This study examined the language used by mothers to talk about acute and chronic illness while engaged in a joint book-reading of a story where the main character had a cold. Thirty-four toddlers and their mothers participated in the study. Some of the mothers had a chronic illness, and some of the families or the children had had an acute illness…

Teacher read-alouds (TRA) are common in middle and high school content area classes. Because the practice of reading the textbook out loud to students is often used out of concern about students' ability to understand and learn from text when reading silently (SR), this randomized controlled trial was designed to experimentally manipulate text…

This paper presents an exploratory study of two consecutive reading sessions conducted in primary school by two different teachers. Our purpose is twofold. From a theoretical viewpoint, we propose a tentative set of conditions of teaching effectiveness by relying on the Joint Action Theory in Didactics. From a methodological viewpoint, drawing on…

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…

How does a parent stay connected with an infant or toddler during a prolonged separation? Research has shown how important early connections are for child development. When a parent is not present physically, there are strategies that military parents have been using to keep a parent and child connected, promoting mindfulness. Because infants and…

This article discusses the viability of reading culturally relevant literature aloud to urban middle school youth. The findings from a research study are shared and guidelines for implementing a culturally sensitive read aloud program in your own middle school or high school classroom are discussed. Anecdotes from students involved in the study…

Storybooks are the most frequently chosen genre for read alouds in preschool classrooms. However, growing evidence suggests that genre may influence the quantity and quality of talk produced outside of the text. The current study compared twenty preschool teachers' extratextual talk across read-aloud sessions with a storybook and an information…

The researchers investigated the effects of listening to expository text on the listening comprehension and book choice of 77 first-grade students. Two intact classes of experimental children heard expository read-alouds over four weeks while two intact classes of 40 controls received no intervention and followed their teacher's normal read-aloud…

Humans are fragile beings easily influenced by the verbal behaviors of others. Spoken words can have a multitude of effects on an individual, and the phrases and statements teachers use in their classrooms on a daily basis have the potential to be either detrimental or inspirational. As increasing numbers of students arrive at schools from broken…

Parent reading beliefs are the ideas that parents have concerning the influence of reading and their own efficacy as language teachers to their children. In the intervention More Languages, More Opportunities, one of the goals is to positively influence the parental reading beliefs. The participants were 16 mother-child couples from bilingual…

The current study, a preliminary examination of whether music teachers are more susceptible to vocal problems than teachers of other subjects, asked for expert evaluation of audio recordings from licensed speech-language pathologists. Participants (N = 41) taught music (n = 23) or another subject (n = 18) in either elementary (n = 21), middle (n =…

Research Findings: The present study explored the underlying factor structure proposed a priori by the developer of the Parent Reading Belief Inventory (PRBI: B. D. DeBaryshe, 1995) using a local independent sample. The PRBI was developed to assess maternal beliefs about reading aloud to children and was designed to measure attitudes, perceptions,…

Explicit instruction on the skill of creating mental imagery from text supports reading comprehension and recall. This article shares a strategy for teaching students how to process what they read by comparing mental imagery to "brain movies." It emphasizes choosing appropriate fiction and nonfiction texts to encourage readers to build the skill…

Family literacy studies have shown that the role of parental storybook reading has an impact on children's success in school-based literacy instruction. However, many children who are English language learners come from homes or cultures where storybook readings are not common practice. The purpose of this qualitative research study explored…

In a bid to identify and gain analytic insight into the make-up and dynamics of kindergarten literacy curricula in an era of early childhood education and care reform, this study was designed to trace how classroom literacy curricula were produced in a kindergarten in a childcare centre in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on actor-network theory's (ANT)…