Activating joy is a rigorous and serious pursuit in literacy education. In this article, we guide educators through the framework of culturally and historically responsive education and its five pursuits: identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. Our focus is on the fifth pursuit -joy-- and we support elementary school teachers in…

Experiences with books before age three predict children's motivation to read (Bus et al., 1995), and can support the development of vocabulary, communication, and symbolic skills (Scarborough, 2001). Sharing books with infants and toddlers is different than reading aloud to older children. For example, it is important to attend more closely to…

Interactive book reading (IBR) as a context for vocabulary learning is studied widely in preschool children and kindergarteners. In the present study, we elaborate on this prior research by investigating the effects of a five-week IBR intervention on first graders' expressive target vocabulary growth. A repeated measures design with two…

The purpose of this article is to detail preschool age students' exploration of social justice as they cocreated with their teacher an interactive read-aloud approach, named "Picturebooks for Social Justice." Over the three phases, the teacher researcher studied her own preschool teaching as she read and explored 12 picturebooks with the…

One way to support young children's factual learning is through shared book reading (reading books with a knowledgeable other). Many books that teach factual content are narrative in structure, in which factual content is embedded within a fictional storyline. However, there are gaps in our understanding of factors influencing children's factual…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental posttest only nonequivalent comparison-group study was to examine the influence of teacher read aloud using narrative fiction on early adolescent empathy. Participants (n = 151) were seventh-grade students in one suburban Pennsylvania public school district. Experimental participants (n = 82) were exposed to…

When interacting with young children, adults often self-repeat their own utterances that vary in sequences of adjacent utterances called variation sets (VS) (Küntay and Slobin 1996). These repetitions benefit children's linguistic development because they emphasize form and meaning. This paper analyzes the use of VS during group interaction and…

In this article we report the results and classroom implications of a qualitative study that explored third-grade students' interactions with each other as they partner read. Participants included 10 students, each of whom engaged in three readings with a partner during recorded observations. All students had been taught structures for partner…

Preschool teachers' read-aloud and writing practices were investigated using a questionnaire about how activities were planned and organized, and what their purpose was. The results indicate that early literacy practices were not planned systematically. Most of the preschool teachers (77%) reported having storybook read-alouds at least three times…

The practice of reading aloud to children is ubiquitous in early childhood classrooms. Teachers read aloud to young children to entertain, to build early literacy skills, to develop domain specific content knowledge and vocabulary, to promote social and emotional development and well-being, and to draw children into community with each other and…

Children's literature, including picture books, can be appropriate for any age level and can help students understand complex concepts, such as music. It can also engage students in music learning. Students garner a deeper comprehension of both the text and music when bringing children's literature to life, and reading aloud enhances students'…

While the association between shared book reading (SBR) and child language development is well documented, there has been less focus on how book characteristics may differentially elicit parents' language input and hence differentially relate to children's language skills during this activity. Moreover, despite the positive and unique role that…

Text comprehension can be facilitated in many ways, including enabling the listener to see pictures illustrating the story, to read along silently, or to read along aloud. The purpose of this study was to determine whether any of these three supports facilitated text comprehension in adults with intellectual and/or developmental disability (IDD).…

One of the most important benefits of read alouds in the early years is the exposure children gain to new words. Although many early skills support later reading success, early vocabulary knowledge improves reading in several ways, including supporting comprehension of words that children decode; helping children recognize words more quickly;…

A limited number of studies have investigated how different genres of wordless picturebooks impact children's interactions and story creations in the context of shared book reading. Employing a transactional theory as a guiding lens, this study explores second-grade Korean-English bilingual students' dialogical patterns of interaction during…