Contemporary trends in education reflect a shift from traditional teacher-centered approaches to more student-centered approaches to learning. Empowering students in their own learning is facilitated by teaching them effective meaning-making strategies that support active participation in their own learning. Making this happen requires using…

The aim of this investigation was to measure the impact of the arts broadly construed on the quality of life. A randomly drawn household sample of 315 adult residents of Prince George, British Columbia served as the working data-set. Examining zero-order correlations, among other things, it was found that playing a musical instrument a number of…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dominant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided…

This investigation examined the effects and consequences of using testing accommodations, including reading aloud test content, with a group of eighth-grade students (N = 79) on a standardized reading test. Research questions pertaining to the effects of accommodations on reading test scores and consequences of testing on teacher and student…

Our research is concerned with the observation of communication between the child and his parents (mother-baby vs. father-baby). The children are aged from 30 to 36 months old. Communication was analysed according to utterances functions and social aims. 14 French children, 7 boys and 7 girls were filmed with each of their two parents in their…

The purpose of this survey investigation was to gain insight into the different home literacy practices of preschool children in some disadvantaged areas across the state of Victoria, Australia. Findings indicate that parents read to their children regularly from a young age, found libraries easy to access and use, and have children who enjoy…

Encouraging the love of reading is a vitally important priority that has positive consequences for students' literacy growth, both now and in the future. Children need daily, in-school opportunities to enjoy reading and become immersed in reading as a lifetime activity. Although a wide variety of considerations are useful for promoting the reading…

Previous studies have shown that phonological awareness correlates with children's reading aloud and also adults' literacy experience. More recent research has further suggested that phonological awareness is associated with the processing of spoken language, which is a correlate of reading comprehension. In this paper, I argue that phonological…

This paper describes a school-home reading project that was developed to support culturally and linguistically diverse beginning readers, and offers practical suggestions for starting such a program. First-grade classrooms from 5 Chapter 1 schools in a large suburban school district are participating in the project. Teachers in these classrooms…

One approach to helping children to become literate is to use good children's literature in the classroom. Children's trade books are now available on a variety of topics. Many of them are traditional stories, but more authors are also writing historical fiction, biographies, and science books. This variety of materials allows the teacher to use…

Synectics is the use of thinking in metaphors, or figurative language in general, to see the familiar in unfamiliar ways or the unfamiliar in familiar ways. W.J.J. Gordon and his Cambridge Synectics Group isolated ways to think metaphorically by using artistic problem-solving mechanisms most people possess in their experiential background. This…

A study examined whether reading aloud to young children would have an effect on their reading success in first grade. Subjects, 45 first-grade students in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, were given a questionnaire to be completed by their parents. The three first-grade teachers provided students reading aptitude scores, based on teacher observation and…

Focusing primarily on what parents can do to help children up to 10 years of age with reading, this booklet offers activities designed to lay the foundation for children to become lifelong readers. The first section of the book offers some basic information about parents reading to their children. The second section offers suggestions to guide…

This booklet is the companion guide to a videotape intended for those who work with young children and want to make their childcare facility a place where reading and books are a part of every child's day. The 10-minute videotape demonstrates practical techniques for reading aloud, choral reading, using Big Books, and storytelling, and suggests…