Literacy is a critical life skill which impacts individuals and society. Knowledge to practice gaps in the field of education have existed for many years, specifically while teaching all students to become proficient readers. The intention of this qualitative study is to explore teacher understanding and perspectives about early literacy…

Translanguaging theory highlights the dynamic use of multiple languages and communication modes by multilingual people in their daily experiences. Museums are informal family learning spaces where multilingual families use languages and other semiotic resources to create learning opportunities for their children. Using a microethnographic approach…

Students in Title 1 school districts continue to fall far behind their peers academically in comparison to neighboring suburban districts. School reform has unsuccessfully attempted to improve test scores by consistently changing reading curriculums and mandating the use of various resources that fail when implemented. Struggling school districts…

Future Forward is an early elementary literacy program which, through a family-school-community partnership approach, integrates one-on-one tutoring and family engagement to support literacy development at school and at home. In the 2020-21 school year, as part of an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Mid-Phase grant, the impact of a modified…

Background: The array of availability of diverse digital reading applications, the mixed results emerging from small-scale experimental studies, as well as the long-standing tradition and range of known positive developmental outcomes gained from adult-child storybook reading warrant an investigation into electronic storybooks (e-books) by…

Theory is an important element of literacy research. Research designs are informed by theories that explain what literacy is, how it develops, and how it should be taught and evaluated. Sociocultural theories emphasize the socially situated nature of literacies engagement and practices, whereas cognitive theories emphasize the underlying skills…

Bullying prevention starts with helping young children understand and accept diversity--the earlier the better. That's why your school team needs this ready-to-use resource, a simple, fun, and effective way to promote social acceptance in the critical early years of attitude development. Perfect for K-2 classrooms, this book presents the…

This study evaluated the ability for two rhythmic rhyming programs to raise phonological awareness in the early literacy classroom. Year 1 (5-6-year-olds) from low socioeconomic status schools in Bedfordshire, learned a program of sung or spoken rhythmic rhymes, or acted as controls. The project ran with two independent cohorts (Cohort 1 N = 98,…

This study examines the multiplicity of literacies while incorporating multiple modes of meaning to understand a young trilingual child's meaning-making processes. This qualitative study reports the results of a combination of ethnographic observations and a longitudinal case study of one child's multi-literacy development from birth to…

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the…

In recent years, researchers have called into question the efficacy of prescribed commercial curricula in early childhood classrooms (Genishi & Dyson, 2009). Despite these concerns, federally funded initiatives and such findings as those presented in the Report of the National Early Literacy Panel continue to promote scientifically based…

In this essay, we explain the development, implementation, and preliminary findings of an innovative writing program that drew upon a peer collaborative model and a community literacy perspective. Developed as an after school program, this project represented a community-university partnership designed to provide an enjoyable forum for teaching…

Two studies explored the nature of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese. In Study 1, involving 146 children, awareness of phoneme onset did not differ from chance levels at ages 3-5 years in preschool but increased to 70% correct in first grade, when children first received phonological coding (Pinyin) instruction. Similarly, tone awareness was…

This eight-week study supports the view that literacy learning is multimodal (Berghoff et al., 2000). It contributes to existing research (Dyson, 1986; Gardner, 1980; Hubbard, 1989; Hubbard & Ernst, 1996; Olshansky, 2007, 2008; Skupa, 1985) on the communicability of drawing and writing as vehicles through which children make and share meaning.…

This study is the first randomized study of the impacts of the vocabulary instruction program Kindergarten PAVEd for Success (K-PAVE) (Hamilton and Schwanenflugel 2011) on low-income students in kindergarten and grade 1. The study has two components. The first component is a test of the impacts of one year of the K-PAVE vocabulary instruction in…