Research (Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005) suggests systematic patterns in how young children visually attend to storybooks. However, these studies have not addressed whether visual attention is predictive of children's storybook comprehension. In the current study, we used eye-tracking methodology to examine two-year-olds' visual attention while…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display social communication differences that may affect reading comprehension. The enjoyment of storybooks is a natural part of childhood. Students with ASD experience difficulty with understanding the thoughts and feelings of others, which may impede their comprehension of character motive in…

A reading experiment combining online and offline data evaluates the effect on second language learners' reading behaviors and lexical uptake of three gloss types designed to clarify word meaning. These are (a) textual definition, (b) textual definition accompanied by picture, and (c) picture only. We recorded eye movements while intermediate…

Up to now, very few studies investigated the influence of gender on the depiction of emotions in children's drawings. However, the literature on emotions reveals differences between boys and girls in various kinds of tasks (e.g. recognising emotional facial expressions, understanding an emotional situation, etc.). Therefore, we examined the impact…

The aim of the present study is to monitor the effectiveness of a new conception of early literacy curriculum (in force since September 2016) which provides -- unlike the previous one -- a wide range of purposeful literacy practices and literacy events. The study compares graduates of previous early childhood literacy curriculum (tested in June…

Purpose: Although school-age children learn most new word meanings from surrounding context, the joint roles of language ability and executive function (EF) in the word learning process remain unclear. This study examined children's acquisition of word meanings from context in relation to oral language ability and three EF skills (working memory,…

Previous studies demonstrated that the continuation task has great language learning potential and that various task-related factors may affect the extent to which the potential can be exploited (e.g. Wang & Wang, 2015). This study investigates the effect of one understudied factor, the linguistic complexity of the input text, on English as a…

Purpose: Many children begin school with limited vocabularies, placing them at a high risk of academic difficulties. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of a vocabulary intervention program, "Story Friends," designed to improve vocabulary knowledge of at-risk preschool children. Method: Twenty-four early-childhood…

Classroom talk is frequently limited, often used to check student comprehension rather than develop thinking. In classrooms with higher numbers of students living in poverty, teachers talk more and students talk less (Lingard, Hayes, and Mills 2003), positioning students as passive learners, which is problematic to developing critical thinking.…

Research Findings: This study examined the association between interactive book reading quality and prekindergarten children's gains in language and literacy skills over the course of an academic year for 96 teachers and 417 children across multiple locations in the United States. Two moderators were examined, namely, children's initial skill…

We examined the developmental relationship between cognitive-linguistic skills (nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming [RAN]), home environment factors (direct teaching, shared book reading, access to literacy resources, parents' expectations, family's socioeconomic status [SES]), and pinyin letter knowledge in…

This study addresses teachers' and students' needs for digital picture storybooks based on "Punokawan" puppet characters in elementary schools in Sukoharjo Regency. The Wayang "Punokawan" storybook media was developed based on a needs analysis in Sukoharjo Regency elementary schools implementing the 2013 Curriculum. This…

This study aims to discover the view, opinion, perception and experiences of Turkish teachers and secondary school students towards Wattpad, an online literacy community, to interpret them educationally, to determine the reasons for their use and to interpret the main plot of youth literature on the axis of changing reading perception/behavior and…

The young generation, born into digital technologies and called Millennials or the Y-Generation, are raised in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets (Hamari et al., 2014), and they are constantly engaged in digital activities. However, research on the impact of digital devices on learners' educational performance and motivation…

The study aims to analyze, in terms of content and process, the math talks between the mother and child during the shared book reading of the illustrated storybooks with math contents. The study group under the research is comprised of nine pairs of mother and child. The process of the study 18 videos which were recorded when two storybooks with…