Purpose: Momentum around the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in US K-12 classrooms is increasing. Opponents have argued that Ethnic Studies does not challenge students academically and prepare them for high stakes testing (Planas, 2012; Sanchez, 2007). Conversely, research continues to show ways Ethnic Studies contribute to students'…

Early childhood interventions that target numeracy, language, and literacy skills can help to mitigate negative educational outcomes among young children from low- to middle-income families in developing countries. The current study evaluates the efficacy of parent coaching programs designed to enrich home numeracy and literacy environments in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of digital and non-digital storybooks on low-income preschoolers' oral language comprehension. Employing a within-subject design on 38 four-year-olds from a Head Start program, we compared the effect of medium on preschoolers' target words and comprehension of stories. Four digital…

This article bridges research to practice by summarizing an interactive content-enriched shared book reading approach that Spanish-speaking parents of preschool-age children can easily use in the home to accelerate content vocabulary knowledge in Spanish. The approach was implemented in preschool classrooms using a transitional bilingual education…

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have shown mixed effects on child development outcomes in the context of poverty. Direct parenting support integrated with CCTs may improve the effectiveness of CCTs for children's development, and benefits could occur via improvements in parenting practices or the home environment. Here, we use data from…

This study examined the efficacy of a shared book-reading approach to integrating literacy and science instruction. The purpose was to determine whether teaching science vocabulary using information text could improve low-income preschoolers' word knowledge, conceptual development, and content knowledge in the life sciences. Teachers in 17…

Since the early 2010s, there has been a proliferation of new platforms for children's stories (e.g. storybook apps or iBooks), but not necessarily greater diversity of story content or children's greater interest in reading. This article argues for a new approach to address the apparent paradox of a wider availability of children's literature…

In this article, the authors focus on one important early literacy skill--phonological awareness--and describe how to support its development for all children by intentionally embedding it in storybook reading. Supporting the development of young children's phonological awareness is an important part of helping a child learn to read. Preschool…

Children with good and poor listening comprehension (n = 17 in each group) 9-10 years of age were trained to self-generate mental images for sentences and stories. Their ability to identify the antecedents of personal pronouns in individual sentences and also to select the appropriate pronoun in a story cloze task was assessed pre- and…

Vocabulary development is critical for children's ability to learn to read and their success at school. Vocabulary has also been identified as a key factor in the achievement gap, with children from low-income families knowing significantly fewer words when they enter school. Although book reading has long been celebrated as an effective way for…

This study examined differences between adults with low literacy skills and typically achieving children, who were matched on decoding ability, on their production of morphologically complex words (MC) in oral and written stories. In addition, we collected data on their morphological awareness, spelling, and vocabulary skills. Both adults and…

This exploratory study compares the shared book reading behaviours of five school aged children with DS (aged 11 years 6 months to 15 years 6 months) before and after participation in an intervention which included selected components of the MultiLit Reading Tutor Program. The program was delivered 1:1 to participants each week over a 12 week…

A discourse recognition theory derived from more general memory formulations would be broad in its psychological implications. This study compared discourse recognition with some established profiles of item recognition. Participants read 10 stories either once or twice each. They then rated their confidence in recognizing explicit, paraphrased,…

Several researchers have shown that children's ability to make inferences is related to their reading comprehension. The majority of research on this topic has been conducted on older children. However, given the recent focus on the importance of narrative comprehension in prereaders, the current study examined the relationship between inference…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…