Until I prepared for the WEST-E, I couldn't have told you the difference between "phonemic awareness" and "phonological awareness." And other than my 7-year-old daughter, I've had no direct experience helping a young child learn to read. So I found the initial run-down of the ELP, the Early Literacy reading and the Fox chapters enlightening, because they've shown me what a nuanced process learning to read is. Now so much of what I experienced as parent makes sense (when it comes to literacy, at least!).
For example, my daughter used to memorize a story and then "read" it to me or her stuffed animals. Of course, the "reading" wouldn't be exact, but I didn't see it as a characteristic of emerging literacy. (If anything, I saw it as a delay in skill development.) Now I see how the retelling of a story was indicative of her using picture and word cues.
Similarly, I see how her kindergarten teacher's classroom practices were exercises in phonics or environmental print. The word-learning stages (outlined in Fox) ring true, as do the teaching strategies of partial alphabetic word learners. I'm hopeful there will be more on spelling later in the book, and kids can learn how to spell the words they've learned to read. Somehow, it seems that the writing and reading of words don't always go hand in hand.
Just before I left my main placement (fourth grade), we began an extensive word-decoding/spelling program that explained the rules for seemingly every possible letter pattern, such as consonant-vowel-consonant, vowel-consonant-vowel, and so on. I don't remember learning to read or spell this way when I was in school, and it strikes me as an awful lot of rules for kids to remember, but at least these strategies give kids something to draw from when they come across a new word, rather than try to commit it to memory. I look forward to learning more about how to help intermediate-level students.
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