Examination of the relationship between preschool children's emotional knowledge and early literacy skills

Emotions are the elements that allow an individual to adapt to the events around him and affect his decisions, behaviors and social life. Understanding emotions from expressions or situations begins at a very young age, and this emotional knowledge has been found to be associated with social and academic skills and primary school readiness. Therefore, it must be developed and supported during pre-school education. The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between preschool children's emotional knowledge and early literacy skills. The study group of the study consists of 156 children aged 48-72 months studying in independent kindergartens and kindergartens affiliated to primary schools in 2 central districts of Gaziantep in the academic year of 2018-2019. "Personal Information Form", "Emotion Comprehension Test" and "Early Literacy Skills Assessment Tool" were used as data collection tools. According to the results obtained from the research; While children's emotional comprehension levels differ according to age, number of siblings and monthly income variables; It does not differ according to the variables of mother / father age, education level of mother / father and working status of mother / father. Early literacy skills, on the other hand, differ according to the variables of monthly income and education level of the parents, but do not differ according to the number of siblings, age of the mother / father, and gender. A positive significant relationship was found between the emotion naming and emotion understanding skills in stereo typical situations and phonetic awareness, print awareness, story comprehension and visual matching skills of the children participating in the study. A positive significant relationship was also found between emotion recognition and emotion comprehension skills in non-stereotypical situations and phonetic awareness, print awareness, story comprehension, visual matching and pre-writing skills. In addition, according to the results of the regression analysis, it was seen that all of the phonetic awareness, print awareness, story comprehension, matching images and pre-writing skills were explained by the level of emotion comprehension in non-stereotypical situations.