Early fine motor writing skills are quickly becoming recognized as an important school readiness skill associated with later academic success (Dinehart and Manfra, 2013; Grissmer et al., 2010; Son and Meisels, 2006). Yet, little is known about the development of handwriting, the extent to which it is of value in the early childhood classroom and…

My paper situates literacy in the pre-symbolic implications of the maternal relation. Turning to child psychoanalysis, particularly Melanie Klein's theories of infancy and symbolization, my paper discusses the role the child's inner life plays in her engagements with literacy. Citing cases of second language learning, I pose literacy as…

With the revolution that has taken place in the functionality and uptake of portable networked "smart" technologies, educators are looking to see what potential applications such technologies might have for school education. This article reports on a study on the use of portable personal computing devices in the early years of schooling.…

This paper draws data from a 5-year ethnographic study of young multilingual (Mixteco/Spanish/English) children in their early childhood classrooms. In this paper, we focus on two of the children and their distinctive paths as they develop language and literacy. Using a sociocultural and multimodal theoretical framework we examine how these two…

There is widespread agreement with in the field of early childhood education that vocabulary is important to literacy achievement and that reading aloud can support vocabulary growth. However, there are unexplored and significant problems with the ways we assess young children's vocabulary learning from read-alouds. This paper critically…

The reading process and reading development have been addressed by researchers for decades. As a result we know much about what reading is and how it happens. However, less is known about how reading influences other aspects of children's development, specifically the development of social imagination. To address this, we examined the narrative…

Young children explore their world through manipulatives, playing with "technology" that may or may not be digital. To this end, I offer an exploration into how the existing framework of the New Media Literacies (NMLs) paradigm set forth by Henry Jenkins (2006) in "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st…

In this paper, we analyse one aspect of home-school book sharing, namely the activity of borrowing a book. We describe how the borrowing activity is accomplished in daily practice in two Dutch preschools and which emergent literacy practices can be embedded in this routine. We followed fifteen children, aged from two years to four years, and…

One of the most common types of interaction between parents and their very young children is picture-book reading, with alphabet books being one of the most popular types of book used in these interactions. Here we report two studies examining alphabet letter learning by 30- to 36-month-old children in book-reading interactions with an adult. Each…

This article positions a view of student responses with relation to current literacy expectations. Student responses to a single book, "The Egypt Game," are explored. The responses are analysed from a group and individual student perspectives. The responses demonstrate the complex understandings that young students created about this book.…

This paper discusses findings from the Danish contribution to the EASE project, a European research project running from 2008 to 2010 on early literacy in relation to the transition from childcare to school. It explores a holistic inclusive approach to early literacy that resists a narrow accountability-oriented Danish policy (mirroring…

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school…

This article examines six years of ethnographic research in Robyn Davis's pre-kindergarten classroom in the USA. Using a theoretical framework to embed writing within a social semiotic that is multimodal and has social intent (Street, 2003), the authors show how children used interactions during writing to create various written products. Three…

The current study compares the effects of two shared storybook reading (SSR) interventions on language and emergent literacy skills of low-income preschoolers. The control intervention targeted language and print awareness, skills for which there is strong evidence of the effect of SSR. The experimental intervention added a focus on phonological…

This literature review provides an overview of research into technology and literacy for children aged 0-8 in educational settings from 2003-2009. The article begins by exploring the different assumptions about the role of digital texts that underpin the studies considered, identifying three loose categories of studies which position technology…