Research investigating whether people's literacy skill is being affected by the use of text messaging language has produced largely positive results for children, but mixed results for adults. We asked 150 undergraduate university students in Western Canada and 86 in South Eastern Australia to supply naturalistic text messages and to complete…

Previous studies with English-speaking families in the North American context demonstrated that home literacy practices have positive influences on children's literacy acquisition. The present study expands previous studies by examining how home literacy practices are related to "growth trajectories" of emergent literacy skills (i.e., vocabulary,…

Notes how females are known to excel over males in most reading tasks, but not consistently so in tasks that require processing information from maps, tables, charts and diagrams, so called "Documents." Describes and analyzes gender differences on Document tasks, and investigates if and how the pattern of differences varies over countries. (SG)

Considers if Hispanic and non-Hispanic second graders acquire knowledge of structural features of words in the same order and at the same rate. Reveals that both groups appear to be acquiring knowledge of the structural features of words at different rates, but in a roughly similar order with Hispanic learners lagging behind the non-Hispanic…

Administers two tests of phoneme awareness to kindergarten-, first- and second-grade children in Germany and America as a probe to the consequences of pedagogical differences on the emergence of phoneme awareness. Finds that the contrast between the American and German kindergarteners and the equivalence of the first and second graders in the two…