The authors emphasize the importance of cultivating autonomous motivation for literacy in early childhood by supporting students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness while building foundational skills. Additionally, the authors highlight four key findings specific to early childhood (pre-K-2) literacy development:…

This article describes an enjoyable, intuitively grasped, learn-by-doing activity that uses general to increasingly specific sentences describing a mystery topic. This technique helps teachers assist students to bridge the gap between foundational skills--such as phonemic awareness, letter patterns, and sight words--and the acquisition of a…

Reports that by combining a phonetic writing system with instruction in carefully selected clusters of related Chinese characters, Chinese schools can start children on productive reading at an early age with texts closer to their developed cognitive levels. (FL)

The author asserts that "Children benefit when teachers and parents reinforce the same concepts and ideas. For this to happen, teachers and parents must have some knowledge of what happens in the classroom and what happens at home that support reading acquisition." In this article, the author describes several strategies that teachers can share…