Research Findings: In this study, we examined the short- and long-term effects of Reading Express, a home-visiting intervention in which volunteers encourage low socio-economic status and ethnic minority parents to engage in interactive shared reading with their child. Outcomes of a quasi-experiment involving 176 children in the Netherlands (mean…

Based on the Home Literacy Model, this study explored a refined model of home literacy activities and their relations with children's emergent literacy skills in a linguistic and socio-economic diverse sample of 214 Dutch kindergartners (mean age 4 years and 7 months, 46% girls and 29% monolingual speakers of Dutch). The study examined a typology…

The aim of this meta-analysis was to investigate effects of family literacy programs on the emergent literacy skills of children from low socioeconomic status families (0-6) and to establish which program, sample, study, and measurement characteristics moderate program effects. Outcomes of 48 (quasi-)experimental studies covering 42 different…

It is hypothesized that variability found in the effects of family literacy programs results from differences in implementation by parents. In this study, the implementation and effects of a Dutch program were examined in a sample of 207 kindergarteners (mean age at pre-test: 64 months). No main intervention effects on children's literacy…

This meta-analysis examines the effects of family literacy programs on children's literacy development. It analyzes the results of 30 recent effect studies (1990-2010), covering 47 samples, and distinguishes between effects in two domains: comprehension-related skills and code-related skills. A small but significant mean effect emerged (d = 0.18).…

Literacy interventions in the family context have great potential to promote reading development in children. However, the results of meta-analyses indicate that family-based approaches tend not to be as effective as expected. Although the effectiveness of family literacy interventions can be assumed to hinge largely on the quality of their…

This paper deals with the relation between children's home literacy environments (HLE) and their literacy development in the first phase of primary school. On the basis of a broad conceptualisation of the HLE, we identified three home literacy profiles (rich, child-directed and poor HLE). Firstly, we related these profiles to socio-cultural…