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The article presents a classroom‐based study that engaged linguistically diverse preschool and early school‐age children in illustrating books, jointly composing written narratives to accompany their illustrations, and enacting these child‐authored books through shared sociodramatic play. Findings from story retell tasks show significant improvement in children's narrative language: vocabulary, syntax, accuracy, and text structure. Analysis of collaborative dialogue during book‐making highlights the role of peer and teacher scaffolding in supporting children's literate language and identity development. The article presents an engaging play‐based approach for ECE educators to (1) significantly and equitably increase child‐led literate language interactions; (2) improve early writing instruction, by increasing meaningful composing experience; (3) strengthen culturally sustaining home/community–school partnerships, through authentic dialogue with caregivers about children's writing; and (4) harness the social and multimodal power of play to promote a range of important early learning goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Word Hunter project sought to engage families of Year 1 children with the aim of extending their vocabularies beyond everyday language. Early vocabulary development has been linked to later performance in reading comprehension, as well as to socio-economic status. This project sought to recruit families from two diverse school communities as partners in encouraging their children to increase their lexical repertoires by providing them with vocabulary rich books, supplementary resources and advice. Utilising a pre-and post-test design with a treatment group and comparison group in each of two contrastive schools, the study investigated both receptive and expressive vocabulary performance, with a focus on words in the Tier-2 category, drawing on the work of Beck and McKeown. Initial assessment found unanticipated similarities in the performance of children from low and middle SES backgrounds, but differences related to language background and gender. Based on this assessment, we suggest that educators may be underestimating young children's receptive and expressive language competence. Findings of the comparative analysis of pre- and post-test results indicate that the intervention was effective in improving children's understanding of challenging words included in fictional and nonfiction texts provided in resource packs. However, this was only the case in one school, Pleasant Rise, which had a socially and culturally diverse community with a moderate level of disadvantage; it was not the case in Pelican Point, a school serving a highly disadvantaged community. In discussing the findings, we suggest there may be an interaction between teacher attitudes, family interventions and child outcomes, even when educators' pedagogy is not the focus of the interventions. Acknowledging limitations of the project, we propose that directly encouraging parents and carers to engage in vocabulary extension with their children, and providing high quality and engaging materials, is worth further attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collaborative teacher-research study was conducted in children's first year of school and explored ways young children's use of oral language, vocabulary and phonology connected with beginning reading. A play-based oral language intervention was implemented and an analysis of oral language and reading suggested that spoken language did not provide a neat, sequential base which can be easily mapped to written language. Questions were raised about the view that oral language neatly underpins reading development and the study concluded that learning to read written English is influenced by children's oral language development as well as their experience and understanding about written language structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how oral language is acquired from linguistic, social interactionist and cognitive development viewpoints. It looks at an approach of primary education teachers in which they use a play-based program that intrinsically motivates children in order for them to experiment with oral language and get feedback. It mentions that the program may involve the use of oral language to inform, hypothesise and imagine, as well as exercise symbolic thinking. It adds that oral language is fundamental to learning and thinking especially when educators explore oral language from the viewpoints of linguistic, social interactionist and developmental psychology.