Ethnic prejudice, even among very young children, is a universal occurrence. Yet, little research has been conducted on this issue outside of Westernized contexts. The current study evaluated a storybook intervention in Indonesia, a country of historically high racial tensions, designed to reduce young children's ethnic bias regarding out-groups…

Educational technology is commonly used. The use of technology at preschool education has an important role with a lot of effective methods so that children can learn. Preschool teachers use the technology to support children's development. Early literacy skills have gained more importance especially in the recent years. As a result, the use of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a storybook-based academic vocabulary learning intervention for young children from low-income families. The transition to primary school is particularly challenging for low-income children. To help smooth this transition, this study implemented an academic vocabulary learning program…

In three experiments, I tested for the presence of the naming capability, the participants' drawing responses of the stimuli learned in the absence of the visual stimulus, and the participants' comprehension of texts with and without pictures present. In Experiment 1, I tested for the presence of naming and the drawing responses for the stimuli…

Children with limited oral language due to developmental and language delays have difficulty with communication in their everyday lives. Their trouble with speech and/or language impacts their ability to socialize with peers and learn in the school setting. Most of the research on alternative and augmentative communication systems and oral…

A total of 29 low-income, prekindergarten children, attending a summer school program, participated in a six-week shared book-reading (SBR) intervention. Children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions that varied in the extent to which teachers embedded an explicit emphasis on print (code-focused interactions), vocabulary…

Understanding how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) improve oral language skills in relationship to tutor prompting has not yet been investigated. The study examined how variation in language prompt use by tutors during a storybook reading intervention influences growth in vocabulary and emergent literacy for young children with ASD.…

Background: Learners from predominantly less priviledged South African schools encounter English as a language of teaching and learning for the first time in Grade 4. The transition from the use of home language to second language, namely English first additional language, is complexly related to the learners' inability to read text meaningfully.…

This paper reports results from two studies conducted to examine word learning among preschool children in group book reading while we developed a scalable method of teaching words during book reading. We sought to identify factors that fostered both depth and breadth of learning by varying the type of information children heard about words while…

Background: This study investigated whether a personalized life story book and rummage box enhanced well-being and led to changes in behaviour for people with Down syndrome (DS) who have dementia. Materials and Methods: A randomized single case series design was used with five participants who had DS and a diagnosis of dementia. Participants were…

Jerome Bruner's experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the "subjunctification" of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By "subjunctification", Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for…

This study examined associations among low-income mothers' use of attention-getting utterances during shared book reading, preschoolers' verbal engagement and visual attention to reading, and their early literacy skills (N = 51). Mother-child shared book reading sessions were videotaped and coded for each utterance, including attention talk,…

In this article, we review the skills that have been found to be related to good story comprehension in novice readers with normal hearing and describe the relative weight each plays. The relationship between effective story comprehension and lower level skills (such as syntactic awareness and vocabulary knowledge) is considered, and the casual…

In two studies, 5-and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included…

Children and their teacher participated in a project that explored the question of how engaging in transmediation after hearing a story might affect children's meaning construction. In this article we share our work with a teacher and her third graders as they were challenged to move from the traditional activity of drawing a picture about a story…