Preschool teachers' read-aloud and writing practices were investigated using a questionnaire about how activities were planned and organized, and what their purpose was. The results indicate that early literacy practices were not planned systematically. Most of the preschool teachers (77%) reported having storybook read-alouds at least three times…

In an era of evolving literacy challenges, an Italian based project 'Leggere: Forte!' (Reading Strong) is promoting shared reading aloud to spark youth interest in reading and improve language skills. Now in its third year, the project team have analysed the impact of daily shared reading on 1829 children aged 3-10. The results show significant…

This study presents the research that Pramling Samuelsson's keynote at the 32nd annual EECERA conference in Brighton 2024 drew upon. The study addresses an important but understudied feature of early childhood education and care for sustainability (ECECfS), namely engaging children in prospective or what-if thinking. Our reasoning is founded on…

This paper considers alternative ways of teaching Romantic poetry to post-sixteen English Literature pupils in England. It explores how practitioners can value tangents developed by pupils' independent thinking when pupils are given the freedom to develop their own ideas. It reflects on a lesson planned to respond to a tangent developed by the…

Purpose: Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers. Method:…

This paper draws lessons from the Read like a Champion (RLAC) program implemented in Suva, Fiji, which engaged elite sporting individuals in literacy activities at schools. A qualitative case-oriented study was utilized, drawing on Esser and Vliegenthart's (2017) practical steps in analyzing comparative data to consider lessons from RLAC in…

This article introduces the results of a research survey that involved 443 preschool and classroom teachers. The objective of the investigation was to discover teachers' views on making picture book reading a part of the teaching process, how picture book reading was incorporated, and how a productive visual response to a picture book was…

While speaking, reading and writing are identified in the Newbolt Report as components of English and are still acknowledged as such one hundred years later, Reading Aloud, which the Report ranks alongside them, is no longer accorded any prominence. The Newbolt Report connects Reading Aloud with literature and announces it as a method of…

This paper examines how 15 London social enterprise nurseries undertook a short pilot study to ascertain how to successfully replace a formal reading scheme with the Whitehurst and Lonigan dialogic reading (DR) approach. DR has shown to work very successfully with children from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, which is the focus group of the…

The professional development (PD) of early childhood educators (ECEs) is key to childcare quality. The Professional Learning Community (PLC) model has been well-researched in K-12 settings and is found to have advantages over traditional models of PD; thus, it holds promise for educators in other settings such as early childhood education centers.…

Reading aloud to children is considered one of the most highly effective strategies for fostering a range of literacy skills, both at home and within contemporary classrooms. However, little is known about teachers' attitudes toward reading aloud, their self-reported frequency of engagement in the practice and what may pose as contemporary…

Reading aloud to children is a ubiquitous practice in early childhood settings. While there are many recommendations for how educators should conduct these experiences, little research in the past decade has examined how read-alouds are actually accomplished. Using anthropological and sociological theories of learning, literacy and research, our…

Read-alouds are a frequent practice in early childhood classrooms and provide great potential for developing literacy skills for young learners including vocabulary, comprehension, text structure awareness, visual literacy, and fluency. Yet, any potential benefit of read-alouds depends on how the teacher enacts a read-aloud, particularly in…

This article focuses on the need for increased attention to content issues and working methods for science teaching in Early Childhood Education (ECE). Science education research emphasises the importance of not only focusing on specific phenomena, but also on the Nature of Science (NOS). NOS teaching deals with questions about what science is,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature and understanding of online talk in a New Zealand primary-school context. This research consisted of a small-scale case study of the #NZReadaloud, a pre-existing literacy programme, over 6 weeks in mid-2020. A private online group on the education platform Edmodo was established where 14…