These are: (1) the study of children's first encounters with literacy, which include their dawning realization that letters represent sounds and that speech can be segmented into words; (2) a method of teaching this early form of awareness to children who fall behind in reading. Those who concentrated on the first meaning produced the idea that learning to read is a cultural act and that its cultural ramifications are quite wide and involve the child's home and parents and siblings and neighbours as much as the classroom. The most famous study of children's dawning awareness that print represents spoken language, that spoken language consists of words and eventually that words consist of sounds that are represented by those letters was done by Fereiro and Teberosky, who made a persuasive case for children forming their own hypotheses about written language long before they are taught about it in a formal sense.
No one who has read their book can any longer think that all that we have to consider is what the child is taught at school. Children are more or less prepared for literacy when they go to school, and how well prepared they are depends to a large extent on the environment that they have been brought up in.
When it comes to teaching, the most important method associated with emergent literacy is the reading recovery programme devised by Marie Clay. This, of course, is based on the idea that children who are slow in reading have a poor understanding of the way that written language works and need intensive instruction to learn what other children with more propitious home environments can pick up effortlessly.