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)

The comprehension of written stories starts with learning to comprehend everyday situations, but it is the child's direct experiences with written stories that bring the process to fruition. These direct experiences with stories are generally of two types. Initially there is a storybook time, the occasions upon which a literate person, usually the…

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…