The authors compared the discourse of 100 Israeli preschool teachers with a group of children during three book-sharing contexts: reading, reconstruction, and telling. During telling and reconstruction, the teachers used more utterances and questions and referred more to concept of book and to the illustrations. During reading, they referred more…

Twenty-three preschool-age children, 3;6 (years; months) to 4;1, were videotaped separately with their mothers and fathers while each mother and father read a different unfamiliar storybook to them. The text from the unfamiliar storybooks was parsed and coded into story grammar elements and all parental extratextual utterances were transcribed and…

This article presents research that investigated how a school year-long letter-writing project between kindergarten students and extended family members could facilitate literacy development in students, as well as provide a way to build inter-generational bonds through correspondence focused on family history and stories. Analysis centered on the…

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…

Forty middle-class American mothers and their preschool children were observed in a narrative activity which involved telling a story using the Berenstain Bears Play Set as a stimulus. The goal of the study was to examine the presence of story grammar elements in both maternal and preschool narratives. In addition, the study sought to explore the…

The current study investigated the effect of colour vs. black-and-white pictures on the stories children told using the pictures as stimuli. Participants were 22 preschool children aged 4-6 (M = 59.98, SD = 7.52) attending day-care centres in a Western Canadian city. Two story sets of five pictures each, depicting stories with similar structure,…

Educational media serve as informal educators within the home by supplementing young children's development. Substantial evidence documents the contributions of educational television to preschoolers' acquisition of a variety of skills; however, television's natural capacity as storyteller and the role it plays in preschoolers' early literacy…

This study sought to test the most efficient representation mode with which children with hearing impairment could express a story while producing connectives indicating relations of time and of cause and effect. Using Bruner's (1973, 1986, 1990) representation stages, we tested the comparative effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) as a mode of…

Purpose: The script frameworks model (R. Schank, 1975) and causal network model (T. Trabasso & L. Sperry, 1985) were used to assess script-based story retellings of children with and without language impairments (LI). When retelling scripts and stories, children developing typically include (a) more obligatory than optional elements, with few…

A significant gap in emerging literacy intervention with preschoolers relates to a skill that is crucial to later reading comprehension-the ability to engage in inferencing. This article presents a theoretical rationale for fostering inferential language during book sharing with preschool children, and provides research-based ideas for how this…

Purpose: This study examined the structural development of African American preschoolers' narratives. It also investigated the effect of background variables (e.g., gender, maternal education, stimulation and responsiveness of the home environment, and whether or not the child lived in poverty) on the children's narratives. Method: Sixty-five…

This study investigated the premise that action, manifested here through pretend play, is a semiotic arena that can enhance narrative development. It was hypothesized that children would produce structurally more complex narratives in play-prompted elicitation than in direct elicitation conditions, and that this competence would increase with age.…