The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the role of the "First Language First" model for preschool bilingual education in the development of vocabulary depth. The languages studied were Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2) among bilingual children aged 4-5 years in Israel. According to this model, the children's first language of…

How can it be explained that early literacy and numeracy share variance? We specifically tested whether the correlation between four early literacy skills (rhyming, letter knowledge, emergent writing, and orthographic knowledge) and simple sums (non-symbolic and story condition) reduced after taking into account preschool attention control,…

Letter names are stressed in informal and formal literacy instruction with young children in the US, whereas letters sounds are stressed in England. We examined the impact of these differences on English children of about 5 and 6 years of age (in reception year and Year 1, respectively) and US 6 year olds (in kindergarten). Children in both…

Several researchers have shown that children's ability to make inferences is related to their reading comprehension. The majority of research on this topic has been conducted on older children. However, given the recent focus on the importance of narrative comprehension in prereaders, the current study examined the relationship between inference…

Speech problems and reading disorders are linked, suggesting that speech problems may potentially be an early marker of later difficulty in associating graphemes with phonemes. Current norms suggest that complete mastery of the production of the consonant phonemes in English occurs in most children at around 6-7 years. Many children enter formal…

Are children's understanding of mental states (understanding of mind) related to their notating skills, that is, their ability to produce and read written marks to convey information about objects and number? Fifty-three preschoolers and kindergarteners were presented with a dictation task where they produced some written marks and were later…

Phonological awareness is a critical enabling skill in learning to read, often developed outside the context of formal reading instruction. More than 2,000 6-year-old children were tested on phonological awareness at two occasions during the preschool year in two cohorts. Between the assessments, a training program was implemented. A two-level…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of activity with an educational electronic book (e-book), as compared with adult reading of the printed version of the same book, on the vocabulary, phonological awareness as well as concept about print of preschool children at risk for learning disabilities. The study involved the…

Preschoolers' metalinguistic and visual capabilities may be associated with the writing system of their culture. We examined patterns of performance in phonological awareness, naming of letters, morphological awareness, and visual-spatial relations, in 5-year-old native speakers of Spanish (n = 43), Hebrew (n = 40), and Cantonese (n = 63) and the…

This study examines the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) in the two languages of Korean English as a foreign language learning children in relation to L1 characteristics and school experiences, and its predictive role in word decoding skills in each language. Seventy-two 5-6-year-old Korean children who had attended English-medium…

The purpose of this study was to concurrently examine the development of written language across different writing tasks and to investigate how writing features develop in preschool children. Emergent written language knowledge of 372 preschoolers was assessed using numerous writing tasks. The findings from this study indicate that children…

The present study investigated relative contributions of initial status and growth rates of emergent literacy skills (i.e., phonological awareness, letter-name knowledge, vocabulary, and rapid serial naming) to initial status and growth rates of conventional literacy skills (i.e., word reading, pseudoword reading, and spelling) for young Korean…

The writing skills of 286 children (157 female and 129 male) were studied by comparing name writing and letter writing scores from preschool to kindergarten with letter and word reading scores over the same time period. Two rubrics for scoring writing were compared to determine if scores based on multiple components (i.e., letter formation,…

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation for scaling up a comprehensive early childhood teacher professional development program into 11 communities across 2 years with funding through state legislative actions. The comprehensive program had four major components based on results from a previous multi-condition random assignment…

Early Reading First (ERF) was created to address problems related to language and development among economically disadvantaged and language-minority preschool children through quality classroom processes, professional development, and instruction. More than any previous initiative, ERF specifies what early literacy instruction should look like in…