Research Findings: Early childhood teachers' talk is a key ingredient in children's early language and literacy development, but there has been little systematic synthesis of observational studies that examine relationships between teacher talk and child oral language. In this systematic review of 54 studies, we investigate and synthesize the…

In summer 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, 8 parent-child dyads were recruited to participate in a pilot project to investigate the potential benefit of an at-home adaptation of an Animal-Assisted Intervention (AAI) for literacy. After completing a demographic survey and the Perceived Stress Scale-10 (Cohen et al., 1983), children's reading…

Research Findings: The present study examined children's listening comprehension during a two-semester-long dialogic reading. We explored the extent to which the development of children's listening comprehension was accounted for by initial listening comprehension and whether children's engagement and the amount and level of their verbal…

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…

This study investigated the types of reading instruction and opportunities prekindergarten children have both at school and outside of school to understand how their reading develops during the first semester of prekindergarten. An abundance of research suggests that many children enter kindergarten lacking foundational reading skills that they…

Postmodern picturebooks do not follow the established norms of traditional picturebooks and instead invite readers to navigate nonlinear structures and attend to metafictive devices, including counterpoint and multiple narratives, experimental typography, nonlinearity, intertextuality, and ambiguities in meaning. These qualities challenge readers…

Domain-specific vocabulary knowledge is an important precursor to overall knowledge acquisition, which is essential to reading and comprehending grade-level texts. There are a number of malleable factors within the classroom that can be shaped by teachers and policy makers, yet additional empirical evidence is needed to uncover and evaluate those…

Individual differences in children's number knowledge arise early and are associated with variation in parents' number talk. However, there exists little experimental evidence of a causal link between parent number talk and children's number knowledge. Parent number talk was manipulated by creating picture books which parents were asked to read…

This study examined conversational turn-taking when reading scripted dialogue versus having a spontaneous conversation. When reading, listeners waited until speakers' turns had been completed before moving to start their own turns, and gap lengths between turns were longer than those of spontaneous, natural conversation. Theatrical performance…

Research Findings: The current study explored the impact of a brief, small-group, shared book-reading (SBR) intervention on preschoolers' expression of thoughts and emotions and their social understanding. To structure discourse around the book, we adapted Ellis's ABC model, which focuses on understanding activating events (A), related beliefs…

The advent of Generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, in November 2022, necessitated immediate and critical attention from the educational research community. The impact of GenAI in education, though not yet clear, has the potential to be transformative. More specifically, the focus of this paper is on how to integrate GenAI into elementary…

We explore the concept of remixing existing literacy programs instead of replacing them in light of calls for changes emerging from local, national, and international conversations about literacy research and practice. We explain the evolution of a long-standing community and school literacy program in which pre-service teachers conduct…

Reading mediation is a concept used in Latin America and Spain, referring to the nurturing role played by adults in forging relationships between children and books. In this article, we conceptualize reading mediation as a 'technology of affect'. We propose 'mediation-as-usual', a normative becoming of this technology, tasked with producing…

Studies of early reading in the home indicate the relevance of these experiences for young children's later reading development when they start school. The study reported here followed twenty children through 2 years prior to starting school and assessed their reading progress at the start of school. Audio/tape-recordings of their home experiences…