Early Words Together at Two aims to help to improve the home learning environments of families of two-year-olds. It is designed for settings, including private and school nurseries and children's centres, who serve low-income families or any children with language and communication difficulties. Between January 2017 and March 2018, the programme…

In 2018, the Great School Libraries Campaign was launched with the aim of bringing school libraries and librarians to every school in the UK, and to gather data on the quality and quantity of school libraries that already exist. Previous research has clearly highlighted the importance of school libraries, not just for children and young people's…

To celebrate Blue Peter turning 60, we took a closer look at children and young people's letter writing in 2017/18, exploring how many children write letters in their free time, how often children write letters, and why children decide to write, or not write, letters. Our report is based on the responses of 42,363 pupils aged 8 to 18 who answered…

This article explores the use of Bourdieusian analysis for examining how policy and practice interact in the teaching of English and therefore in the development of children's language and literacy, in particular how. Bourdieusian analysis uncovers the ways in which teachers' practice has been influenced unconsciously by centralised shaping of the…

Participatory research can be seen as providing affordances for "listening" to student voices. This study contributes to the debate around its affordances in ameliorating democratic processes in schools. Students in a northern city secondary school in England used multimodal methods to research questions based on "where do students…

In January 2019 the University of Derby delivered its first module entirely dedicated to and structured around editing and writing articles for Wikipedia. The course focused on using Wikipedia as a means to improve students' skills in writing for public consumption, in addition to enhancing their digital and collaborative skills. Students…

Following the implementation of online reading list software, Library Services at the University of Worcester (UW) encouraged academic staff to consider the reading list as a learning tool. Using an interactive teaching session timetabled as part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, lecturers are asked to…

Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language…

Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and…

Young children's engagements with digital technologies form part of their emergent everyday literacy practices. The study reported here derives from the pan-European study 'A Day in the Digital Lives of Children aged 0-3'. The methodology was centred on the videoing of an entire day's experiences of a child aged under 3, together with a reflective…

Most children growing up in contemporary homes in post-industrial countries use digital media as part of everyday literacy activities, such as to connect with distant family and friends, watch their favourite programmes, play games and find information. However, conceptualizations of the Home Literacy Environment (HLE) have not yet adapted to the…

Shared reading with young children has a positive impact on a range of areas including language development and literacy skills, yet some parents face challenges in engaging in this activity. While much is known about the benefits of shared reading, the barriers to it are poorly understood. The research presented here draws on in-depth interviews…

Pre-school children's engagement with activities in child-initiated play is taken to be an important mediating factor in their learning. The adult's role in supporting and enhancing children's play is an area of significant study. However, how children play when play is child-initiated, and how this maps to our assumptions and expectations about…

This article uses a sociomaterial perspective to explore how deficit views of young children's language and literacy are sustained and can be challenged. Foregrounding the notion of multiplicity, it considers how diverse sociomaterial relations work to uphold particular kinds of practice and particular arrangements of bodies and things over…

The biggest and most devastating pandemic of the 21st century began to affect our world, with the Chinese Government reporting that a mysterious respiratory disease of unknown origin was detected in 2019. Education has been one of the areas most affected by this deadly disease, which spread all over the world in a short time. In this process,…