Research Findings: The current study examined whether collective small-group behavioral engagement and teacher behavior management during small-group instruction predicted print knowledge, phonological awareness, letter writing, and expressive vocabulary gains for preschoolers at-risk for literacy difficulties. This study, part of a larger…

Research Findings: This study examined performance on self-regulatory tasks, in addition to individual characteristics including cognitive ability, receptive and expressive language skills, planning, and behaviour as contributing factors to early learning difficulties. Twenty-nine children born with ELBW and 30 comparison children at four years of…

Shy children are less likely to interact with peers and teachers, ask questions, and participate in classroom activities. Children low in attention and inhibitory control also perform worse academically. Although research indicates children's relationships with teachers may be protective for children at risk for academic difficulties, less is…

Research Findings: A growing emphasis in the literature on children's self-regulation signals the need for increased understanding of the ways in which young children become active players in the acquisition of knowledge. In particular, self-regulation may be linked to subsequent academic achievement through greater engagement with the learning…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine within-group individual differences in the code-related and oral language abilities of an economically stressed Spanish-speaking English language learner (ELL) preschool sample and to evaluate the predictive relationship of these differences to later listening comprehension. Latent class…

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…

Research Findings: Multitiered instructional frameworks are becoming a recommended approach for enhancing prevention and intervention efforts targeting early literacy and language skills. However, few studies to date have studied the feasibility of tiered oral language interventions before kindergarten; therefore, this pilot study explored the…

Research Findings: The teacher-child relationship can provide an important support to young children who exhibit developmental risk. This research studied the contribution of children's language skills, temperamentally based attributes (shyness, anger), and gender to closeness and conflict in the teacher-child relationship for 133 preschoolers…

This study examined the relation between language skills, gender, and relational/physical aggression. Language skills of 100 preschoolers were assessed with 3 standardized instruments. Relational/physical aggression was rated by the children's teachers. Results indicated that relational and physical aggression tended to increase as language scores…