Young English learners (ELs) whose home language is Spanish continue to lag behind in several school readiness areas including language and literacy skills in spite of their strong social skills, which are positively related to language and literacy. The purpose of this article is to identify challenges that preschool Spanish speaking ELs face,…

Mikhail Bakhtin is a latecomer to the field of child development. His contributions emphasize the dialogic nature of language as a lived event of becoming for all and de-thrones any monologic truths that might be told otherwise. Dismantling any master theory that might determine the ways children are known (or know-able), Bakhtin offers a…

The last half-century has seen a slow, tentative change in adult attitudes about young children's capacity to think abstractly. Parents and teachers know the young child as a dramatic mixture of the concrete, sense-bound, and the transcendent, and it is just that mixture, cultivated and pursued, which makes for philosophy. Young children's…

Educational pioneers believed that the early childhood curriculum was inappropriate for most of the children. It needed to be modified to meet each child's maturing needs, abilities, and interests. The pioneers advocated that education should be more hands-on and assist children to function successfully in society. They recommended the initiation…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

Despite receiving scant attention, the evolution of categorization in early childhood is of central importance, not only in clarifying the child's understanding of the world but in terms of refining cognitive organization and augmenting the development of semantic memory. In this review, we outline how categorization develops and is made manifest…

In this paper, we present a series of studies performed in the last decade that examined the contribution of e-books reading to the language and literacy of young Hebrew-speaking children. Children worked with two e-books designed by the researchers to achieve this aim. We present the effect of reading these e-books on the language and literacy of…

In this article, we take a linguistic perspective to support effective communication between early educators and parents who speak English as a second language and may have limited English proficiency. Positive communication and partnerships are recognised as important for the education of young children. Because early educators may be unaware of…

Play is one of the essential components in proper development of first-grade students. Since the adoption by various states of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), two outcomes have developed: (a) increased instructional time and (b) decreased public school recess periods across school districts. Given the complex nature of daily instructional…

The purpose of this article is, first, to describe Sami children's education and its status in the Finnish education system and, secondly, to contemplate its development in Finland. The core of the article is intertwined with issues concerning the status, language, and culture of indigenous peoples. According to the article, the western school…

Evidence-based reform is transforming education at all levels, both in providing effective models for use in schools and in linking policy to effective practice on a broad scale. As early education moves from a concern with effects of preschool versus no preschool to focus on creating and evaluating effective preschool models capable of improving…

With the increasing numbers of dual language learners (DLLs) in early childhood programmes, the use of research-based and effective pedagogical strategies to support oral language learning is important. Early childhood classrooms can provide many opportunities to support language learning. Teacher feedback is an intentional teaching strategy to…

The purpose of this article is to describe the New Zealand experience of second language acquisition as it applies to learning the Maori language and also to new immigrants learning English. The article describes the te kohanga reo movement and also outlines the government policy as it relates to the learning of English as an additional language…

This article first introduces oracy and literacy education practices in a Japanese kindergarten classroom. The authors then take up three episodes of oral interactions between five-year-old children and their teachers and examined the meaning of these oracy activities as children's building the base in the literacy world. Finally, the authors…

This study provides a brief overview of the history of early childhood education and care for Native Hawaiian children in Hawai'i. Data sources include a literature review, examination of archival documents, and interviews with a sample of Native Hawaiian parents and community members. We trace the emergence of outside-the-home early childhood…