There is widespread agreement with in the field of early childhood education that vocabulary is important to literacy achievement and that reading aloud can support vocabulary growth. However, there are unexplored and significant problems with the ways we assess young children's vocabulary learning from read-alouds. This paper critically reviews…

Finds that each of six kindergarten teachers had a distinctive storybook reading style, varying in each of three major facets of style: focus of teacher talk during reading, type of information talked about during the reading, and instructional strategies used. (SR)

Reviews selected theoretical and empirical work on the topic of parents reading aloud to their children to assess the state of the art in this area and suggests some aspects still unknown about the nature and consequences of reading aloud to children. (HTH)

A 3-year longitudinal study combined research in emergent storybook reading with research in parent-child interaction across income and cultural groups. In San Antonio, Texas, 8 families (4 each of low and middle income, with 2 families in each group being of Mexican-American heritage and 2 of Anglo heritage) tape recorded 1 storybook reading…

The most successful approach for promoting interactions with books and fostering voluntary reading habits in the early childhood classroom involves daily reading aloud of storybooks by teachers, a classroom library, availability of trade books for children's use, and encouragement of children's emergent readings of storybooks. (BB)

A survey of 14 leading language arts, children's literature, and reading methods books, as well as professional journal articles and other notable books on reading to children, yielded a total of eight recommendations made by more than half of the authors, including the following: (1) prepare by previewing the book, (2) read with expression, (3)…

Instead of merely correlating the amount of time a child is read to with gross measures of language development or reading achievement, researchers need to examine closely, through naturalistic studies, the underlying construction and organization of story book reading events between parent and child. The notion of scaffolding, in which the adult…

Reports on the observation of a group of kindergartners in their classroom library twice a week for eight weeks to learn more about how the nature of the texts--familiarity, predictability, and size--influence the children's use of books. (NH)

Studies low-achieving fifth-grade readers to evaluate the feasibility of a cross-age reading program and to clarify implementation details for a large-scale project. Finds that quantitative results and qualitative data suggest that cross-age reading programs are a promising way to help poor readers to improve their reading. (MG)