The importance of emergent literacy skills as a foundation for proficient reading has led to the development of interventions to teach these skills. These interventions are particularly important for children from disadvantaged homes because they often lack the home literacy experiences necessary for building foundational literacy skills prior to…

In this study, we explored ways that four literacy specialists who worked in three schools that were part of one state's Reading Excellence Act (REA) grant constructed their identities as writers and as teachers of writing. We also explored how they negotiated the performance of those identities in different contexts over a two-year period.…

The role of informational text in primary-grade classrooms has been the subject of much discussion in recent years, and there is converging evidence that young school children have few opportunities to engage with this genre. The studies described here expand the research base to include preschool (Study 1) and home (Study 2) exposures to…

This study examined the opinions of more than 300 primary teachers. The first purpose of the study was to investigate the reported frequency with which teachers used various beginning reading materials (e.g., literature, basals, workbooks, predictable text, leveled text, decodable text, and vocabulary-controlled text). The second purpose of the…

The present study replicated the original evaluation of the Howard Street tutoring model (Morris, Shaw, & Perney, Perney, 1990), an intervention for struggling readers in second and third grade. It also evaluated the effectiveness of supervised paraprofessionals (Title I aides) in delivering that tutorial. For an entire school year, teachers or…

Describes a study in which collaborative writing among 40 mothers and their second grade children was observed, and maternal beliefs on spelling were extracted from interviews. Finds low socioeconomic status children had more spelling errors and discussed spelling with their mothers more frequently than high socioeconomic status children. Finds…

Describes the features of the first grade texts included in basal readers used for beginning reading instruction in Texas in 2000. Investigates the general features of student texts with respect to the instructional design of the text, the accessibility of the text for beginning readers, and the engaging qualities of the text. Suggests that policy…

Finds in year 1, children showed effects of neighborhood size in high frequency words read in stories and in low frequency words read in lists and stories; in year 2, rimes from large neighborhoods were read more accurately than rimes from other neighborhoods; and by year 3, effects on low-frequency words continued, but not for high-frequency…

Describes two at-risk readers' perceptions of in-school and out-of-school reading-related activities; their conceptions of reading, learning to read, and themselves as readers; and their responses to their teachers' learner-centered, meaning-based reading instruction. Illustrates the instructional significance of children's conceptions about…

Explores the nature of first-grade students' oral narratives and the connections between teachers' instructional practices and students' narratives. Presents six case studies that describe students' school achievement, their oral narratives, and teachers' practices. Finds certain classroom practices, which either support or narrow opportunities…

Examines native Spanish-speaking students' participation in a dynamic literacy practice in a primary-grade English immersion class established by Proposition 227, which mandates English-only instruction. Elaborates three principles that enable the analysis of literacy acquisition as a process dependent on the commingling of social relations,…

Investigates reliability of two approaches for estimating text difficulty at the first-grade level: the Scale for Text Accessibility and Support and the Fountas/Pinnell system. Supports the predictive validity of the two rating scales with performance data. Suggests potential benchmarks for first-grade performance: 95% accuracy; 80 words per…

Addresses the affective quality of the parent-child relationship during shared book reading. Finds a significant difference in the affective quality of the parent-child relationship related to both the child's attitude toward reading and the child's reading fluency. Notes dyads who were affectionate during shared reading had children who were less…

Examines how and when spelling begins when a group of Finnish kindergartners were provided guided and meaningful literacy opportunities. Demonstrates a substantial growth in children's spelling: some spelled almost all dictated words correctly, most used invented spelling, and only one child used random letter strings for a few words. Notes that…

Tests the validity of the Test of Phoneme Identities (TPI). Finds the TPI to be reliable and comparable to other phoneme awareness measures in predicting decoding ability; and to be more effective than a nursery rhyme and alphabet measures in predicting the number of lessons required for a student to learn to distinguish phonetic cues. (RS)