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…

Research Findings: The current study examined the use of a newly developed instrument for measuring parental literacy beliefs in a highly diverse urban Dutch sample of 35 parents, participating in a family literacy program. The instrument was used to explore a new conceptualization of parental literacy beliefs and associations between beliefs and…

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…

To examine what kinds of parent-child interactions are elicited by different literacy-related activities, an exploratory study was conducted with 19 mother-child dyads. Although prompting boards are widely incorporated in pre- and primary school curricula, and in various family literacy programmes, scientific knowledge supporting their use is…

Purpose: This study aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally. Method: The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their…

Children with a rich home literacy environment generally show better reading comprehension. For children in the higher grades of primary school, this relation is thought to be indirect. We propose a model in which this relation ran via children's higher order language and cognitive skills (i.e., expressive verbal ability and mentalizing ability)…

This publication demonstrates the potential of dynamic literate environments and the importance of nurturing a culture of reading and writing, examining four different contexts: digital environments, intergenerational settings, community libraries and prisons. The case studies, from UNESCO's Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database…

Within a learning family, every member is a lifelong learner. A family literacy and learning approach is more likely to break the intergenerational cycle of low education and inadequate literacy skills, particularly among disadvantaged families and communities. The selection of case studies presented in this compilation show that for an…

In this paper, we analyse one aspect of home-school book sharing, namely the activity of borrowing a book. We describe how the borrowing activity is accomplished in daily practice in two Dutch preschools and which emergent literacy practices can be embedded in this routine. We followed fifteen children, aged from two years to four years, and…

Background: The present study concerns literacy and its underlying cognitive skills in Dutch children who differ in familial risk (FR) for dyslexia. Previous studies with FR-children were inconclusive regarding the performance of FR-children without dyslexia as compared to the controls. Moreover, van Bergen et al. (2011) recently showed that…

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).…

The goal of the present 1-year long longitudinal study was to determine which home literacy variables were effective in stimulating early reading skills of children with cerebral palsy (CP) directly or indirectly via the reading precursors. Parents of 35 children with CP completed questionnaires regarding aspects of the home literacy environment…

Examines specific effects of home literacy on the development of word decoding and reading comprehension from first through third grade. Results reveal that parents' instructional and social-emotional quality had an effect on the development of reading comprehension, but not on word decoding. (Contains 62 references and 4 tables.) (GCP)

Studies 89 multiethnic families with four-year-old children in the Netherlands to measure home literacy over a period of years. Tests and assesses children after formal reading instruction. Supports the hypothesis that home literacy is multifaceted. (PA)