Educators and researchers consider vocabulary development foundational in young children's language and literacy learning and for academic achievement; adult-child shared book reading is potentially a rich site for word learning and concept development. In this article, we report on how an immigrant father and his four year old daughter, English…

This research reports on one area of a larger study in Western Canada examining the literacy activities of families from culturally diverse backgrounds. The research focused on parents' interactions with preschool children in storybook sharing and children's emergent reading development as measured by the "Test of Early Reading Ability-2…

The purpose of this study was to critically examine how family literacy is promoted and represented on websites developed by family literacy program providers. Naturalistic research over the last 20 years or so demonstrates that the family is a rich site for supporting children's literacy development across socioeconomic and cultural contexts.…

Notes storybook reenactments by 15 kindergarten children from working-class were transcribed and coded. Compares with the results from 24 children from middle-class homes. Finds the children in the present study did not show the same developmental progression as the children from the middle-class homes and, in fact, 11 of the 15 children did not…

This study compared the development of storybook reading in 15 kindergartners from working class homes to that of kindergartners from middle class homes studied by Sulzby (1985). Nine girls and six boys from two kindergartens in a small, rural town in British Columbia, Canada, participated. Kindergarten teachers used a holistic approach to…

The purpose of the study reported in this article was to explore the mathematical discourse in which four dyads engaged while sharing the storybook "One Snowy Night" (Butterworth, 1989) while at home or in other locations (e.g., day care centers). Each dyad consisted of a mother and her four-year-old child. Various discourse patterns were evident,…

The purpose of this study was to explore how parents and their young children attended to mathematical concepts as they engaged in shared book reading. Thirty-nine parents and their 4-year-old children from a culturally diverse metropolitan area were videotaped as they read "Mr. McMouse" (Lionni, 1992) and "Swimmy" (Lionni, 1963). Shared reading…