Given the emerging evidence on the importance of learning content-specific vocabulary in the early years, many early childhood teachers try to incorporate science vocabulary teaching as part of classroom activities. In this article, the authors argue for the importance of teaching science vocabulary in engaging ways using read-aloud and the…

Just beginning to understand the potentials new technologies might bring to the learning environments of young children, we invited authors to submit articles that investigate multimedia sources and their effect on learning settings. Two main themes emerged--how digitization changes the learning environment and adult-child interaction in…

There have been increasing demands to improve Swedish children's reading habits, triggered by poor PISA results in 2013, and public healthcare has stepped in as a strong reading-promoting actor. Drawing on the emerging field of valuation research in STS, the paper explores the values enacted in health-related information brochures about reading…

Children's books must primarily be appropriate for children so that they could be a significant stimulus in children's lives. In other words, it is essential that the concepts child reality, literary criteria and artist sensitivity be reflected in books in order to create children's books. From birth to age 6, the fact that children's books are…

The early home language environment, and parents in particular, form the foundation of children's language development. In this article, Dina Kapengut and Kimberly Noble explore the intersection of neuroscience and developmental psychology to explain how language experiences in the home, and the "home learning environment" more broadly,…

The practice of reading is rapidly moving from print to screen. Young children are not immune from this trend; indeed, many children's principal literacy experiences occur using iPads and other handheld digital devices. This transition raises important questions about how the emergence and development of literacy might change in these new…

This paper develops an approach to thinking about young children, digital technologies and learning, drawing on research literature that relates children's learning to the use of books, and on literature that discusses the nature of interaction between adults and children and its relationship to children's learning. An analysis is given of parents…

In this article, the authors suggest that current notions of advocacy in early childhood education should be expanded to include a view of young children as citizens. The authors ground their discussion in a how-to book project in Providence, Rhode Island, consider different concepts of children and citizenship, share commentary from City Hall and…

It is generally accepted that talk enriches children's interpretations of texts in literature circle discussions. However, the nature of that talk and exactly how it facilitates interpretation of texts has not been much analysed. This article describes some work undertaken with a class of Scottish children, aged 9-10, to introduce them to the idea…

This article explores Shared Reading as an instructional approach that mimics home reading experiences in a group setting for young children. The article includes information about how to use enlarged text as the teacher provides experiences with books that first focus on the meaning and enjoyment of the story and then shifts to how print works…

Children learn to read at approximately the same stage in life as they start to master their physical environment. This article argues that some of the same mapping and schema-building strategies inform each activity, and draws on examples from a broad range of children's books to support the idea that reading fiction and mapping one's local…

Relatively unexplored by research is how young boys transact and respond to literacy experiences during read-alouds. Some teachers perceive boys to be less interested in literacy and to prefer different kinds of stories than young girls. The purpose of this study was to analyze how two groups of preschool boys responded to different texts and how…

This study compared traditional and multimedia-enhanced read-aloud vocabulary instruction and investigated whether the effects differed for English-language learners (ELLs) and non-English-language learners (non-ELLs). Results indicate that although there was no added benefit of multimedia-enhanced instruction for non-ELLs, there was a positive…

Engaging young children in literacy activities at home is one way for families to augment and enrich the home literacy setting and to participate in their child's education at an early age (St. Pierre et al. in "Dev Psychol" 41(6): 953-970, 2005). Burgess et al. ("Read Res Quart" 4(4): 408-426, 2002) suggested that the resources families have at…

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare mother-child interactions in three contexts: shared reading with a book in a traditional print format, with an electronic book in a CD-ROM format, and with an electronic book in a video clip format; (2) compare mother-child interactions with a three-year-old and a seven-year-old; and (3) compare…