It is essential that early educators in day-care services possess adequate pedagogical tools for supporting children's communicative development. Early literacy programmes (ELPs) are potential tools. However, studies investigating the effects of ELPs seldom address implementation processes or the programme users' perspectives. This study sheds…

This article considers drawing as a meaning-making activity that takes place in certain sociocultural contexts to find evidence for its communicative potentials as well as the relationship between thought and drawing in early childhood. The researcher challenges traditional views about young children's drawing that focus on the result of the…

This study examined the impact of direct instruction and interactive instruction on immigrant kindergarten children's vocabulary learning during storybook reading. (In the present study the terms "immigrants" and "second language learners" are used alternatively meaning kindergarteners from immigrant families who are in the…

The study aimed to investigate whether the impact of mood state on children's choice of expressive strategies (literal and non-literal content and abstract) varies as a function of mood valence, age and topic to be drawn. The sample (N?=?96) consisted of four groups of children aged 5, 7, 9 and 11years, respectively. Half of the children in each…

Acquisition of literacy is best conceptualized as a developmental continuum, with its origins early in the life of a child, rather than an all-or-none phenomenon that begins when children start school. How parents expose their children to literacy even before they enter school is important for the later development of reading. The home environment…

This paper examines socio-economic factors influencing parental involvement in homework at the Foundation Phase in eight Johannesburg public primary schools. The research was conducted among over 600 parents from schools in different geographical and socio-economic areas such as the inner city, suburban and township. Two primary schools were…

The goal of the current study is to explore the influence of knowledge on socioeconomic discrepancies in word learning and comprehension. After establishing socioeconomic differences in background knowledge (Study 1), the authors presented children with a storybook that incorporates this knowledge (Study 2). Results indicated that middle-income…

This article presents the pedagogical implementation of the reader-response theory in a class of English as a foreign language with language pre-service teachers as they experience the reading of two short stories. The research took place over a 16 week period in which students kept a portfolio of their written responses to the stories.…

Children's narrative skills have been widely studied in North America, but there is a paucity of African research. Within South Africa's diverse socio-cultural context, this study of mixed-race children explored the development of narrative production and the influence of home background variables. Using the Bear Story picture prompt, this…

The home literacy environment is a well-established predictor of children's language and literacy development. We investigated whether formal, informal, and indirect measures of the home literacy environment predict children's reading and language skills once maternal language abilities are taken into account. Data come from a longitudinal study…

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…

Background: High-risk human papilloma virus (HR-HPV) is highly prevalent in sexually active men and women; HR-HPV has been classified as a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and as a necessary, but not sufficient, causal agent for cervical cancer. Women who test positive for HPV often experience serious psychosocial consequences such as fear,…

The majority of research that has been conducted on structuring mentorship programs has been on career support in terms of transferring tacit and explicit knowledge from the supervisor to the protégé. While the instructional design literature touts that cognitive apprenticeships provide a great framework for constructivist and situated learning…

This study compared the teaching interaction procedure to social stories implemented in a group setting to teach social skills to three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The researchers taught each participant one social skill with the teaching interaction procedure, one social skill with the social story procedure, and one social…

According to theories of embodied cognition, a critical element in language comprehension is the formation of sensorimotor simulations of the actions and events described in a text. Although much of the embodied cognition research has focused on simulations of motor actions, we ask whether readers form simulations of story characters' linguistic…