Search

We examined the bidirectional relations between home literacy environment, reading interest, and children's emergent literacy and reading skills in a sample of 172 English-speaking Canadian children (Mage = 75.87 months) followed from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Results of cross-lagged analysis revealed that the reading comprehension activities (RCA) at home positively predicted children's reading skills at the end of Grade 2 and the reading skills negatively predicted the RCA in Grade 3. Parent-rated reading interest was bidirectionally related to reading skills, whereas child-rated reading interest was only predicted by earlier reading skills, but not vice versa. These findings suggest that parents are sensitive to their children's reading performance and modify their involvement accordingly.

ispartof: Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning vol:2020 issue:4 pages:1-12 status: Published online

Research has linked family risk (FR) of reading difficulties (RD) with children's difficulties in emergent literacy development. This study is the first to apply parents' self-report of RD as a proxy for FR in a large sample (n = 1171) in order to test group differences in children's emergent literacy. Emergent literacy, the home literacy environment and children's interest in literacy and letters were compared across different groups of FR children around the school entry. The FR children performed lower in emergent literacy compared with not-FR children. Furthermore, when comparing FR children with one parent reporting RD and children with both parents reporting RD, moderate group differences were found in Emergent Literacy. Finally, parents' self-report of RD was a significant contributor of emergent literacy after controlling for the home literacy environment, children's gender, their interest in literacy and letters, months in kindergarten, vocabulary and parents' education. Our findings suggest that schools should monitor the reading development of children with parents self-reporting RD closely - especially if both parents self-report RD. © 2017 The Authors. Dyslexia published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This investigation examined developmental aspects of 155 second-graders' intrinsic reading motivation and reading achievement at the beginning and end of a school year. Reading motivation remained at the same level through the school year, while reading achievement was significantly higher at the end of it than at the beginning. According to word reading skills, low reading achievers (n = 63) and typical readers (n = 92) evinced significant differences in reading motivation. The former scored lower in overall reading motivation and self-concept as a reader, as well as in reading achievement. Throughout the school year, low reading achievers showed a decline in overall motivation, self-concept as a reader and literacy outloud, and did not improve in reading comprehension achievement. Reading motivation in typical readers remained high and steady during the school year. Implications of the results are discussed in relation to previous studies.

Background German children do not formally learn letter-sounds before school entry. In this study, we evaluated kindergarten children's sensitivity to the frequency of letters and visually similar symbols in child-directed texts, how it develops and whether it predicts early reading abilities. Method In a longitudinal study from kindergarten to primary school, children were asked to judge whether a presented alphabetic (e.g., A) or non-alphabetic symbol (e.g., #) was a letter. High and low frequency was varied for both types of symbols. Furthermore, we analysed whether later reading abilities were predicted by this letter judgement ability. Results Before school entry, children had difficulties in distinguishing frequent non-alphabetic symbols from letters. Furthermore, letter judgement in kindergarten predicted reading abilities in first grade. Conclusions Children derive some knowledge about letters from the frequency of co-occurrence of letters and symbols in texts. The ability to distinguish letters from non-alphabetic symbols predicts early reading.

This article highlights considerations for teachers when selecting and using e-books and e-book applications (apps) with beginning readers during guided and independent reading. A framework for examining e-books and e-book apps is suggested, and several apps and related digital features are described. The article also includes an overview of children's emergent and early reading behaviors, the types of texts that support these behaviors, and examples of how digital texts could influence beginning reading instruction. Also discussed are the ways in which e-books and e-book apps can enhance the home–school connection and support English learners.

Young children gain emergent literacy skills during the preschool years. Oral language development is enhanced as students engage in dialogue with teachers and peers. The use of topical vocabulary is linked to greater gains in students’ vocabulary development. Students acquire emergent writing skills as they participate in spontaneous and guided writing activities. Teachers play an essential role in promoting literacy development through intentionally designing literacy-rich environments and learning experiences. Literacy-related play can be enhanced when teachers guide students’ use of content-specific props. The Entomologist Tool Kit is an example of a prop that jump-started preschoolers’ vocabulary, oral language, and emergent writing development in a preschool classroom. This article gives steps for replicating this prop.

Early writing is important to young children's development—research indicates that writing is predictive of later reading and writing. Despite this, preschool teachers often do not focus on writing and offer limited scaffolding to foster children's writing development. This article shares innovative ways to scaffold early writing across the three component skills of writing: composing, spelling, and forming letters.

Despite growing attention to early literacy experiences and emergent literacy perspectives, many children start kindergarten with less than optimal emergent literacy skills. In this article, I review research on efforts to identify what works to support young children's development of emergent literacy in early childhood classrooms prior to starting kindergarten. These efforts include curricula, best practices, and professional development. Such efforts show promise in improving children's emergent literacy skills, but many gaps remain and require further study. In particular, research is necessary to identify ways to improve meaning-focused skills, understand the generalizability and sustainability of effects, and translate findings into practice.

Print in the environment is typically posted in early childhood classrooms. However, the print that exists is often not meaningful to children, and teachers rarely engage children in using the print. This is a missed opportunity to support children's writing. This article presents research-based ideas for engaging children with meaningful print in the environment and provides ways for creating print that are related to children's interests, aligned to current classroom content, and co-created with children. Strategies for how to engage children with print in the environment are also outlined.

This study moves beyond previous investigations to examine whether an educational intervention combining shared book reading with a vocabulary game increases children's vocabulary knowledge. Four-year-olds (N = 44) were randomly assigned to dyads in either an intervention (shared book reading plus vocabulary review game) or comparison condition (shared book reading, after-reading vocabulary review, and game that did not teach vocabulary). After two 30-min sessions, results demonstrated that the intervention condition outperformed the comparison condition on measures of receptive and expressive knowledge of taught vocabulary words. Children in the intervention group who scored the lowest at pretest on the receptive measure saw the most gains in taught word knowledge. Findings suggest that combining vocabulary gameplay with shared book reading improved children's learning of the vocabulary words in comparison to a comparison group.

The ability to ask questions is essential to learning, reasoning, and understanding. This column introduces a sequence of activities that incorporate the use of digital images and online texts into intentional opportunities for even the youngest learners to work with their teachers and classmates as they wonder, anticipate, explore, and think deeply about things that matter to them.

The present study examined how embedded activities to support executive functions helped children to benefit from a computer intervention that targeted preliteracy skills. Three intervention groups were compared on their preliteracy gains in a randomized controlled trial design: an experimental group that worked with software to stimulate early literacy with embedded executive-functioning support EL+EF group, an experimental group that worked with the same early literacy software without the explicit EF-support EL group and a control group that played with language discovery games from the same software. These groups were contrasted on their preliteracy progress over time and on their learning behaviours while working with the software. Results showed that children in the two experimental groups progressed more in preliteracy skills on the long-term, with the EL+EF group showing the highest learning effects. These results were mainly shown for the children with lower levels of EFs. Moreover, children in the EL+EF group showed more independent behaviour and played more games than children in the EL group. These results indicate that young children can show more effective learning over time during computer interventions when their executive functions are kept active.

The ‘summer learning effect’ (SLE) is described as a stall or drop in achievement over summer, especially in schools serving poor or ‘minority’ communities. There has been little research in Europe on the effect, and research internationally has primarily focused on the effect in reading, with minimal focus on writing. This paper describes the extent and nature of the SLE in reading comprehension and writing in second grade classrooms in Germany. The SLE was evident in both subject areas with all students experiencing lower progress rates over summer. In reading, students attending the high-income school progressed significantly more over summer than their low-income peers, while there was no significant difference in writing progress over summer. Literacy logbooks over summer and interviews with a subset of students provided information on how home literacy practices influenced the effect.

Vowel teams such as vowel digraphs present a challenge to struggling readers. Some researchers assert that phonics generalizations such as the “two vowels go walking and the first one does the talking” rule do not hold often enough to be reliable for children. Others suggest that some vowel teams are highly regular and that children can apply their knowledge of vowel sounds to decode unknown words containing vowel teams. The TOTO Strategy provides a means for students to systematically use information about vowel sounds and the frequency of these sounds to “Try One and Try the Other” in order to decode words that make sense in context.

The ability to comprehend language is uniquely human. Behavioural and neuroimaging data reinforce the importance of intact oral language as foundational for the establishment of proficient reading. However, proficient reading is achieved not only via intact biological systems, but also a stimulating Home Literacy Environment. Conclusion Behavioural and neuroimaging correlates for linguistic ability and literacy exposure support the engagement of neural circuits related to reading acquisition.

This article presents research that investigated how a school year-long letter-writing project between kindergarten students and extended family members could facilitate literacy development in students, as well as provide a way to build inter-generational bonds through correspondence focused on family history and stories. Analysis centered on the body of correspondence between the students and their family members, and used a comparative analysis technique. Themes that emerged include how the project helped improve literacy skills, how letter-writing encouraged students to write more, with longer thoughts and multiple ideas, and how the project helped develop stronger family bonds.

Environmental print, such as signs and product labels, consist of both print and contextual cues designed to attract the visual attention of the reader. However, contextual cues may draw young children's attention away from the print, thus questioning the value of environmental print in early reading development. Eye tracker technology was used to measure the extent that children attend to words in environmental print. The relationships between print fixations and letter and word knowledge, as well as differences in fixations across types of environmental print, were also examined. Preschool children (N = 39) ages 3–5 years viewed photographs of nine environmental print items and their standard print equivalents while visual fixations were recorded. Children were found to attend to words in environmental print, although they showed more and longer fixations for standard print words without contextual cues. Children's fixations were not associated with print knowledge. However, fixations on words in environmental print varied by item type to suggest that print learning may be facilitated by using environmental print with larger and more centralized fonts. Chinese 环境文字(例如符号和产品标签)的设计包括了文字及语境提示,目的是要吸引阅读者的视觉注意力。然而,语境提示可能转移幼童对文字的注意力,因而令人质疑环境文字对早期阅读发展的价值。研究者利用眼球追踪技术,量度儿童对环境文字注视的程度,考查他们的文字注视与字母及单词知识之间的关系,并检视他们对不同类型环境文字注视程度的差异。当39名3-5岁的学前儿童在观看9张环境文字照片及其对应的标准文字照片时,研究者记录他们的视觉注视情形。研究者发现儿童有留意到环境文字中的文字,但当他们注视没有语境提示的标准文字时,次数却较多和时间较长。儿童的注视与他们的文字知识是没有相关联的。然而,儿童对环境文字的注视因不同类型而有所差异,这结果显示,具有较大和较集中字体的环境文字,可能有助于儿童的文字学习。 Spanish El texto ambiental, como los letreros y las etiquetas, consta tanto del texto como de una senal contextual disenada para atraer la atencion visual del lector. Sin embargo, las senales contextuales pueden distraer la atencion de los ninos del texto en si, poniendo en tela de juicio el valor del texto ambiental en el desarrollo temprano de la habilidad de leer. Se uso la tecnologia de seguir los movimientos oculares para medir cuanto tiempo los ninos se fijaban en las letras en textos ambientales. La relacion entre el tiempo que pasaron fijandose en las letras y el conocimiento de letras y palabras, al igual que las diferencias a traves de diferentes tipos de textos ambientales, tambien fueron examinadas. Ninos pre escolares (N = 39) de entre 3 y 5 anos vieron fotos de nueve textos ambientales y sus equivalentes textuales estandar mientras se grababa su fijacion. Se encontro que los ninos le ponian atencion a las palabras en textos ambientales, aunque mostraron fijarse mas y por mas tiempo a los textos impresos sin senales contextuales. La fijacion de los ninos no tiene relacion a su conocimiento de letras. Sin embargo, la fijacion en las palabras en textos ambientales variaba de acuerdo al tipo de item y sugiere que el aprendizaje de letras podria ser facilitado usando textos ambientales con letras mas grandes y centralizadas. Arabic إن المطبوعات البيئية، مثل اللافتات وعلامات البضائع، تشمل كل من الإشارات المطبوعة والسياقية المصممة كي تجذب انتباه القارئ البصري. وبالرغم من هذا، فإن الإشارات السياقية قد تشتت انتباه الأطفال عن فهم النص، ومن ثمة فتتشكك في قيمة المطبوعات البيئية في نمو القراءة المبكر. وقد تم استخدام تقنية اقتفاء العين ليقيس الدرجة التي اهتم الأطفال فيها بالكلمات في المطبوعات البيئية. وقد تم فحص العلاقات بين أثبات العين على النص ومعرفة الحرف والكلمة، بالإضافة إلى الاختلافات في الأثبات عبر أنواع المطبوعات البيئية. وقد شاهد أطفال روضة، (عددهم = 39) وتتراوح أعمارهم بين 3-5 سنوات، صورا لتسعة نصوص مطبوعة بيئية ونظيراتهم العادية المطبوعة أثناء تسجيل الأثبات البصرية. ومع أنه اكتشف أن الأطفال انتبهوا بالكلمات في المطبوعات البيئية، فأظهروا أثبات أكثر وأطول للكلمات المطبوعة العادية بدون إشارات سياقية وأن أثبات الأطفال لم تتعلق بمعرفة النص. ولكن أثبات العين على الكلمات في المطبوعات البيئية اختلفت حسب نوع النص، الأمر الذي يقترح أن تعلم قراءة المطبوعات قد يسهله استخدام المطبوعات البيئية التي تتمتع بخطوط أكبر وأكثر تركزا. Russian Oкpyжaющий нac языкoвoй пeйзaж – вывecки, этикeтки, тoвapныe знaки – cocтoит из coбcтвeннo тeкcтa и кoнтeкcтyaльныx cигнaлoв, paзpaбoтaнныx для пpивлeчeния внимaния. Oднaкo эти cигнaлы пopoй oтвлeкaют внимaниe мaлeнькиx дeтeй oт тeкcтa и, тaким oбpaзoм, вoпpoc o цeннocти языкoвoгo пeйзaжa в пepвoнaчaльнoм cтaнoвлeнии чтeния ocтaeтcя oткpытым. Иccлeдoвaтeли пpимeнили тexнoлoгию cлeжeния зa движeниями глaзa, чтoбы oпpeдeлить, нacкoлькo дeти выдeляют в языкoвoм пeйзaжe cлoвa кaк тaкoвыe. Изyчaлacь взaимocвязь мeждy фикcaциями глaзa нa тeкcтe и знaниeм бyкв и cлoв, a тaкжe paзличиями в фикcaцияx нa paзныx элeмeнтax языкoвoгo пeйзaжa. Пpибop oтcлeживaл движeния глaз дoшкoльникoв (N = 39, вoзpacт 3-5 лeт), кoгдa oни paccмaтpивaли фoтoгpaфии дeвяти элeмeнтoв языкoвoгo пeйзaжa и, oтдeльнo, cooтвeтcтвyющий им тeкcт. Bыяcнилocь, чтo дeти пpoявляют внимaниe к cлoвaм в языкoвoм пeйзaжe, нo чaщe и дoльшe фикcиpyют взгляд нa cтaндapтныx cлoвax бeз кoнтeкcтyaльныx cимвoлoв, пpичeм этo никaк нe cвязaнo c yмeниeм peбeнкa читaть. Oднaкo пpoдoлжитeльнocть и чacтoтa фикcaций нa cлoвax в paзличныx элeмeнтax языкoвoгo пeйзaжa пoдcкaзывaeт, чтo эти элeмeнты мoжнo иcпoльзoвaть для oбyчeния чтeнию, ecли pacпoлaгaть cлoвa ближe к цeнтpy и yкpyпнить шpифт. French Les ecrits de l'environnement, qu'il s'agisse de signaux ou d'affiches commerciales, comportent des indications ecrites et contextuelles destinees a attirer visuellement l'attention des lecteurs. Toutefois, les indications contextuelles peuvent distraire de l’ecrit l'attention des jeunes enfants, ce qui interroge sur l'interet des ecrits de l'environnement au debut de l'apprentissage de la lecture. Nous avons fait appel a la technologie d'observation des mouvements oculaires pour voir dans quelle mesure les enfants s'interessent aux mots des ecrits de l'environnement. Nous avons aussi examine les relations entre les fixations sur l’ecrit et la connaissance des lettres et des mots, ainsi que les differences de fixation suivant les types d’ecrits de l'environnement. Nous avons enregistre les fixations visuelles des enfants d’âge prescolaire (N = 39) de 3 a 5 ans regardant des photos de neuf items representant des ecrits de l'environnement et leurs equivalents en ecrit standard. Nous avons trouve que les enfants s'interessent aux mots des ecrits de l'environnement, mais que leurs fixations sont plus nombreuses et plus longues quand les mots sont ecrits de facon standard sans indices contextuels. Les fixations des enfants n'ont pas de relation avec leur connaissance de l’ecrit. Toutefois, les fixations sur les mots de l'environnement sont variables d'un type a l'autre, ce qui suggere que l'apprentissage de l’ecrit peut etre rendu plus facile si l'on utilise des ecrits de l'environnement ayant des caracteres plus grands et plus centres.