In an effort to understand cognitive foundations of oral language comprehension (i.e., listening comprehension), we examined how inhibitory control, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring are uniquely related to listening comprehension over and above vocabulary and age. A total of 156 children in kindergarten and first grade from…

This seven-month ethnographic case study elucidated a kindergarten student's navigation through her first formal schooling experience with relation to expressive oral language. Gee's theory of Discourses and methodology of discourse analysis were used to examine expressive oral language in use. Two discursive contexts germane to…

The present study compared the effects of different mediation routines provided to kindergartners from families of low socioeconomic status on the students' invented spelling attempts and on their gains obtained on spelling and other early literacy skills (letter naming, sounds of letters, word segmentation, and word decoding). The effects of…

This study explores how intertextuality influences the narrative practices of young deaf children in two classrooms. Specifically, the study examines how variations in what texts are made available to juxtapose and variations in how texts are juxtaposed influence the narratives young deaf children produce. A major premise underlying these two…

There is now compelling evidence that children's early vocabulary development is essential to their long-term reading comprehension. Findings from experimental studies have indicated that vocabulary knowledge influences the development of conceptual knowledge and comprehension, suggesting a causal relationship among these fundamental language…

Alphabet knowledge is a hallmark of early literacy and facilitating its development has become a primary objective of preschool instruction and intervention. However, little agreement exists about how to promote the development of alphabet knowledge effectively. A meta-analysis of the effects of instruction on alphabet outcomes demonstrated that…

This paper presents findings from a correlational study of the relationship between teachers' vocabulary instruction practices and pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children's vocabulary. We observed sixteen teachers during three 90-minute language arts blocks, and we assessed the performance of their 244 children on knowledge of target words and…

Drawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourse analysis to examine children's videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergarten classroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in U.S.…

The aim of this five-year longitudinal study was to examine whether 13 Greek precocious readers' performance on a variety of reading, spelling, and phonological-awareness tasks from kindergarten through the fourth grade was different from that of 12 Greek nonprecocious readers and, if there were differences between the two groups' performances,…

The purpose of the study was (a) to examine the development of four sublexical fluency skills over the second semester of kindergarten and (b) to identify the predictors of fluency level (estimated at the end of kindergarten) and growth. Ninety-two kindergarten children enrolled in six full-day kindergarten classrooms participated. The students…