Early literacy screening tools are often a critical component of schools' intervention frameworks. As the use of screening tools becomes more prevalent for identifying students who may be at risk for learning difficulties and in need of additional instruction, it is important to continuously evaluate teachers' implementation of these screening…

Writing is a vital part of the teaching and learning process. The view of learning to write as a developmental and evolving process is well-established in professional literature, and close observation of an emergent writer as they compose text can contribute to an understanding of their writing acquisition. A multiple case study, which focused on…

Australian educators teaching in the early years of formal schooling find themselves grappling with the dilemmas of preparing learners to sit performance-based assessments in later years and their sense of pedagogic responsibility towards designing competency-based assessment. Studies have explored this tension in the primary and middle years…

Early writing is a critical factor in children's literacy development and academic success. This study observed and analyzed videos from twenty-eight teachers working in prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first-grade classrooms in under-resourced schools. The coding process focused on categorizing the type (language- and code-based) and demand…

This qualitative narrative inquiry study examined the challenges and opportunities in a writing workshop framework and teachers' perceptions of their role in addressing the inequities of writing instruction in the early grades. The narrative inquiry study examined the contextualized phenomena within writing instruction in early childhood…

Early childhood professionals attending in-depth literacy training have been shown to gain knowledge and change classroom practices. These early childhood professionals play an important role in children's literacy development. In this multi-state study, the effectiveness and usability of the Literacy in the Early Childhood Classroom training…

Head Start teachers and their classrooms (N = 86) were observed to determine the state of quality of the early literacy and language instruction and environments in prekindergarten. Cluster analysis was used to create profiles of prekindergarten teacher and classroom quality across two constructs: Book Supports and Writing Supports. Descriptive…

This program evaluation focused on the Palcare Literacy Innovation Project. The general research problem was to see if the enhanced preschool literacy project would show an improvement in the preschool classroom literacy environment, overall parent participation and a deeper connection to the community over a three-year period. The specific gap in…

Assessment and instruction of reading tend to dominate current discussions of early literacy. Shifting the focus to writing, this article addresses the assessment of writing for students in kindergarten through second grade. Using curriculum-based measurement of written expression for beginning writers, teachers can measure growth of smaller…

Print in the environment is typically posted in early childhood classrooms. However, the print that exists is often not meaningful to children, and teachers rarely engage children in using the print. This is a missed opportunity to support children's writing. This article presents research-based ideas for engaging children with meaningful print in…

Print in the environment is typically posted in early childhood classrooms. However, the print that exists is often not meaningful to children, and teachers rarely engage children in using the print. This is a missed opportunity to support children's writing. This article presents research-based ideas for how to create and engage children with…

The goals of this study were twofold: first, to examine whether preschool children's name-writing proficiency differentiated them on other emergent reading and writing tasks, and second, to examine the effect of name length on preschool children's emergent literacy skills including alphabet knowledge and spelling. In Study 1, a range of emergent…

The study describes an adapted form of "interactive writing" (McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000) and examines its effectiveness as an approach to beginning writing instruction for young children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Systematic videotape analysis was used to document the content of 45 adapted interactive writing lessons across an…

The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well researched and well understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term "oral rehearsal" is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy…

Much has been made by early childhood educators about the importance of activities that foster early reading--and deservedly so--but studies show that reading and writing are skills that children develop simultaneously. Early reading is supported and improved by early writing. Young children need reading to help them learn about writing, and they…