Young children's use of tablets and smartphones has proliferated in recent years. Furthermore, apps are being developed at breakneck pace, often designed to support children's learning in a variety of academic skills across various domains. While a growing body of literature focuses upon the use of multimedia apps to support emergent literacy,…

Phonics continues to be one of the most controversial literacy instruction topics debated in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Given the importance placed on phonics in early literacy learning and the role that teacher beliefs play in the types of code-related literacy children encounter, the purpose of this two phase mixed-methods study…

Previous research has demonstrated correlation between letter-naming and letter-writing fluency, and a relationship between letter-naming fluency and successful reading development. Awareness of critical features of letters has received less attention as a part of handwriting development, but it is theorized to also play a role in letter-writing…

This study examined the nature of parents' shared reading with their preschoolers between and across two different alphabet trade books. The "busy" book contains more sentences and words per page, more complex illustrations per page, and the target letter takes up less of the page and appears in the same colour as the text. The…

This study explored what kinds of phonological strategies are used by children and how they scaffold each other while they solve tasks in a digital literacy game. The theoretical basis of this study lies in Vygotsky's thoughts on the role of social interaction in learning and in the concept of peer scaffolding. The data included eight videotaped…

Although many young children become literate within an environment in which different writing systems exist, there is little research on what children know about different writing systems and how they understand and develop them when they are learning more than one simultaneously. This qualitative study discusses how Korean EFL (English as a…

The purpose of this paper is (1) to report on the design of the early writing observational writing rubric designed to observe and describe change over time in the writing of children emerging into conventional literacy (ages 6-7) within an instructional setting and (2) to investigate the initial reliability and validity of the rubric. We used an…

Preschool children begin to represent spoken language in print long before receiving formal instruction in spelling and writing. The current study sought to identify the component skills that contribute to preschool children's ability to begin to spell words and write their name. Ninety-five preschool children (mean age = 57 months) completed a…

Children today are growing up in a digital world that is changing and advancing at an unprecedented rate. While some adults may struggle to keep up with new technological gadgets, we find our very young may be quite at ease with the use of digital technologies, even before learning to speak. This study builds on a foundation of family literacy…

It has long been acknowledged that immigrant children who are originally exposed to home languages become rapidly socialized into using only English. Although many children ultimately develop receptive skills in their home language, they often become English dominant and rarely have the opportunity for literacy development. There is also a common…

This paper explores the idea that young children's emergent literacy practices can be tools for mediating peer interaction, and that, therefore, literacy, even in its earliest stages, can support oral language development, particularly for emergent bilinguals. The paper draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of 11 Nepali-…

One of the most common types of interaction between parents and their very young children is picture-book reading, with alphabet books being one of the most popular types of book used in these interactions. Here we report two studies examining alphabet letter learning by 30- to 36-month-old children in book-reading interactions with an adult. Each…

There is a critical need, according to national policy statements in the United States, to integrate information and communication technologies into instruction, and yet research about the effect of such integration on the literacy learning of at-risk populations is scant. In addition, barriers exist that prevent teachers from realizing the goal…

This study has focused on using the text associated with popular culture print to teach early literacy skills to pre-kindergarten students. This study examined whether explicitly using popular culture print to teach alphabet knowledge and print concepts increased the achievement of these skills. Data revealed an increase in the mean rank of the…

US government mandates to implement intensive phonics instruction in elementary classrooms invoke an alleged scientific superiority of this approach over more meaning-centered models. But curiously absent from this scientific enterprise is a study of the phonics system itself. Advocates of intensive phonics have not demonstrated that the commonly…