Language learning is an important developmental experience for young children during their preschool years, and book reading is an important context for promoting this growth. Book reading introduces children to a wider range of words than is evident in typical conversations and provides meaningful opportunities to practice using new words in…

Purpose: There are well-established links between oral language and reading development in monolingual English-speaking children that are associated with literacy outcomes. Oral language, defined relative to lexical quality, provides key support for developing early reading skills. For bilingual children, the connection between oral language and…

The contemporary 'notion' of Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) is primarily associated with the professionalization and policy review of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workforce in England. As such, although considered to advocate reputed prospects and potential for graduates 'leading' provision for under-fives, remains for many…

The author, a district chief academic officer, discusses his immersion into the research on the science reading and how it informed his views on how reading instruction needed to change in his district. He emphasizes the importance of adopting a cohesive curriculum aligned to the research on early reading, particularly in the areas of phonics and…

The Texas A&M University System recently developed six quality standards for educator preparation programs, the Texas A&M Quality Standards for Educator Preparation, that are to be implemented and met by all system schools. These standards are: quality of selection of teacher candidates; quality of content knowledge and teaching methods;…

We examined the cognitive predictors of early word reading skills in Japanese syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Eighty-three Japanese kindergarten children (M age = 75.6 months, SD = 3.4) were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological memory, morphological awareness, and…

There have been few areas in England over the last 50 years where government has drawn more heavily on research to inform policy and practice than in the area of teaching reading. The focus of this article is an analysis of the research and evidence on early reading, in particular the role of phonics, on which government policy in England and the…

We investigated the longitudinal associations among maternal pre- and postnatal depression, maternal anxiety, and children's language and cognitive development followed from 15 to 61 months. Furthermore, we assessed the protective role of children's early print experiences with books against the adverse effect of maternal depression on language…

The relationships between phonological awareness, rapid naming, short term verbal memory, letter knowledge, visual skills and word reading in kindergarten, and the predictive patterns from kindergarten to first grade were examined in 41 Chinese-Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands in both their first language (Chinese) and second…

This article addresses the characteristics of learners in the emergent stage of literacy development and describes two instructional practices that facilitate the development of the alphabetic principle and concept of word in text.

When learning to read, the developing mind is likely to cluster letters into frequency-based chunks. In the current study, the authors investigated the extent to which such chunking takes place among preschoolers (N = 54) by examining the association between sensitivity to subword orthographic regularity and preschooler age. A version of the…

Phonological awareness is critical for early reading acquisition across alphabetic as well as non-alphabetic languages. The grain size of phonological awareness varies with oral language structure and written orthography across languages. Phonological awareness' grain size and contribution to reading for simultaneous biliterate children is…

Direct Instruction (DI), commercially marketed by McGraw-Hill as Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading, is a bundle of highly scripted reading programs emphasizing phonics and phonemic awareness. This assessment considers 40 recently published studies on DI in order to consider the program's aims and efficacy as a means of teaching reading. Our…

Finnish is a language with simple syllable structure but rich morphology. It was investigated whether syllables or morphemes are preferred processing units in early reading. To this end, Finnish first- and second-grade children read sentences with embedded inflected target words while their eye-movements were registered. The target words were…

This study examined the print exposure of teacher candidates (N = 195) in relation to their GPAs, achievement in reading and writing on the SAT, and their self-ratings of their own early (K to Grade 5) reading experiences. Participants came from undergraduate and Masters programs in varied certification areas and from two different universities.…