Continuities, Discontinuities and Transition in Early Childhood Literacy Education at Digital Time

Regarding the effectiveness of literacy practices during remote teaching, transition programmes should create an appropriate degree of continuity between preschool and school experiences and develop strategies to help children adjust to school, as it occurs during traditional teaching in conventional educational settings. Furthermore, although first-grade teachers mentioned their negative mood about the existing (or not existing) transition programmes however they verified their importance for a smooth transition from one level to another. These findings are consistent with previous research who emphasize to educational continuity (e.g., Ahtola et al., 2011; Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 2000) in face-to-face teaching processes and not in digital age (as there are no research findings).

Continuity between early childhood programmes and primary school education is the key for a smooth transition. As results revealed that support for the transition of young children from preschool to primary school settings was inevitably affected, transition programmes should create an appropriate degree of continuity between preschool and school experiences and develop strategies to help children adjust to school, avoid stressful experiences and experience success in later school and social life.

Conclusion

By ensuring a smooth transition process to school, learning is likely to progress. In order to achieve this, policy planners need to embrace the idea of co-construction of transition which is shared by all the participants: teachers, parents and students. Schools have to being sensitive to the needs of individuals and particular groups and having strategies to help children develop resilience to cope with change and to be active in making the transition work for them; curriculum continuity across phases of education, that results from establishing the prior learning that has taken place and where children are helped to learn with and from each other; collaboration between pre-school and school teachers and common training programmes; schools evaluating induction and the management of transitions and transfers from the perspective of all participants, and that help to question the assumptions of the setting and see life from the child's perspective; special training for staff working with those children who are starting school (Koglbauer, 2022).

The knowledge of current practice, priorities, challenges, and opportunities will help language educators to adjust their education offer, their syllabi, expectations, or pedagogical approaches to facilitate a more positive and smooth transition process for each and every learner. Also, cross-phase policy engagement contributes to further enhancing one's understanding. However, collaboration between education providers and wider stakeholders will increase these positive experiences. The introduction and extended use of educational technology during the pandemic must be seen not only as a temporary “emergency tool” to bridge the distance between teachers and students but as a fast-track to move the educational system into a digital age.

Finally, based on evaluations of experiences during the pandemic, a smooth transition and continuity from one level to another could be facilitated and intermediated by preschool and primary school teachers and other stakeholders simultaneously. Discontinuities in early childhood literacy education and development could be disappeared if stakeholders (learners, parents, educators, school leaders, policy makers, etc.) nationally and globally try to bridge and sculpt “distances” via effective transition programmes.

Limitations and Implications. The small sample size is the main limitation of this study. Future research is suggested to include a more significant sample, examine school characteristics (e.g., school context and leadership) in relation to teachers' practices, providing insights into which digital tools could be more utilized as to be more appropriate to reduce barriers and enhance students' literacy.

Ethical standards

Ethics Declarations. All procedures performed with the permission of the teachers who participated in the research for the processing and analysis of their data.

Funding. No funding was received to conduct this research.

Conflict of Interest. The author does not have any potential conflict of interests that may influence the decision to publish this article.

Author's Contribution. Zoi Apostolou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis and investigation; Writing - original draft preparation, Writing - review and editing; Funding acquisition, Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data; Resources, Supervision, Preparation of tables; Programming, Software development, Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs, Submission of a data set to the international repository.

Consent for publication. The authors approve of this submission and, conditional upon the decision made by the editorial board from the peer-review process, consent to the publication of the current work. The work has not been, nor has it been submitted to other journals in consideration for publication.

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