model language, ask open-ended questions, and gently steer the activity toward a learning goal without shutting down the fun.
This does not mean every moment of play needs to be scripted. Instead, the review points to guided play as a productive balance. Teachers provide a brief, explicit lesson and then step back so children can practice the concept through hands-on, multisensory activities.
This approach consistently performed better than both unstructured free play and rigid, teacher-only direct instruction.
Small Groups Create More Opportunities to Learn
Another consistent theme across the studies is the value of small-group and one-on-one instruction.
Compared with large-group settings such as traditional circle time, small groups were associated with stronger outcomes in expressive language, alphabet knowledge, and phonological awareness.
A likely explanation is that smaller settings create more opportunities for back-and-forth conversation between teachers and children. Those exchanges give children more time to speak, respond, practice, and receive feedback.
Curriculum Choices Influence Literacy Development
The review also compared literacy-focused curricula, including Handwriting Without Tears and ELLC, with broader whole-child curricula such as Creative Curriculum.
The literacy-focused programs showed a notably stronger relationship with gains in phonological awareness. This does not mean whole-child curricula lack value. It does suggest that certain literacy skills may not develop as strongly when a program depends mainly on children learning them incidentally rather than through explicit instruction.
Curriculum choice matters because play-based activities are most useful when they are connected to a clearly defined literacy skill.
What the Review Found Across Emergent Literacy Domains
Of the 26 studies reviewed, 10 included measurable student outcomes. Their results identified several features associated with improved literacy development.
- Phonological Awareness
- Gains in phonological awareness were directly connected to the amount of time children spent on activities focused specifically on sounds.
- Small-group settings again showed an advantage. Literacy-focused curricula also produced substantially larger gains than programs that were not specifically focused on literacy.
- Vocabulary Development
- More frequent teacher-child language exchanges were associated with stronger expressive language skills.
- A technique researchers call Say-Tell-Do-Play combines shared book reading with related play. It was considerably more effective than relying on children to pick up new words incidentally.
- Across the studies, guided play performed better than free play when the goal was learning new vocabulary.
- Listening Comprehension
- Drama-based strategies made a measurable difference in listening comprehension.
- Teachers who used pantomime, directed imagination, and expressive facial expressions during read-alouds saw improved story recall among their students.
- In another example, an adult modeled a real event by making a pizza with props before asking children to retell a story. This activity produced one of the largest effects found in the review.
- Alphabet Knowledge and Concepts of Print
- Small-group time was associated with stronger letter-word identification.
- Adding literacy-specific materials to existing play centers also increased children’s literacy behaviors. In some inclusive classroom settings, adding materials such as menus to a dramatic play kitchen doubled the literacy behaviors observed during play.
- The materials alone, however, were not the only factor. Teacher involvement helped children understand how those materials related to language, print, and writing.
- Outcomes for Multilingual Learners and Students with Disabilities
- The review found that teacher mediation was especially important for certain groups of students.
- English learners and multilingual learners showed significant gains when teachers used scaffolded digital tools and dramatic storytelling techniques. Systematic, play-based curricula used in Head Start programs also produced particularly strong results for this population.
- Among students with disabilities, child-initiated play without adult guidance offered limited benefit. Teacher-mediated interactions and structured support led to meaningful improvements in literacy skills.
- For these students, active adult involvement was not simply helpful. It was essential to connecting the play activity with the intended literacy outcome.
What Makes Guided Play Difficult to Implement
If guided play and small-group instruction work well, why are they not used more consistently?
The review identified three recurring barriers.
- Policy Pressure: Teachers often feel pressured to choose between play and rigorous instruction because of school readiness mandates. This creates a false division between two approaches that can work together.
- Teacher Confidence: Many teachers reported interest in play-based approaches but felt they lacked the skills needed to connect play with academic outcomes. Some teachers worried that asking questions or entering an activity would interrupt a child’s engagement. This can make it difficult to judge when to observe, when to participate, and when to guide.
- Curricular Limitations: Comprehensive curricula often rely on infusing literacy into classroom activities implicitly. This whole-child approach can result in fewer gains in specific domains, including phonics, compared with programs that provide explicit, literacy-focused instruction.
What the Findings Mean for Classroom Practice
The review concludes that the pendulum of preschool instruction does not need to swing between play alone and direct instruction alone.
The most effective approach is the intentional planning of brief, explicit lessons followed by related play-based exploration.
- Prioritize Small-Group Learning.
- Shifting some instructional time from large-group circle time to small-group rotations can create more opportunities for teacher-child language exchanges.
- Small groups also give teachers more opportunities to observe individual needs and provide focused feedback.
- Design Centers with a Literacy Purpose
- Free-choice centers can include thematic props and materials that connect with current reading and instruction.
- For example, teachers might add typewriters to a center after reading a book about writing. The play remains child-centered, but the materials create opportunities to practice a related literacy concept.
- Build Teacher Skill Through Professional Learning
- Professional development should focus on teacher mediation strategies.
- Teachers need practical guidance on how to enter a child’s play, model language, and ask open-ended questions without taking control of the activity or disrupting engagement.
- Teach Alphabet Knowledge with Phonological Awareness
- Alphabet knowledge should be taught alongside phonological awareness.
- Children need opportunities to learn letters while also hearing, identifying, and working with the sounds those letters represent. Teaching these areas together provides a more complete foundation for later word recognition.
Bringing Play and Explicit Instruction Together
The most effective early literacy instruction is not about choosing between play and teaching.
It is about recognizing that children benefit when teachers actively participate in play with a clear learning purpose. Brief instruction can introduce a skill, while guided play gives children a meaningful opportunity to explore and practice it.
Play remains engaging and developmentally appropriate, but it becomes more productive when the teacher understands the intended literacy outcome and provides the right level of support.
Teachers who thoughtfully combine explicit instruction with guided play are helping children develop the oral language, sound awareness, print knowledge, comprehension, and early writing skills that support later reading and writing development.
Read the Full Review
This article is adapted from the Kentucky Reading Research Center’s systematic review of emergent literacy instruction across classroom activities.
Read the full review for a deeper examination of the research, student outcomes, classroom practices, and implications for preschool instruction.
