Research has shown that early intervention can help change a student's trajectory, helping them become more successful in school and decreasing the likelihood that they will leave school before receiving their high school diploma. Because African-American students fare worse than their peers on early reading assessments, they are the focus of this…

As instructors of preservice teachers both researchers have spent time in classrooms observing the reading block. Teacher read-alouds were observed and a disconcerting occurrence became apparent to both researchers independently. Teachers took two seemingly dissimilar approaches to the practice of read-alouds. Teachers observed, either implemented…

Although many studies have been done on the benefits of parent/teacher-child interactions during shared storybook reading or read'aloud sessions, very few have examined the potential of professional storytellers' oral discourse to support children's vocabulary learning. In those storytelling sessions conducted by professional storytellers, the…

An increasing amount of attention has been paid to the ways in which classroom discussions shift in response to varying contextual conditions (Allen & Moller, 2009; Morrow & Smith, 1990) and group composition (Allen & Moller, 2009; Evans, 1997). Recently, researchers have suggested that the classroom might be a place to explore and…

The present study used a multiple probe across participants design to examine the effects of systematic and explicit instruction to teach students with severe disabilities (SD) to comprehend and discuss grade-aligned literature. The text was adapted and formatted as a read-aloud on an iPad2®. Using a modified system of least prompts, participants…

Transformative, anti-oppressive curricula, as theorized by Banks (1989, 2014) and Kumashiro (2001, 2009), directly address present-day realities of racism, discrimination, and oppression. According to Banks (1989), a transformative curriculum includes "the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference, and content from various groups,…

This study examined variability of the home literacy environment (HLE) using multiple measures among families of low SES. The relations of the measures to each other and to children's early oral language skills and print knowledge were reported. Considerable variability of the self-reported HLE items and the Children's Title Checklist (CTC) but…

This brief presents a promising approach to supporting young children's early math skills development. The approach synthesizes the influence of parents, the home environment, and children's health care providers, and is being implemented by Reach Out and Read. Reach Out and Read is a program in which health care providers give young children new…

In April 2020, Scholastic, together with YouGov, conducted a survey to explore aspirations, family attitudes and behaviors around reading in China. The key findings of this research, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,210 parents and children, including 509 parents of children aged 0-5; and 701 parents of children aged 6-17, are…

The Australian Curriculum positions literacy as a general capability to be taught across all subject areas. While schools may design agreements and policies to formalise the position of literacy as a whole-school priority, there is relatively limited research guiding the structure and content of these planning documents. We contend that reading…

This report [1] focuses on four upper-intermediate and advanced English language learners being supported as international teaching assistants (ITAs) at a research university in the U.S. [1] Learners had little experience using English in extended speech, and little grasp of Discourse Intonation (DI), which is how a speaker uses the pausing and…

This article explores a first-grade team's efforts to develop a family-school literacy partnership. The first-grade teachers wrote and developed the "Family at Home Literacy Questionnaire" to understand how their first graders selected texts and read with family members at home. The findings identified a number of unexpected at-home…

Studies of proficient readers have shown that the use of certain strategies (e.g., relating personal background knowledge to text, attending to headings and images, and summarizing) is important for comprehension of challenging texts (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2017; Duke et al., 2011; Goldman et al., 2016; Shanahan, Shanahan, &…

One potential advantage of e-books is that unlike traditional books, preschoolers can read independent of an adult by using the audio narration feature. However, little research has investigated whether children comprehend a story's content after using an e-book with audio narration. The current study compares preschoolers' comprehension of an…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to provide guidance to clinicians on early benchmarks of successful word learning in an interactive book reading treatment and to examine how encoding and memory evolution during treatment contribute to word learning outcomes by kindergarten children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Twenty-seven…