This research report is on fostering young children's metacognitive skills. The study was conducted at a private early childhood education center in a Midwestern city in the United States in 2020. The design of the study was a mixed approach including Time Series experimentation, naturalistic observation, and interviews. Children aged 3-4 years…

Language, literacy, and social-emotional skills are important for successful participation in society. These skills develop through interaction with others and through explicit instruction. An important activity to contribute to the development of these skills in young children is shared storybook reading. For deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH)…

Although it is well established that reading with young children supports early language and literacy development, few studies have focused on the importance of parental beliefs about reading with infants. The current study, which sheds light on parental beliefs had three main aims. The first was to examine practices of shared reading in infancy…

Children vary widely in their number knowledge by the time they enter kindergarten, and this variation is related to their future academic success. Although talk about number predicts children's early understanding of foundational number concepts, we know little about whether interventions can increase this talk nor about the types of number talk…

Understanding how to successfully train storytime providers is crucial to the goal of offering high-quality early literacy programs in public library settings. As part of a larger study, nine early-career public library storytime providers were interviewed to learn what contextual factors are important to improve their knowledge, practice, and…

Solid knowledge of vocabulary and sensitivity to words' morphological structure not only facilitates children's ability to learn and comprehend new words in speech, but it can also be used and transferred to more distal language abilities such as narrative, an important part of children's academic success. Nonetheless, relatively little research…

Purpose: Shared reading provides preschool-age children with the opportunity to learn novel, low-frequency words. Abundant empirical evidence demonstrates that children can learn the meanings of such words during shared reading, referred to as "semantic learning." However, less is known about whether children learn the spellings of words…

A majority of children's language learning experiences occur in inclusive early child care and education settings. Few evidence-based professional development (PD) programs exist to empower early childhood education providers to use language instruction practices with children in inclusive classrooms. There is little research on providers'…

Purpose: Opportunities to actively engage in literacy instruction should be accessible to all students in the classroom. Shared book reading provides a literacy-based context in which teachers may adapt their communication to allow students with a range of abilities to participate. The current study examines teacher communication during shared…

Multilingual children living in areas with low socioeconomic status (SES) are at an increased risk of having speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). Many multilingual children with SLCN in Sweden have insufficient basic vocabulary knowledge in the majority language, preventing them from achieving the school's learning goals. However,…

We investigated the longitudinal associations among maternal pre- and postnatal depression, maternal anxiety, and children's language and cognitive development followed from 15 to 61 months. Furthermore, we assessed the protective role of children's early print experiences with books against the adverse effect of maternal depression on language…

The professional development (PD) of early childhood educators (ECEs) is key to childcare quality. The Professional Learning Community (PLC) model has been well-researched in K-12 settings and is found to have advantages over traditional models of PD; thus, it holds promise for educators in other settings such as early childhood education centers.…