Background/Context: Both correlational and experimental evidence suggests that having access to books can be a key resource for accelerating the literacy outcomes for children. Results from a 20-year study across 27 nations by Evans, Kelley, Sikora, and Treiman (2010), suggest that children growing up in homes with many books obtain 3 years more…

Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children's literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally…

This study used eye-tracking to examine whether extraneous illustration details--a common design in beginning reader storybooks--promote attentional competition and hinder learning. The study used a within-subject design with first- and second-grade children. Children (n = 60) read a story in a commercially available Standard condition and in a…

This study was conducted with the following objectives: 1) to develop digital technology that supports learning in children with disabilities; 2) to test the effectiveness of digital technology used in children's learning. The sample selected to study the current context of and needs of digital technology consisted of a group of 46 teachers and…

Purpose: Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American…

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, young children did not attend school in the traditional setting. However, many teachers, schools, and districts conducted online instruction to allow students to still learn despite the restrictions. After two years, teachers and students returned to the classrooms and schools. However, the time away from school…

This study examined the unique contribution of Home Literacy Environment (HLE), Classroom Literacy Environment (CLE), and parent and teacher expectations to the development of Dutch (L1) and English (L2) vocabulary in children in Dutch-English bilingual primary education. The children (n = 106) were tested on vocabulary in both languages in…

Primary teachers often struggle to find high quality literature for use with their first-grade students. Therefore, a list of award winning books was evaluated for characteristics that lend themselves to teaching reading comprehension strategies and literary elements. The Golden Kite Award, an annual award which provides a grant to the winning…

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were adopted by most states in the US. The authors of these standards called for a shift from previous standards by recommending that young children experience a 50-50 balance between informational and literary reading. For this mixed-methods study, researchers examined the contents of 23 first-grade…

In this study, we examined students' access to text, defined as the number of texts freely available to children in their classrooms. From 60 elementary classrooms across five states, we catalogued the books in first, third and fifth grades in both high- and low-achieving schools (based on state-wide reading test scores) to create a database of…

This study focused on the phonological awareness skills of 72 Spanish-English and 86 Cantonese-English bilinguals, all enrolled in bilingual and mainstream classrooms in the same schools. Bilinguals were assessed on phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge of book reading each year from kindergarten until second grade.…

In this article, the authors report findings from a yearlong study that addressed teaching first-grade students to make inferences and engage in inferential discussion about children's literature. Because of the importance of both inferencing and discussion for comprehension, a collaborative team of two researchers and a classroom teacher focused…

A century of research has shown that culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining literacy teaching is essential to teaching all students well and is especially crucial for students of color, who most often attend urban schools. The authors share one innovative and culturally sustaining literacy practice that critically centers kindergarten and…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine the effect of an intensive vocabulary intervention embedded in e-books on the vocabulary skills of young Spanish-English speaking English learners (ELs) from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds. Method: Children (N = 288) in kindergarten and 1st grade were randomly assigned to treatment and read-only…

In response to Canada's growing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity, educators in French immersion classrooms are increasingly responding with enhanced cross-linguistic initiatives, and dual language books are promising resources in the promotion of multilingualism (Zaidi, 2020; Zaidi & Dooley, 2021). This paper details a research…