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…

Read-alouds play an important role in young children's literacy development. Teacher education programs include read-alouds as part of balanced literacy instruction and many preservice teachers are required to read aloud to others in their teacher education programs. There are many excellent resources teacher educators may use to help preservice…

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…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether the lexical compounding, suffixation, and part of speech aspects of lexical prosody rendered while reading text aloud are predictive of children's developing oral reading fluency and reading comprehension skills. Ninety-four third grade children were recorded while reading aloud a grade-level…

This article details findings of an analysis of a third grade classroom's read-aloud discussions spanning a 6 week period. Data were analyzed first using the constant-comparative method, followed by an analysis of selected interactions in which the teacher revoiced students' utterances. Findings suggest students co-constructed knowledge through…

There is always debate about when, where, and how to introduce students to vocabulary when teaching science. The authors argue that there is not necessarily a singular correct order or right time to introduce new vocabulary to students. Rather, what is important is that we support students in learning the language they need to engage in the…

The paper examines the role of context in reading unpointed Hebrew, demonstrating the changing nature of reliance on context during the course of reading acquisition. We analyze the reading-aloud of sentences with heterographic-homographic ambiguity, aiming to shed light on the development of ambiguity resolution processes in typically developing…

In this three-month qualitative study, 36 pre and in-service teachers were invited to create and write poems from four idea bundles (e.g., the mixed bundle, the verbal bundle, the visual bundle, and the arranged bundle) in response to four picture book read alouds that address themes of abandonment (Wild, 2006), homelessness (Wild, 2007),…

Picture books have the potential to engage students in multimodal ways of learning in early education setting. This pilot study aims to investigate the efficacy of using picture books specifically written to convey increasingly complex ecosystem concepts and their influence on introducing ecoliteracy to first-grade students. Under the central…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of a family literacy program on Latino parents' language practices at home and their children's oral language skills. The study examined the extent to which (a) the program called "Family Reading Intervention for Language and Literacy in Spanish" was effective at teaching low-income,…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often demonstrate delays in early language and literacy skills. Shared reading, the practice of adults reading aloud to children while using behaviors (e.g., asking questions) that are meant to promote interaction between the adult and child, is an intervention that has had positive effects on those…

Pre-reading and early childhood literacy skills are important for brain development and fundamental to a child's long-term cognitive and social well-being. As such, the fostering of these skills is an important preventive health measure. Family physicians can play key roles in encouraging parents to routinely read with their children. However, in…

Focusing on 84 Chinese-English dual language learners (DLLs) in U.S. preschool programs serving children from low-income backgrounds, this study investigated which aspects of the home language and literacy environment and which parenting styles may be related to these DLLs' oral receptive and expressive language abilities in Chinese and English.…