Supporting Early Readers: Building Print Awareness Using Print Referencing

Hi friends!

Let’s chat about supporting early readers.

Helping young children become confident, successful readers starts long before they decode their first word.

One of the foundational skills in early literacy is print awareness—understanding that print carries meaning and knowing how books and print work.

As SLPs, we’re in a unique position to support this skill through a simple and effective strategy: print referencing.

By intentionally drawing attention to print during shared reading, we can build children's understanding of print concepts, help them connect spoken and written language, and lay the groundwork for later reading success.

"Print referencing is an evidence-based strategy that may be used by speech-language pathologists and other early childhood specialists to enhance the emergent literacy skills of young children" (Justice & Ezell, 2004).

In this post, we’ll break down what print awareness is, why it matters, and how to use print referencing strategies in your sessions—no fancy materials required!

What is Print Awareness?

Print awareness is one of those early literacy skills that seems simple but plays a huge role in learning to read.

It’s all about a child’s understanding that print has meaning and that it’s organized in a specific way. Think: knowing how to hold a book, where to start reading on a page, and recognizing that words are made up of letters.

Children with strong print awareness start to notice environmental print (like stop signs or cereal boxes), can point out letters in their name, and understand that we read from left to right and top to bottom (in English).

These might seem like small things—but they’re actually big stepping stones to future reading success!

print referencing

Print referencing is a simple strategy we can use during shared book reading to develop print awareness skills by drawing attention to the print on the page.

That’s it!

You’re probably already doing this in many ways—pointing to words as you read, talking about the letters in a child’s name, or showing where the title is on the front cover.

We’ll dive into the different types of print referencing cues and how they connect to written language skills in just a bit—but first, let’s take a moment to talk about why this strategy is worth using in the first place.

Why It Matters for SLPs

Print referencing is a natural fit in speech and language therapy.

As SLPs, we play a direct and critical role in supporting the literacy development of children with communication challenges—especially those at risk for reading difficulties (Spracher, 2000).

Our deep understanding of language development, from phonology and morphology to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, positions us to make a meaningful impact in early literacy development.

We're already working on many of the skills that underpin reading success—like vocabulary, sentence structure, and phonological awareness—so integrating print awareness is a seamless next step.

The best part? You don’t need a special curriculum or extra prep time. Just grab a favorite book and sprinkle in a few intentional, print-focused comments as you read.

These small tweaks can be embedded into your existing literacy-based or narrative language sessions with minimal effort.

In fact, research shows that using print referencing consistently during shared reading can significantly boost emergent literacy skills—especially for children who are at risk for reading challenges (Justice & Ezell, 2004).

It’s simple, evidence-based, and effective. Total win-win!

Diving Deeper

When we use print referencing during shared reading, our main goal is to develop print awareness—also known as written language awareness.

This sets the stage for early reading success and helps children start to see how spoken and written language connect.

Print awareness can be broken down into three key areas:

📖 Print Concepts

This includes understanding how books and print work—things like holding a book right-side up, reading from left to right, and knowing where a sentence starts and ends.

🧠 Concept of a Word

This is the understanding that spoken words match up with written words. It’s what helps kids realize that each word on the page represents one spoken word when we read aloud.

🔤 Alphabet Knowledge

This involves recognizing letters, knowing their names, and beginning to understand the sounds they make. It’s also noticing that letters combine to form words.

📖 Print Concepts

Print concepts refer to the form, features, and functions of written language—basically, how print works.

These foundational understandings help children navigate books, understand structure, and begin to make sense of written text.

Here are some key examples of print concepts:

• Directionality of print: Knowing that in English, we read from left to right and top to bottom.

• Book handling skills: Recognizing how to hold a book the right way and identify the front vs. back cover.

• Book organization: Understanding parts of a book—like chapters, the table of contents, or where a story begins.

• Language unit names: Identifying things like words, sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation marks (e.g., period, question mark, exclamation point).

• Relationships among units: Realizing how language units work together—like how a question mark signals the end of a sentence and shows someone is asking something.

• Print carries meaning: Understanding that the words on the page communicate ideas, actions, and emotions. For example, when it says “He feels sad,” it tells us how the character is feeling.

🧠 Concept of a Word

Concept of a word is all about helping kids understand that each spoken word corresponds to a written word—and that we can track those words as we read.

For example, we can point to individual words in the text and illustrations, and define its meaning: "This sign says ‘three.’ The illustrator wanted to tell us there are one, two, three elephants in the zoo."

For typically developing children, this discovery usually occurs around four to five years of age, and helps a child understand how speech to print are linked (Roberts, 1992).

When students begin to grasp concept of a word, they’re more prepared for word recognition, spelling, and decoding down the road.

🔤 Alphabet Knowledge

Alphabet knowledge is exactly what it sounds like—knowing letter names and the sounds they make.

This is one of the strongest early predictors of reading success (Badian, 2000).

Ways to support alphabet knowledge include:

• Naming letters on the page or cover of a book.

• Finding specific letters (e.g., “Can you find a capital S on this page? Let's trace the letter with our finger.”).

• Talking about letter sounds (e.g., “The word sun starts with S, which says /s/.”).

• Matching uppercase and lowercase versions of letters.

• Noticing familiar letters (like the first letter of a child’s name).

Alphabet knowledge builds the foundation for phonics and decoding—and it’s easy to weave into your everyday book reading routines.

Clinicians can support all three areas of written language—print concepts, concept of a word, and alphabet knowledge—by using simple, intentional print referencing cues during shared reading.

These cues are easy to incorporate and make a big impact over time.

Let’s take a look at the types of cues you can use and how they help build early literacy skills.

5 types of print referencing cues

Print referencing doesn’t require special materials or big prep—just a few intentional tweaks to how you read a book with a child.

Cues draw attention to the print in natural, engaging ways, and they can be mixed and matched to fit your goals.

👉 Nonverbal/Visual Cues

Use gestures or pointing to make the structure of print more visible.

• Pointing to print

• Tracking print

🗣️ Verbal Cues

These are prompts that bring a child’s attention to the print you’re reading.

• Asking questions

• Making comments

• Making requests

  
  

"For print referencing to be effective, it must target skills that children are able to perform with assistance but that have not yet matured to independence. This is the zone of proximal development" (Justice & Ezell, 2004).

Quick Tips to Get Started

• Shared storybook reading should be fun - aim to strike a balance with using cues vs reading the story

• Keep print references within the child's proximal zone of development

• Use print referencing to increase a child's interest in print before moving on to higher level literacy skills (i.e. use more non-verbal cues and comments about print before asking questions and making requests, focusing on print concepts before alphabet awareness)

I have a variety of examples using some commonly used books in

🌟 this blog post. 🌟

I hope this has been helpful! 🩵

References

Badian, N. A. (2000). Do preschool orthographic skills contribute to prediction of reading? In N. Badian (Ed.), Prediction and prevention of reading failure (pp. 31–56). Timonium, MD: York Press.

Justice, L.M. & Ezell, H. K. (2004). Print Referencing: An Emergent Literacy Enhancement Strategy and its Clinical Applications. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2004/018)

Roberts, B. (1992). The evolution of the young child’s concept of word as a unit of spoken and written language. Reading Research Quarterly, 27, 125–137.

Spracher, M. (2000). Learning about literacy: SLPs play key role in reading, writing. The ASHA Leader, 5 (8), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.SCM.0508200