Evidence supports a link between handwriting and aspects of literacy, including both reading and writing. Most evidence, however, pertains to children from grade one and above, once foundation skills known to support emerging literacy have been established. The purpose of this systematic review is to synthesise the extant literature concerning…

This pilot study examined the effects of the Interactive Book Reading at Home (IBR; Wasik, 2009) parent training program on the emergent literacy skills of preschool children and parent beliefs about reading. A quasi-experimental, pretest and posttest design was utilized. Twenty parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to a control or treatment…

This study examined the relations among features of the classroom physical literacy environment (book materials, literacy area and writing materials) and psychological literacy environment (instructional support), and preschool children's gains in two areas of emergent literacy over an academic year. Results showed that features of the physical…

In the present study, maternal Pinyin mediation and its relations with young Chinese children's word reading and word writing development were explored. At time 1, 43 Mainland Chinese children and their mothers were videotaped on a task in which children were asked to write 12 words in Pinyin (a phonological coding system used in Mainland China as…

Background: The present study examined home literacy environments, children's interest in reading and emergent literacy skills of pre-school-aged children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 20), school-aged children with DS (n = 17) and typically developing children (n = 18) matched on chronological age with the younger DS group and mental age (MA) with…

In this study, the investigators surveyed 215 early childhood educators throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania to determine teacher knowledge and training in early literacy instruction, with a focus on The 5 Big Ideas in Reading as identified by the National Reading Panel: phonological awareness, accuracy and fluency, alphabetic principle,…

In the Jackson and Coltheart theory of acquisition of word reading it is claimed that, near the beginning of the partial alphabetic phase of development, children have full use of abstract letter units (ALUs). This claim and less exclusive alternatives were examined. In Experiment 1, normal progress children with on average 9 months of school…

The knowledge of letter names measured just before children enter school has been known for a long time as one of the best longitudinal predictors of learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. After a period during which the comprehensive investigation of this relationship was largely disregarded, there is now a growing interest in attempts…