Against the backdrop of growing international concern for a narrowing view of early literacy, this study was initiated to determine how teachers of four-year-olds view their task of fostering early literacy. This paper reports on the first steps to design and validate an instrument which captures teachers' perceptions of early literacy content…

This paper is centered around 106 tellings of personal experiences during shared readings of picture books in kindergarten classrooms. It is shown that teachers orient to different interactional storytelling competences of their pupils. Teachers are found to contribute to pupils' tellings by inviting them, by showing recipiency, by asking…

The aim of this study was to assess whether children's development benefited from teacher-and child-managed academic activities in the preschool and kindergarten classroom. Extensive systematic observations during four half-days in preschool ("n"?=?8) and kindergarten ("n"?=?8) classrooms revealed that classrooms differed in…

How can it be explained that early literacy and numeracy share variance? We specifically tested whether the correlation between four early literacy skills (rhyming, letter knowledge, emergent writing, and orthographic knowledge) and simple sums (non-symbolic and story condition) reduced after taking into account preschool attention control,…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to determine whether kindergarten children with specific language impairment (SLI) could develop phonological awareness skills through computer intervention and whether speech manipulation (i.e., slowing speech rate and enhancing transitions) in instruction produced additional learning. Method: The…