Several cross-linguistic studies found that oral reading prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in reading aloud) correlates with reading comprehension. As an extension, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between oral reading prosody and beyond word-level reading abilities in tone languages like Mandarin. One hundred and nine…

This study explores the relationship between the Hanzi recognition performance and the home literacy environments of 351 children aged 3 to 6 based on Montessori's philosophy of education. This study used 200 frequently spoken words in Montessori classrooms as the word set of a Hanzi recognition test, based on which studies at six Montessori…

This longitudinal study examines change in maternal interaction strategies in Taiwanese mothers across time, and the synchronic and diachronic relationships between maternal interaction strategies and children's language and early literacy skills. Forty-two mother-child dyads participated in this study. Their interactions during joint book-reading…

This study examined the influence of small-group discussions on early adolescents' social reasoning development. A total of 147 fifth-grade students (79 males and 68 females) from six classrooms in a public school in Taiwan participated in a pre-post control quasi-experimental study. Classrooms of students were assigned to either a 5-week…

Research Findings: This study examines the amount of attention to print paid by Taiwanese mothers and children during joint book reading over time and the relationship between the use of print referencing by Taiwanese mothers and the print concepts skills of their children measured at age 3;0. A total of 42 Taiwanese mother-child pairs from…

This study examined the influence of classroom pedagogic reading practices and out-of-school practices in explaining why the reading attainment of Hong Kong Grade 4 students was superior to that of their counterparts in Taiwan in the 2006 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Analyses of scores from 9,301 students (4,712 from Hong Kong…

Research Findings: I examined the long-term association between the lexical and acoustic features of maternal utterances during book reading and the language skills of infants and children. Maternal utterances were collected from 22 mother-child dyads in picture book-reading episodes when children were ages 6-12 months and 5 years. Two aspects of…

This study used a quasi-experimental design to determine the effects of teachers' story read-aloud on EFL elementary school students' word learning outcomes. It specifically examined whether the word learning was enhanced by teachers' repeated story read-aloud and word-meaning explanations and further determined whether the learning outcomes were…

Researchers have indicated that many children from Asian countries have the experience of learning English prior to school at home or at private institutes. The Taiwanese government promotes informal and play-based teaching of English in the home if the parents would like their young children to learn English prior to formal instruction. This…

In this study we adapted DeBaryshe and Binder's Parent Reading Belief Inventory (PRBI) with middle-class, well-educated (M = 14-15 years of education) Taiwanese mothers to find what their beliefs were about reading aloud to young children. Parental reports of home literacy practices including children's emergent literacy behaviours were also…