Search

This study aims to assess the physical literacy environment in 30 early childhood classrooms servicing 4- to 6-year-old children. A high-quality literacy environment that includes a variety of materials and resources is an important part of children's emergent literacy, as research shows their use supports oral and written language development (Dynia et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2023). Observations were conducted using the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation Pre-K (ELLCO Pre-K; Smith et al., 2008) and the Literacy Environment Checklist (Smith et al., 2002), along with qualitative observational data and photographs of the classrooms. Overall, results show a low or basic level of quality of the physical literacy environment. Classrooms lack quality features such as a wide variety of books, writing materials in learning centers, accessible environmental prints, and representations of children's diversity in reading materials. This level of quality is not considered sufficient to adequately support the language development of 4- to 6-year-old children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Cunningham, 2010). These findings underline the importance of teachers' professional development to better support emergent literacy through the physical environment of early childhood classrooms.

Potentially serving as the primary national literacy initiative, the Reading Seed Programme (RSP) by PUSTAKA Negeri Sarawak aims to enculturate a reading culture from an early age. For instance, RSP was invented to promote reading culture by having the pregnant mother read to their infant until the child was three years old. The process is vital to helping children learn to read from a young age and eventually empower them to be independent readers for life. Particularly, the objectives of RSP are to promote reading habits by getting parents to read to their children, strengthen a child's vocabulary, and develop their confidence, especially in reading. Thus, this paper is primarily designed to investigate the demographic differences between RSP participation and the programme's objectives, i.e., reading habits, parent's engagement, vocabulary ability, and confidence development. To assess how well the RSP achieved its goal of assisting toddlers in developing their confidence as readers. An online survey yielded 385 completed responses, representing a 92.33% response rate among RSP participants. The key findings indicated that the age of the child, mode of joining the programme, and year received the RSP's kits are the most important indicators of the usefulness of the programme (RSP and RSP's kits) and the programme's objectives attainment, especially in straightening the child's vocabulary and comprehension and developing their confidence, especially in reading and knowledge. Nonetheless, the results of this study highlighted the novelty of the early literacy programme of the RSP in cultivating the reading culture, parent-child engagement in reading, and preparing children to acquire knowledge.

In this paper, we examine 4- and 5-year-old Anishinaabek children's text creation and identity (re)formations while involved in collaborative writing with their Anishinaabek teacher about the moose hunting practices of their northern community. The teacher took on a role as an emergent writer alongside the children, voicing her memories of moose hunting with family members and her thinking as she drew pictures and used the marks, letter-like forms, and letters that her students used to create the collaborative text. Inductive analysis of talk and nonverbal communication in the video recordings of the teacher's interactions with the children, as well as analysis of the collaboratively created text and the children's independent texts, shows that the teacher created spaces for children to learn Anishinaabek cultural knowledge alongside literacy skills and knowledge.

The aim of this research is to reveal the effects of symbolic play content activities organized in kindergarten to first reading and writing skills. For this purpose, mixed-method research has been designed. In the first stage of this research, four experiments, including pretest-posttest applied, a paired experiment-control group, were applied. 30 kindergarten students from 15 experimental and 15 control group-students participated. The data obtained from the experimental process were analyzed with the Man-Whitney U Test and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. In the second stage, the data were collected through semi-structured observation and interview forms. 20 first-grade students from 10 experimental and 10 control group-students participated. Qualitative data were analyzed through descriptive analysis. The control group participants who successfully acquired the read-write preparation outcomes in the kindergarten and passed to the first grade were more successful in obtaining the first reading and first writing compared to the supervisory set participants who passed the first grade without acquiring the literacy preparation achievements in the kindergarten.

The ability to recognize and name the sounds of alphabet letters is a crucial prerequisite for students as they embark on their journey to learn how to read. Regrettably, some children face significant challenges in this area. In this single-case multiple baseline study, we utilized mnemonic pictures to facilitate the memorization of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence of ten target letters. Our aim was to empower four struggling first-grade students to quickly and confidently retrieve this information. The results reveal that the students significantly benefited from the intervention. Furthermore, the approach was perceived as attractive and helpful by both the four children and their teacher. The study concludes by reflecting on its limitations and discussing potential implications and future avenues of research.

The home environment and experiences before a child enters formal schooling have a significant impact on their educational progress and results. Most research in this area has been conducted in Western countries and may differ across different countries and cultures. The purpose of this study is to investigate how literacy skills are developed in Kazakh homes and the kinds of social interactions that take place between parents and children to foster this development. An ethnographic case study design through participant observations and interviews was used to further understand the relationship between the Kazakh home learning environment (HLE) and literacy development in four affluent and highly educated families. The findings of this study suggest that parent-child social interactions play an important role in the development of literacy skills in Kazakh families. The parents purposefully used play, joint book reading and storytelling to focus on oral language development and to establish skills in one language first despite the fact that Kazakhstan is a bilingual country that is gradually moving towards a trilingual policy (Kazakh, Russian and English). The study highlights the types of regular and high-quality literacy-related social interactions parents engage in to help their children succeed educationally in school and beyond. The findings of this study suggest that children would benefit from regular parent-child interactions and policymakers and other stakeholders responsible for early years learning and development should encourage parents to be actively involved in their children's learning and literacy development in the home environment.

Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, children enter fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying ages and literacy skills. Across three iteratively-developed experiments, 157 children, age 8-15 years, in rural communities in the greater-Adzópe region of Côte d'Ivoire watched sequences of cartoon images with embedded triplet patterns on touchscreen tablets, while performing a target-detection task. We assessed these tablet-based adaptations of non-linguistic visual SL and asked whether the children's individual differences in performance on the SL tasks were related to their first and second language and literacy skills. We found group-level evidence that children used the statistical regularities in the image sequence to gradually decrease their response times, but their responses on post-test discrimination did not reflect this learning. When evaluating the correlation between SL and language skills, individual differences related to other task demands predicted oral language skills shared by first and second languages, while SL better predicted second language print skills. These findings suggest that non-linguistic SL paradigms can measure similar skills in Ivorian children as previous samples, but they also echo recent calls for further cross-cultural validation, greater internal reliability, and tests for confounding variables (such as processing speed) in studies of individual differences in statistical learning.

Early literacy skill development predicts later reading success, and development of skills in specific domains during the preschool years has been established as both a prerequisite and precursory for reading. Early literacy assessments typically include measures of separate skills across domains, and results can assist with determining where instructions may be most needed. When multiple areas of need are identified, understanding which skills to prioritize can be a challenge. Therefore, empirically identifying the relative contribution of each skill measured in preschool to subsequent reading success can promote more efficient systems of assessment. This study, conducted in the United States, examined the predictive validity of early literacy skills measured in preschool compared to skills measured in kindergarten, with a specific practical focus on identifying the most efficient predictive model for understanding reading readiness. Participants were 119 preschoolers (mean age = 66 months) who mostly spoke English as their primary language (79%). Results indicated early literacy and language skills in preschool are highly predictive of early reading in kindergarten, accounting for 59% of the variance in a reading composite score. The most parsimonious model indicated that first sounds, letter sounds, early comprehension, and expressive vocabulary measures adequately explained 52% of the variance in children's kindergarten reading performance.

Young students at risk for reading difficulties are likely to have long-term reading difficulties if they are not provided with evidence-based, supplemental instruction. This pilot study evaluated the feasibility of a Tier 2 reading intervention ("Reading RULES! Kindergarten;" RRK) and its promise to improve outcomes for kindergarten students (n = 92) at risk of reading difficulties. Participating teachers (n = 21) were randomly assigned to deliver RRK or business-as-usual instruction. Although the results suggest null treatment effects, the intervention appears to have promising effects on students' word-reading skills when implemented with sufficient dosage. However, most teachers in the study struggled to implement the intervention with sufficient dosage and adherence, citing systems-level barriers to implementation such as insufficient time. The results suggest teachers may need more systems-level support to ensure the intensity of instruction required to improve the early reading skills of students at risk for reading difficulties.

Aims: To determine the associations between COVID-19 school closures and school readiness skills for Chinese kindergarteners. Design: We utilized the natural experimental condition created by local COVID-19 outbreaks in 2022 (Study 1) to compare school readiness skills of children whose kindergartens were closed for 5 months (Group 1) with children whose kindergartens stayed open (Group 2). We further compared the school readiness skills of one pre-COVID-19 cohort (Cohort 2019) with one COVID-19 cohort (Cohort 2021) from a fifth kindergarten (Study 2). Samples: For Study 1, Group 1 included 445 children and Group 2 included 584 children aged 4-6 years. For Study 2, Cohort 2019 included 156 children and Cohort 2021 included 228 children aged 3-6 years. Measures: For both studies, survey data on four school readiness skills were collected from parents. Additionally, Study 1 collected parental locus of control data from parents. Results: Controlling for covariates, Study 1 revealed that Group 1 and Group 2 did not differ in terms of language and emergent literacy or approaches to learning. However, Group 1 scored lower than Group 2 on health and well-being and arts and imagination. Study 2 revealed that Cohort 2021 scored higher than Cohort 2019 on language and emergent literacy but lower on the other three skills. Conclusions: The associations of COVID-19 school closures with Chinese children's school readiness skills were not uniform, with a positive relation with language and emergent literacy and negative associations with health and well-being, approaches to learning, as well as arts and imagination.

Young students at risk for reading difficulties are likely to have long-term reading difficulties if they are not provided with evidence-based, supplemental instruction. This pilot study evaluated the feasibility of a Tier 2 reading intervention ("Reading RULES! Kindergarten"; RRK) and its promise to improve outcomes for kindergarten students (n = 92) at risk of reading difficulties. Participating teachers (n = 21) were randomly assigned to deliver RRK or business-as-usual instruction. Although the results suggest null treatment effects, the intervention appears to have promising effects on students' word-reading skills when implemented with sufficient dosage. However, most teachers in the study struggled to implement the intervention with sufficient dosage and adherence, citing systems level barriers to implementation such as insufficient time. The results suggest teachers may need more systems-level support to ensure the intensity of instruction required to improve the early reading skills of students at risk for reading difficulties.

Understanding the early literacy abilities of children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is essential for designing and testing methods of reading intervention focused on printed orthography. School-based professionals need assessments that measure word reading skills of students with heterogenous speech and physical abilities. This scoping review describes the assessment and administration procedures in research studies that have been used to measure the print knowledge of students who use aided AAC. This review included 27 studies that described print knowledge assessments targeting awareness of print concepts, letter identification, letter-sound correspondence, print-based phonological awareness, decoding, or sight word recognition that was administered to at least one student who uses aided AAC. Participant characteristics, measures of print knowledge, as well as contexts and features of assessment format and administration were coded. Our review identified 27 studies in which 155 students who used aided AAC participated in assessments of print knowledge. Most assessments measured students' decoding and sight word recognition skills with little attention toward awareness of print concepts and print-based phonological awareness. A range of procedures were identified across studies. More than 40% of assessments included a format or response method to participate that was not comparable to participants' typical communication method. Research should continue to develop and test assessments that are accessible for students with physical and communication support needs that require AAC. In doing so, these tools may be used with all students, regardless of speech ability, to understand early literacy skills that inform individualized reading instruction.

This study reports the findings of extensive ethnographic research in which six preschoolers were observed for 2 years at a preschool in Saudi Arabia. Drawing on the sociocultural perspectives of literacy learning, this study focuses on the early literacy practices in the Saudi home context of two preschoolers and their mothers. The data described in this study were derived from mind maps created with the children and interviews with their mothers. Several sociocultural concepts were used as analytical frameworks following a thematic approach. This study suggests that early literacy is a social and cultural practice embedded and constructed in a sociocultural context. Moreover, the findings indicate how children's early literacy practices at home occur within a social process through interactions with adults and siblings and how these practices reflect Saudi Arabian Islamic culture and identity. Furthermore, the findings highlight the significance of using participatory techniques (mind maps) to hear children's voices in research.

This article presents the outcomes of a study conducted in Victoria, Australia, that recognised teachers' knowledge and understanding of phonics teaching, and early literacy acquisition processes more generally. In total, 45 teachers and 220 students from the 18 focus schools who engaged in the reform initiative agreed to participate in this study. The questions posed considered understandings associated with the professional learning programme and processes that support the implementation of the phonics teaching and the impact this had on students' literacy learning. We share the data used to map teachers' stories of change and practice and some of the key factors, including structures, practices and attitudes, that influenced the implementation. The impact on students' reading and writing outcomes throughout the reform process are also reported. Combined, the findings indicate that the teaching of phonic knowledge, integrated into rich contexts for learning, contributed to improvements in teaching and students' early literacy skills. Furthermore, this study fills an important and common missing gap in professional learning as it explores implementation processes and practice in the classroom. The results inform continuing reform efforts and targeted research necessary to refine phonics teaching practice and further advance students' literacy outcomes.

STEM literacy is a desired principal outcome of STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. With the increasing popularity of Early STEM learning, it is believed that STEM literacy could be developed in the early years. However, relatively few studies have examined STEM literacy in young children. This study utilized the Delphi method and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to elicit the opinions of a panel of experts with diverse backgrounds and to construct a framework of STEM literacy for kindergarten children. The findings of the study illustrate what young children could achieve from high-quality early STEM experiences. This would help to promote curriculum development, performance assessment, and best practices in early STEM education.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of the Teaching Early Literacy and Language (TELL) curriculum package for improving the early literacy and oral language skills of preschoolers from low-income families. Method: In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), TELL was implemented in 30 TELL and 28 business-as-usual classrooms. TELL is a Tier 1 whole-class curriculum package that includes a scope and sequence of instruction, lesson plans and materials, high-quality books, curriculum-based measures (CBMs), and professional development training and coaching. Results: Implementation fidelity was high; however, due to COVID-19 school closures, we did not collect end-of-year data for our third cohort of teachers. Results indicated significant TELL effects on all code-related CBMs and two code-related distal measures as well as receptive and expressive vocabulary CBMs. No significant differences were found on distal measures of oral language/vocabulary or listening comprehension. Conclusions: Results of the present study, paired with findings from an earlier TELL RCT with children with developmental speech and/or language impairments, suggest that children enrolled in TELL classrooms achieve higher outcomes on a variety of code-related and vocabulary measures by the end of their final preschool year.

Purpose: According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), prevention, identification, assessment, and intervention of children who are learning to read and write are within the scope of practice for school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Furthermore, for SLPs who work in the school setting, it is not uncommon to have struggling readers and poor spellers on their caseloads. Importantly, for students who have difficulty in spelling, their spelling errors are among the early indicators of dyslexia and can provide a means for identifying readers who may benefit from early intervention. SLPs can both assess spelling skills and implement evidence-based spelling and literacy diagnosis and instruction. Spelling instruction in kindergarten through the high school grades that is heavily grounded in metalinguistic activities can provide access to mental representations of word spellings, pronunciations, and meanings; links between whole-word and phonics approaches to reading instruction; and a foundation for reading fluency and comprehension. Conclusions: Learning to spell is essential for learning to read. Accordingly, this tutorial aims to elucidate how to (a) assess and identify phases of spelling development and (b) teach spelling to facilitate reading through a listening-first approach.

Early academic skills and behavioral characteristics in students are predictive of later school achievement, but academics and behavior are commonly compartmentalized in research and practice. This study investigated to what extent first-grade early numeracy (EN), literacy, and behavior ratings predicted fourth-grade mathematics achievement. In fall of first-grade, 501 students were given EN and literacy measures and a behavior rating scale completed by their teachers. In spring of fourth-grade, students were given mathematics computation and concepts assessments. Regression analyses indicated EN, early literacy, and behavior uniquely predicted 39% of the variance in participants' fourth-grade mathematics achievement. Significant predictors were EN and behavior ratings (p < 0.001), which accounted for 29% and 9% of the variance in mathematics scores, respectively.

With the overwhelming "Anglocentric" or "alphabetocentric" science of reading, the current review aimed to add to the science of reading acquisition from the perspective of abugidic writing system, distinct from the well-research alphabetic writing system in multiple dimensions of orthographic complexity, as proposed by Daniels and Share (2018), such as linguistic distance, spatial arrangement and non-linearity, and omission of phonological elements. Abugidic writing system is featured with scripts where each base consonant symbol denotes a consonant with an inherent vowel (/a/) and has billions of users in south Asia (e.g., India, Nepal, Sri Lanka), southeast Asia (e.g., Thailand, Laos, Cambodia), east Asia (parts of China) and Africa (Ethiopia and Eritrea). The current review describes the orthographic feature of Indic (Brahmi-derived) and Ethiopic (Ge'ez) scripts within the abugidic writing system and synthesizes existing findings on the literacy acquisition patterns specific to each script. Further, we elaborate on the multilingual and biscriptal language and literacy environment featured with the abugida-writing societies and discuss the theoretical implication for considering multilingualism and biscriptality as an inseparable sociolinguistic factor when understanding the literacy acquisition of the abugidic writing system in particular and literacy in general.

We examined the relation between home literacy environment (HLE), parents' reading skills, and children's emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and vocabulary) and reading (word reading and reading comprehension) in a sample of 168 Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.26 months) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. Results of structural equation modeling showed that code-related HLE activities and access to literacy resources continued to predict children's emergent literacy skills after controlling for the effects of family's socioeconomic status and both parents' reading skills. Parents' reading skills also exerted a direct effect on children's reading comprehension. These findings suggest that HLE exerts a true environmental effect on children's reading skills that is not due to a genetic confound.

This article explores and displays some of the literacy events taking place in the context of early childhood education in Sweden. More specifically, the literacy events are part of the educational practices in the atelier of Reggio Emilia inspired preschools in Sweden. As parts of an ethnographic study of aesthetic activities, including digital technology, these literacy events awoke the researcher's interest. The literacy events are analysed from a sociocultural perspective reinforced by the use of multimodal theory. The results show how the literacy events in the ateliers become playful explorations. The children use the atelier's specific cultural and social potentiality to explore and develop written and oral language as part of the visual and aesthetic literacy practices taking place there.

Families engage in a range of cultural practices in their everyday lives that shape children's early literacies. Given the growing number of children who are living outside the country of their birth or their parents' birth, more research is needed to highlight the under-recognised literacies of young children shaped by their family cultural practices and immigration experiences. This year-long qualitative study in an Aotearoa New Zealand playgroup explored how newly settled families worked to sustain their cultural practices and supported their young children's understandings of new cultural norms in the context of immigration. Qualitative data collection methods included participant observation in the playgroup and photo-elicitation and semi-structured interview conversations in family languages. Findings highlight family aspirations and tensions regarding children's participation in family cultural practices over time, sustaining family languages once children transitioned to school, and notions of belonging. Family participation was integral to interpreting children's meaning-making in the playgroup, including how children flexibly navigated language differences and unfamiliar cultural practices. This study highlights the importance of learning from families about the linguistic and cultural resources young children draw on to represent, communicate and belong in a new country.

This paper presents a unique advanced statistical approach based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to examine factors affective on phonological awareness and print awareness of preschool children. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models were created and correlations between the independent and dependent (outcome) variables were analyzed. The ANN models were trained using the data for phonological awareness and print awareness of children. According to the findings, the created ANN model had an excellent fit to the actual data (R[superscript 2] = 0.934 and 0.940). Furthermore, the ANN model results were tested with a traditional analysis technique, Pearson correlation analysis. The ANN models yielded similar results to the Pearson correlation analysis but with more detail as expected. The ANN models were run for user-generated synthetic datasets and the relationships between the dependent and independent variables were discussed using model results. Demographic variables, namely, children's age, mother's age, mother's education, and family income were found to be not effective on children's print and phonological awareness skills. On the other hand, home literacy environment-related variables were found to be very effective. In conclusion, this paper introduces a methodology for implementing ANN modeling in educational data. A novel and powerful approach is provided to assess and estimate essential components of early literacy skills. The study has important implications for advancing our understanding of potential benefits of employing an AI-based modeling techniques in the field of education. The utilization of machine learning methods in educational research, as presented in this paper, has the potential to fundamentally reshape our approaches in categorizing and analyzing educational data.

Phoneme discrimination is the ability to detect subtle similarities and differences between phonemes. Phoneme discrimination is a strong predictor of reading development and poor phoneme discrimination may predict reading disabilities (Lyytinen et al., 2004). The ability to discriminate phonemes may be an even more critical skill for Emergent Bilinguals (EBs, also known as English Learners) and EBs with reading disabilities because they need to enhance their perception of phoneme boundaries to enhance their word reading ability. As EB populations in schools increase, addressing phoneme discrimination gaps becomes increasingly important. Classroom instruction should include repeated exposure to differentiating phonemes with known high frequency words and minimal pairs to develop a strong foundation for discerning phonetic features.

Gender differences in early childhood development are under-researched in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where almost 90% of the world's young children live. This study examines the direction, magnitude, and variation of gender similarities and differences in 3- and 4-year-olds' early childhood development in 71 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Moreover, we explore whether country-level gender inequality correlates with gender differences in early development. We analyzed Early Childhood Development Index (ECDI) data from UNICEF's Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys and the Demographic and Health Surveys between 2010 and 2019 (n = 226,980). Using logistic regression, we estimated children's odds of being developmentally on track in literacy-numeracy, approaches to learning, social-emotional, and physical domains. We also used meta-analytic regression to examine associations between early childhood development and country-level indicators of gender inequality. In approximately one-half of LMICs, odds of being developmentally on track did not significantly differ for girls and boys; in countries with significant differences, girls were more likely to be on track than boys (odds ratio [OR] = 1.21, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [1.18-1.24], p < 0.001). Differences favoring girls were largest in the social-emotional domain (OR = 1.27, 95% CI = [1.24-1.30], p < 0.001). Country-level gender development index explained a substantial amount of variation in gender differences across countries. Overall, findings suggest that when gender differences exist, girls are more likely than boys to be developmentally on track, particularly in the social-emotional domain and in countries with greater gender equality.

Although the acceptance of educational apps and their contributions to learning have been widely researched, none of these studies have examined links between teachers' acceptance of apps and their students' skills. The present study investigated this issue with respect to a new, French-language educational app for helping preschool children improve their early literacy and early numeracy skills. To this end, we measured the app's acceptance by 33 French preschool (école maternelle) teachers, who used it in class for ten weeks, and the early literacy and early numeracy skills of their 353 students (aged between 3.92 and 4.91 years). Multilevel regression analyses revealed a significant link between the students' post-test early literacy and early numeracy scores and their teachers' perception of the app's usability. These results show that taking teachers' acceptance into account is an interesting opportunity to better understand the potential effectiveness of educational apps in school settings. Implications for teachers' training are also discussed.

This study extends the research on the preschool "home literacy environment" (HLE) in the context of the family risk (FR) of reading disability (RD) by examining a multiple-deficit model of RD. A total of 1,171 six-year-old Norwegian children were assessed at school entry, the onset of formal reading instruction in Norway. Their parents completed a questionnaire regarding their own RD, education, and the HLE. The final sample after applying the inclusion criteria was 794 children and their parents. The findings suggest, first, that two HLE factors (access to print and reading-related activities) should be distinguished rather than treated as a single factor ("exposure to print") as the majority of previous studies have done. This finding suggests a three-factor HLE model that includes "parents' reading interests and habits, reading-related activities," and "access to print." Second, family risk of RD is related to some extent to the HLE, even after controlling for parents' education. Third, children's experiences in their home environments and their emergent literacy may not be independent of their family risk of RD. More importantly, this study highlights the potential protective role of the HLE, especially when there is a history of RD within the family. The reason is that the positive association between the HLE and children's code-related emergent literacy remains significant when controlling for family risk of RD (access to print [right arrow] emergent literacy: 0.39 [0.01, 0.68], p < 0.01; reading-related activities [right arrow] emergent literacy: 0.37 [0.02, 0.35], p < 0.01; parents' reading interests and habits [right arrow] emergent literacy: 0.26 [0.001, 0.15], p < 0.01). This finding supports that children's emergent literacy can be improved via a modifiable, dynamic factor such as the HLE.

The perspective of emergent literacy was applied to investigate the name-writing skills of 4-year-old, low-income Mandarin Chinese-speaking children in Taiwan. One hundred and eleven children in Taiwan were recruited from 12 public preschools. Children were individually assessed with a name-writing task, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, book and print concepts, and recognition of Chinese characters and radicals. Analyses of correlations and stepwise regressions were conducted. The results indicated the following: (1) children's age, vocabulary ability, book and print concepts, and recognition of Chinese characters and radicals were significantly correlated with name-writing skills, whereas the total number of name strokes was not, and (2) recognition of Chinese characters and radicals made the greatest contribution (30%) to explain the variance in name-writing skills, followed by PPVT-R score (3%). A discussion and implications are provided in relation to early writing skills and instruction.

While mobile devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous (even in low-income families in the United States) and are being used for educational purposes, it is unclear how these technological tools may benefit letter learning (a foundational precursor to early literacy achievement) in preschool children. To contribute clarity, this study tested the efficacy of an app intervention on letter learning. Participants consisted of 16 children (13 Hispanics and three African Americans) from two classrooms in a U.S. preschool serving children from low-income backgrounds. Using an experimental research design, the research team randomly assigned children to either the intervention condition (involving the use of an uppercase letter-matching game app on an iPad for 10 minutes daily in the classroom for five weeks) or the control condition. It was revealed that only a few children in either condition knew 10 or more uppercase letters on the pretest but most did meet this 10-letter benchmark and some even achieved or continued to achieve the 18-letter benchmark on the posttest, demonstrating varied growth in letter-name knowledge (LNK). Accordingly, the children's LNK evidenced the three profiles: (1) the "High Initial," (2) the "High Growth," and (3) the "Low Growth." Importantly, the paired sample t-test showed that the mean differences in gain of uppercase letters between the pretest and the posttest among children within the intervention condition was statistically significant, suggesting that the letter-learning app seemed effective for learning more uppercase letters. However, the two-sample t-test did not show significant mean differences in gain of uppercase letters between children in the two conditions.

Emergent literacy is the term used to describe the reading and writing experiences of young children before they learn to write and read conventionally, and it is important for the construction of children's early reading skills and the enhancement of their later reading performance. The systematic review was conducted to examine the effectiveness of children's interactive reading apps in promoting emergent literacy for children between the ages of three and eight over the last decade (2013-2022). A total of 50 studies were included in this review, and it can be concluded that multimedia features (e.g., a dictionary, background music, and animated pictures) in children's interactive reading apps are effective for enhancing emergent literacy. Conversely, interactive functions (such as games and hotspots) may distract children's attention, leading to poor reading performances. This review also demonstrated the positive effects of children's interactive reading apps on improving their learning outcomes and behavior. In addition, the results indicated that well-designed apps could promote children's emerging literacy skills. However, more in-depth studies will be required in the future to provide designers with a well-defined guideline for designing reading apps for children.

Background/purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore three null hypotheses regarding the association between Greek preschool teachers' professional features with their knowledge and views of the official standards of early writing teaching which emphasize on real communicative purposes. Materials/methods: 494 teachers participated in an internet-based survey and their answers of a 21-item digital questionnaire were analyzed through descriptive (calculation of frequencies) and inferential statistics (chi-squared tests). Results: Two of the three null hypotheses cannot be supported and two statistically significant associations were emerged: (a) teachers' high academic qualification is associated with a comprehensive knowledge and use of the official standards and (b) teachers with low qualifications and with a teaching experience of more than 10 years seem to reproduce a "phonics" approach. Conclusion: It is argued that the introduction of curricula per se cannot alter teachers' implementation of the phonics method which is contrary to the official curriculum standards and it is suggested that redesigning writing practices to make them more compatible with these standards should be a long-term and reciprocal project among teachers and policy makers.

Children with hearing loss show a similar development to their hearing peers in terms of the development of oral and written language. They may experience some delays in oral language skills, which is one of the sub-fields of literacy. Children with hearing loss in the preschool period in Turkey receive support education services from preschool inclusive environments and special education and rehabilitation center (SERC). Research indicates that education programs related to early literacy positively affect teachers' professional development, the characteristics, and practices of literacy environments. In addition, supporting the professional development of teachers with roles such as guidance/mentoring/coaching indirectly affects the literacy development of children indirectly. Research with teachers on early literacy development in children with hearing loss in Turkey are about teachers' reflections on their own learning-teaching processes. It is stated that teachers working with preschool children do not have sufficient knowledge about early literacy in Turkey. Research in SERCs also emphasize the importance of supporting the education of children with hearing loss through the participation of teachers in SERCs with in-service training. The study aims to examine the process with one hearing-impaired children teacher in the context of the early literacy development in-service training program. It was designed as participatory action research because it overlaps with an in-service training process that can meet the information needs of one teacher in SERC about early literacy development. The data were collected through field notes and video recording observations, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, documents, products, and a research diary. All data were analyzed inductively during the research process and at the end of the research. It is seen that the knowledge of teachers in the SERC, where support education services in Turkey, is limited on early literacy development. Teacher's needs can be listed as relating the goals with early literacy experiences, planning the lesson in accordance with the level of the child and supporting early literacy, determining the appropriate material, implementation and evaluation. A program to be developed to support teachers regarding early literacy; in addition to informing, it can be stated that the implementation and evaluation processes are supportive of the development. In the implementation of such programs, it can be emphasized that it is important to consider adult learning, to give positive and immediate feedback, and to use internal and external motivational resources.

High quality professional development programs and opportunities for teachers are a vital aspect in improving early student achievement. This study adopts a professional development model which tested the difference in early literacy skills and performance of students (n=2028) in Grades 1-3 over a 12-week teacher training program (n=25). The data were analyzed using ANOVA and indicated an overall significant improvement in all tested skills except for phonological awareness, such as rhyming word tasks and reading nonsense words, where there was a significant decrease in performance. The results also indicated a significant difference between gendered scores, where girls outperformed boys in all tested areas except vocabulary knowledge, where there was no statistical difference for Grade 1 and Grade 3 students. Informed by the data, this paper recommends greater teacher preparation in the areas of reading aloud, shared reading, phonics, and basic questioning techniques.

To cultivate the acceptance of the co-teaching model among preservice teachers, two of the education faculty at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, have incorporated co-teaching in several field-based literacy courses. Alongside experiencing co-teaching from their professors, preservice teachers are also provided with the opportunity to practice co-teaching through a partnership with a local early childhood campus in an Emergent Literacy course. This approach promotes student proficiency in an inclusive early childhood setting and provides a model for preservice teachers to implement when they later encounter opportunities for co-teaching in an inclusive classroom environment. By learning the skills to engage in co-teaching through various field-based literacy courses, preservice teachers are equipped to enter their future classrooms as collaborative professionals capable of delivering high-quality education to both general education and special education students.

The Texas A&M University System recently developed six quality standards for educator preparation programs, the Texas A&M Quality Standards for Educator Preparation, that are to be implemented and met by all system schools. These standards are: quality of selection of teacher candidates; quality of content knowledge and teaching methods; quality of clinical/field placement, feedback, and candidate performance; quality of program performance management; quality of partnership performance management; and expanding the community of practice. In this article, the authors describe how the Islanders Helping the Early Acceleration of Readers Together (IHEART) program exceeds all of these standards by working with a partner school to provide early reading intervention to first grade students and field experience opportunities to preservice teachers.

Good teachers are a major predictor of students' success in school and beyond it. Finding ways to increase the quality of teaching has been a concern for educational systems across various income contexts and, particularly, in the Global South. This paper discusses the iterative design of an online teacher professional development program geared to improving teachers' English language instruction by means of implementing early literacy software. The program was implemented in various modes (face-to-face, blended and online) with early primary teachers scattered throughout Kenya during the pandemic school closures and after reopening. Relying on the blended learning approach, a potentially effective technology-driven TPD offers multifaceted content, has adaptive and flexible design, and is ongoing until mastery of core concepts is achieved. Further, such solution develops motivational dispositions of teachers about teaching with early literacy software so that its perceived value and the likelihood of success are high, and the benefits outweigh the costs of implementation. The next step of this research is to learn about the specific outcomes of the blended TPD, including changes in literacy instruction and subsequent improvements in student literacy skills.

This article describes how teaching deaf students to read has been challenging and contentious, yet, one crucial attribute to developing reading skills is early exposure to American Sign Language (ASL). ASL seemed to serve as a bridge to achieving English literacy and academic success partly because early use of ASL enables deaf students to activate a variety of strategies to successfully develop reading skills. These include: (1) Sign language phonology; (2) Skill of eye gaze; and (3) Fingerspelling. The article describes how teachers can use these pre-literacy reading skills. As young deaf children embark on their literacy journey in the classroom, these pre-literacy skills enable them to more easily succeed in learning how to read and write.