COVID-19 has changed the daily lives of families, impacted on work, social interactions, and mental health. Since spring 2020, parents have been working from home and children have been home from daycare and school. Parents are experiencing stress in an attempt to satisfy the demands of work, family, and COVID-19 concerns. Due to the fact that…

Family literacy programmes can take many shapes, and are often focused on training adult caregivers to engage in particular literacy activities with their young children. In this study, through a series of five, two-hour workshops, we instead worked to help families take advantage of opportunities to infuse literacy learning into their daily…

In this study, the researchers explored the impact of reading aloud on language acquisition for 12 infants and toddlers (6-22 months old) attending a preschool located in South Florida. The research team included university professors, a preschool director and two preschool teachers. A teacher assistant read a selected picture book to each child…

This study examined active Swedish preschool teachers' thoughts and perceptions in terms of read-alouds as a tool to support children's language and literacy development. The research question was 'How and for what purpose do preschool teachers say that they organize read-alouds in preschool?' Three focus group interviews were conducted with five…

Although unevenly distributed, many Australian classrooms are increasingly diverse and include young people from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, young people who speak many different languages and dialects of English. These diverse classrooms offer rich and exciting teaching and learning opportunities and require innovative…

Children's language experiences in the first two years of life are inextricably connected with their current and future language and literacy development. Research has shown that mother-child shared reading of picture books is a practice that can promote this development. Little is known, however, about the shared reading experiences of infants…

Reading aloud to children is a ubiquitous practice in early childhood settings. While there are many recommendations for how educators should conduct these experiences, little research in the past decade has examined how read-alouds are actually accomplished. Using anthropological and sociological theories of learning, literacy and research, our…

Within the last decade, two large reading reform efforts have directed state and local state school reading instruction, the Reading First Initiative (2002) and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (2010). These initiatives have heavily shaped literacy teaching and learning with a focus on disparity reduction in literacy…

In Australia, much emphasis in early childhood education is placed on the importance of supporting young children's literacy development, and book-reading occurs frequently during typical early-childhood education and care programmes. Reading a story to a child presents an opportunity for rich language-learning through reciprocal and extended…

The enquiries in this study were directed towards the reading of children's literature in preschool with the aim of describing and analysing how read-alouds were carried out in 39 preschools in the northern and southern parts of Sweden. How often were read-alouds performed? How long were they? How was literature chosen? Who initiated the…

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 reviews…

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 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…

The study purpose was to describe parent-child engagement and parental guidance of children's participation in literacy-related activities at home. Of the 37 families who participated in a home-based multimethod assessment of storybook reading and play activities, 13 were considered low income. The children's mean age was 60 months. Parents read…

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare mother-child interactions in three contexts: shared reading with a book in a traditional print format, with an electronic book in a CD-ROM format, and with an electronic book in a video clip format; (2) compare mother-child interactions with a three-year-old and a seven-year-old; and (3) compare…