Preschool picturebook read-alouds have the power to capture the attention of young students by providing an immersive experience that stimulates imagination while addressing learning objectives. The instructional strategies or practices that teachers use during picturebook read-alouds impact student engagement with the story and narrative…

This study was designed to explore the effectiveness of balanced literacy instruction in two pre-kindergarten programs in a North Eastern suburban school district. The researcher used a mixed-methods design which included classroom observations, student performance data, and teacher interviews to determine if the language arts program produced…

RFA's three-year mixed methods evaluation of Children's Literacy Initiative's language and literacy supports found positive impacts despite higher-than-typical teacher turnover. In pre-K centers receiving CLI supports, teachers were more able to implement effective instructional practices and created richer classroom literacy environments, and…

Two experiments explored the effects of reading digital storybooks on tablet computers with 25 preschoolers, aged 4-5. In the first experiment, the students' word recognition scores were found to increase significantly more when students explored a digital storybook and employed the read-aloud function than when they were read to from a comparable…

Research for Action's Year Two evaluation report indicates that most lead teachers demonstrated high fidelity to the key elements of the Blueprint approach in the classroom, though some teachers experienced issues related to differentiating instruction and the simultaneous implementation of Blueprint and Creative Curriculum. The authors found…

Children entering kindergarten and grade 1 vary greatly in their emergent literacy skills. Because preschool teachers can help set the foundation of literacy skills related to school readiness, one way to address those gaps is to build teachers' capacity to apply evidence-based strategies in their language and literacy instruction.…

For this edition of the "Bank Street Occasional Paper Series," educators were invited to share stories from their practice: times when they utilized children's literature and conversations to address real life; the difficult topics that children experience through the mirror of their own experiences or the windows of their peers,…

Little analytical scrutiny has been devoted to teacher accommodation of academic language at the early childhood level, despite being a critical school-level factor to consider when addressing at-risk learners' academic needs. The present study investigates how fifteen Head Start teachers support three components of academic language during…

Research Findings: In order to identify the active ingredients in an effective professional development intervention focused on enhancing preschool vocabulary instruction, this study examines the frequency with which teachers and children discussed theme-related vocabulary words during shared book reading. Head Start teachers received 1 year of…

Enhancing young children's early literacy achievement is a top priority in many countries. There is a considerable body of research demonstrating young children's language development as a critical factor in reading and later academic success. Implementation of high quality literacy instruction has the potential to improve literacy…

Scholars advocate the use of children's literature to help build awareness, understanding, and acceptance of disability in elementary school classrooms. Moreover, children's literature has been used as a component of disability awareness studies seeking to improve relationships between students with disabilities and their typically developing…

Storybook features, such as linguistic richness and print salience, potentially influence how a teacher references print. This study addressed two research questions: (1) to what extent does the linguistic richness and print salience of children's storybooks relate to teachers' use of print referencing? and (2) to what extent is there an interplay…

For the forty-second time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes. Volume 1 contains papers dealing…

This study examined the effects of an intensive shared book-reading intervention on the vocabulary development of preschool children who were at risk for vocabulary delay. The participants were 125 children, who the researchers stratified by classroom and randomly assigned to one of two shared book-reading conditions (i.e., the experimental, Words…