This study investigated the types of reading instruction and opportunities prekindergarten children have both at school and outside of school to understand how their reading develops during the first semester of prekindergarten. An abundance of research suggests that many children enter kindergarten lacking foundational reading skills that they…

Postmodern picturebooks do not follow the established norms of traditional picturebooks and instead invite readers to navigate nonlinear structures and attend to metafictive devices, including counterpoint and multiple narratives, experimental typography, nonlinearity, intertextuality, and ambiguities in meaning. These qualities challenge readers…

Domain-specific vocabulary knowledge is an important precursor to overall knowledge acquisition, which is essential to reading and comprehending grade-level texts. There are a number of malleable factors within the classroom that can be shaped by teachers and policy makers, yet additional empirical evidence is needed to uncover and evaluate those…

Home literacy experiences and observed parent and child behaviors during shared book reading were investigated in preschool-age children with hearing loss and with typical hearing to examine the relationships between those factors and children's language skills. The methods involved parent-reported home literacy experiences and videotaped…

Research Findings: Early childhood teachers' talk is a key ingredient in children's early language and literacy development, but there has been little systematic synthesis of observational studies that examine relationships between teacher talk and child oral language. In this systematic review of 54 studies, we investigate and synthesize the…

In summer 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, 8 parent-child dyads were recruited to participate in a pilot project to investigate the potential benefit of an at-home adaptation of an Animal-Assisted Intervention (AAI) for literacy. After completing a demographic survey and the Perceived Stress Scale-10 (Cohen et al., 1983), children's reading…

Research Findings: The present study examined children's listening comprehension during a two-semester-long dialogic reading. We explored the extent to which the development of children's listening comprehension was accounted for by initial listening comprehension and whether children's engagement and the amount and level of their verbal…

Individual differences in children's number knowledge arise early and are associated with variation in parents' number talk. However, there exists little experimental evidence of a causal link between parent number talk and children's number knowledge. Parent number talk was manipulated by creating picture books which parents were asked to read…

This study examined conversational turn-taking when reading scripted dialogue versus having a spontaneous conversation. When reading, listeners waited until speakers' turns had been completed before moving to start their own turns, and gap lengths between turns were longer than those of spontaneous, natural conversation. Theatrical performance…

The advent of Generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, in November 2022, necessitated immediate and critical attention from the educational research community. The impact of GenAI in education, though not yet clear, has the potential to be transformative. More specifically, the focus of this paper is on how to integrate GenAI into elementary…

This article examines findings from an umbrella review of 95 systematic reviews and meta-analyses on effective reading instruction. The analysis highlights that reading is a multifaceted process, requiring the integration of key components such as decoding, comprehension, fluency, and motivation. The review underscores the importance of early…

We explore the concept of remixing existing literacy programs instead of replacing them in light of calls for changes emerging from local, national, and international conversations about literacy research and practice. We explain the evolution of a long-standing community and school literacy program in which pre-service teachers conduct…

In 2024, 2 in 5 (42.3%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said they enjoyed listening to audio (e.g. audiobooks and podcasts) in their free time, compared with 34.6% who enjoyed reading. This is the first time more children and young people enjoyed listening than reading since National Literacy Trust started asking about listening in 2020.…

Research Findings: The current study explored the impact of a brief, small-group, shared book-reading (SBR) intervention on preschoolers' expression of thoughts and emotions and their social understanding. To structure discourse around the book, we adapted Ellis's ABC model, which focuses on understanding activating events (A), related beliefs…

The development of 4- to 6-year-olds' narrative skills was investigated in relation to their receptive vocabulary, grammar, and home literacy environment. At Time One, 82 children aged 4 to 6 years completed standardised assessments of cognitive ability, vocabulary, and grammar. Narrative production and comprehension were assessed by the narration…