The nature of parental guidance during book reading is an important influence on developmental outcomes linked to literacy and language. Despite extensive research documenting the importance of gender roles and schemas on young children's participation in the sociocultural environment, little is known about the possible influences of parent and…

In their quest for resources to support children's early literacy learning and development, parents encounter and traverse different spaces in which discourses and artifacts are produced and circulated. This paper uses conceptual tools from the field of geosemiotics to examine some commercial spaces designed for parents and children that…

An ecological approach, emphasizing the importance of understanding multiple contexts for learning, underpins this study of libraries as activity spaces for young children's literacy participation. Five libraries serving a diversity of communities were the subject of ethnographic investigation incorporating participant observation, visual…

Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children's social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children's web play as "discourses in place": fluidly converging and diverging…

Conceptualizations of the home have changed, particularly in respect to children's rearing and development. An increased awareness of early intervention in meeting a child's learning needs has filtered down into the organization of space in homes. Maximizing learning opportunities by creating "literacy nooks", which involves carving out…

This article describes an ecological study in Eastside, a particular area of Rotherham, a town in the north of England, UK. The purpose of the study was to collect information about literacy practices in a community setting, focusing on a library. The researchers used an ecological approach to data collection. The methodology included approaches…

In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue…

This study has focused on using the text associated with popular culture print to teach early literacy skills to pre-kindergarten students. This study examined whether explicitly using popular culture print to teach alphabet knowledge and print concepts increased the achievement of these skills. Data revealed an increase in the mean rank of the…

This study examined first-grade students' journal writing to determine how placing live zoo animals in classrooms for science education links to students' emergent and early writing. Students were asked to write journal entries during the daily language arts period. Although no direct instruction in informational text writing was offered, teachers…

A formative experiment investigated how two strategies aimed at increasing the quality and quantity of language interactions could be integrated into a preschool classroom. Strategies for enriching language interactions were introduced during book sharing, semi-structured group activities, and mealtimes. Mixed methods revealed factors that…

This study examined the effects of Interactive Writing, a dynamic approach to writing instruction designed specifically for young children, on the independent writing of first graders enrolled in urban schools in a large metropolitan area. Children in the Interactive Writing condition (N = 49) showed greater growth on measures of independent…

This study examined relationships between the spontaneous utterances of pre-kindergarteners (mean age = 5 years and 1 month) from low-income families during joint bookreading and their story retelling skills. Parent-child joint bookreading sessions (N = 62 dyads) and child story retelling sessions (N = 46) were videotaped. Results showed that…

Research on the relationship between play and early literacy flourished in the 1990s but slowed to a trickle at the start of the new millennium. As we see it, play-literacy research is stuck in a theoretical and methodological rut. Two promising conceptual frameworks--connectionist and dynamic systems theories--can supply the thrust needed to get…

In this collective case study of caregiver behaviors with their toddlers, two-minute videotaped reading interactions were analyzed using a constant comparative method. Twenty-four caregiver-toddler dyads from a high-risk sample of children prenatally exposed to cocaine were selected from a larger sample because they represented the extremes of…

This article examines Reading Recovery as a microcosm for issues related to race and access. Tenets of critical race theory are presented to explore how racial biases are systemic in our ways of being, teaching, and conducting research. Specifically, I present data for African American children involved in Reading Recovery in one Midwestern…