Strong oral language skills are foundational for literacy development and begin before a child enters formal schooling. Oral language development has been related to pretend play abilities in children. Children, particularly those from disadvantaged areas, who enter school with low pretend play levels and oral language abilities, are at risk for…

This article discusses language materialities and the Otherworld through the findings of mammoth remains and text-artifacts representing Nenets verbal art. The remains and verbal art are read together as a network of mythic knowledge that forms a semiotic whole, where different signs interact and create potentials for new significations. The…

This study aimed to determine the influence of school principals' attributes and 21st Century Leadership skills on teachers' performance. The study is as follows. The teachers in the northern part of the National Capital Region are female, teacher I position, have rendered 5-14 years of service, and pursued higher studies after college. The…

This article discusses how children in New Zealand make meaning in their spontaneous pretend play from kindergarten (four years old) through to their first year of primary school (five years old). The findings discussed here are taken from a wider project investigating children's storytelling where 12 child participants were video recorded during…

This article explores the author's embodied experience of linguistic incompetence in the context of an interview-based, short, promotional film production about people's personal connections to their spoken languages in Glasgow, Scotland/UK. The article highlights that people's right to their spoken languages during film interviews and the…

This review article starts with an overview of changing education paradigms and the literature on cognitive and linguistic relationships in imaginative play related to comprehension of oral and written texts. Strategies for developing the cognitive and linguistic foundations for text comprehension through play are described. A review of current…

Many American preschool children enter kindergarten without the emergent literacy skills needed to learn to read. To address this problem, this multicase qualitative study investigated the emergent literacy practices at Steiner Waldorf-inspired and Reggio Emilia-inspired schools. The research questions focused on how alternative preschool…

Imagination is rarely acknowledged as one of the main workhorses of learning. Unfortunately, disregarding the imagination has some clearly negative pedagogical impacts: Learning is more ineffective than it should be and much schooling is more tedious than it need be. In this paper, we outline a somewhat new way of thinking about the process of…

Infants and toddlers encounter numerous spoken story experiences early in their lives: conversations, oral stories, and language games such as songs and rhymes. Many adults are even surprised to learn that children this young need these kinds of natural language experiences at all. Adults help very young children take a step along the path toward…

This article argues that Vygotsky's analysis of children's play and of the ways it can serve as a powerful matrix for learning and development has two important implications that are not always fully appreciated. First, children's social pretend play can promote development both in the domains of cognition and language "and" in…

This study was an ethnographic case study that investigated oral and written language learning in a first grade classroom in Kenya. The languages used in this classroom were Swahili and English only. Kamba the mother tongue of the majority of the children, was banned in the entire school. In this classroom there were 89 children with two teachers,…

Literacy must be grounded in creation: imagination, vision, revision, metaphor, and image. Literacy entails imaginative interpretation of texts in private and social contexts. Literacy education that ignores storytelling in favor of "practical" skills prevents construction of perspectives that make experience comprehensible. (SK)

Young children have little difficulty in creating imaginary worlds inhabited by fantastic creatures. Their play often reaches into the realm of make-believe whereby they improvise situations. Playing shop, mother and father, or doctor are examples of children's ability to try out adult roles and behaviors in a safe context. At school, it seems…

Notes how discussing poetry as oral language helps high school students relate poems and imagination to their everyday lives. (RL)

Focusing on the not-yet-conventional ways in which young children write and read--their nature, contexts, and significance for continuing literacy development, this book presents the perspective that children's early reading and writing behaviors are not pre- anything, but are integral parts of an incipient language process. Following an…