The impact of shared book reading on children's language skills: A meta-analysis

Shared book reading is thought to have a positive impact on young children's language development, with shared reading interventions often run in an attempt to boost children's language skills. However, despite the volume of research in this area, a number of issues remain outstanding. The current meta-analysis explored whether shared reading interventions are equally effective (a) across a range of study designs; (b) across a range of different outcome variables; and (c) for children from different SES groups. It also explored the potentially moderating effects of intervention duration, child age, use of dialogic reading techniques, person delivering the intervention and mode of intervention delivery.Our results show that, while there is an effect of shared reading on language development, this effect is smaller than reported in previous meta-analyses ($\bar{g}$ = 0.194, p = .002). They also show that this effect is moderated by the type of control group used and is negligible in studies with active control groups ($\bar{g}$ = 0.028, p = .703). Finally, they show no significant effects of differences in outcome variable (ps ≥ .286), socio-economic status (p = .658), or any of our other potential moderators (ps ≥ .077), and non-significant effects for studies with follow-ups ($\bar{g}$ = 0.139, p = .200). On the basis of these results, we make a number of recommendations for researchers and educators about the design and implementation of future shared reading interventions.     

Low-income minority mothers’ and fathers’ reading and children's interest: Longitudinal contributions to children's receptive vocabulary skills

Using data from a diverse sample of low-income African American and Latino mothers, fathers, and their young children who participated in Early Head Start (n = 61), the current study explored the association between parents’ reading quality (i.e. metalingual talk) while reading with their 2-year-old children and their children's receptive vocabulary skills at pre-kindergarten. It further examined whether children's interest in reading mediated this association. There were three main findings. First, most mothers and fathers in our sample read relatively often to their children (a few times a week) and used some metalingual talk; fathers used more than mothers. Second, controlling for parental education, mothers’ and fathers’ early reading quality significantly predicted children's receptive vocabulary skills at pre-kindergarten. Third, children's interest in reading mediated the association between mothers’ and fathers’ reading quality and children's receptive vocabulary scores. These findings have important implications for programs aimed at fostering low-income children's vocabularies and suggest that both mothers and fathers need to be included in programs.     

Curriculum-based assessment of reading skills: Considerations and caveats for school psychologists

General dissatisfaction with commercial norm-referenced tests and global ability measures and the need for more specific achievement measures due to changes in special education have led to an increased interest in the curriculum-based assessment of reading. We argue that a curriculum-based assessment (CBA) of reading provides relevant information for instructional interventions only if the content of the curriculum and instruction are grounded in the cognitive skills underlying the domain of reading. If CBA is based on valid cognitive constructs, it may assist greatly in the identification of younger readers at risk for reading problems, older students with reading problems, and provide the most sensitive measure of continuous progress. We discuss the implications of our review for the training of school psychologists and for consultation. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The effect of immigrant concentration in schools on native and immigrant children's reading and math skills

Using a unique and very rich PISA dataset from Denmark, we show that the immigrant concentration in the school influences reading and math skills for both immigrant children and native children. Overall, children in schools with a high immigrant concentration score lower on reading and math test scores. The negative effects associated with attending a school with a high immigrant concentration are fairly robust across estimation methods. IV estimates, taking into consideration that parental sorting across neighborhoods might bias the OLS estimates, indicate that immigrant concentration in schools is still important in determining children's math test scores. The estimates are less precise regarding the effect of immigrant concentration on reading test scores. The immigrant concentration in the school has a stronger effect for native children than for immigrant children, but the differences are more pronounced for the math test.     

浅谈英语阅读技巧

英语阅读技巧是近年来在英语教学中被频繁涉及的一个领域。学生通过有目的，有计划的阅读训练，充分了解不同类型的章，可以提高阅读速度和阅读能力。     

Training of component reading skills

Fifteen reading-disabled boys, classified according to reading subskill deficits, formed three subgroups: Oral Reading, Associative, and Sequential. On the rationale that training procedures emphasizing accuracy and speed of response to letters, syllables, and words would improve reading skills, the children were trained daily for two and one-half months. Two schedules of testing and training allowed for an untrained control group and a follow-up group. The results indicated that the computer-assisted training procedures were not only effective in improving component reading skills, but in addition there was a transfer of training to achievement measures of reading word recognition. This study lends support to the hypothesis that training according to subgroup classification, using training procedures which incorporate an application of the automaticity theory and a combination of task-analytic and process-oriented models, is an effective training approach for reading-disabled children. This research was funded by a grant from the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children Foundation, Toronto, Canada, and a scholarship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, Ottawa, Canada.     

The relationship between children's reading motivation and reading competence

It has been found that motivation is very important to children’s reading competence.This paper intended to study intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and find their relationship with children’s reading competence.In order to do so,previous investigations about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were critically reviewed,and their results were discussed in this paper.     

“花样式”阅读促进幼儿早期阅读的发展

以游戏活动激发幼儿主动说的愿望,通过"花样式"阅读促进幼儿早期阅读的发展,帮助幼儿在人生的最初阶段学会阅读的方法、养成阅读的习惯。     

Phonological skills and reading comprehension

In the present study the mainfocus is on the impact of phonologicalawareness on reading comprehension. The studyinvolved 1300 children in Grade 1. Syllableawareness, phoneme awareness, word decodingand reading comprehension were each assessedwith two or three subtests. The results wereanalyzed by structural modeling. Due to themarked skewness observed for some of themanifest variables, separate analyses wereperformed for students with average worddecoding performance and for students with poorword decoding. Both among average and poordecoders, phonological awareness had a directimpact on reading comprehension, indicatingthat phonological factors play an independentrole in the processing of text. One possibleway to explain this observation is that atleast two critical factors in comprehension,vocabulary and short-term memory, are bothdetermined in part by phonological ability. Itmight also be the case that phonologicalawareness partly reflects metacognitiveprocesses assumed to be involved in readingcomprehension.     

浅谈英语阅读技能的改进与提高

阅读在英语学习中有着十分重要的作用。目前,人们更注重非智力因素在学习中的作用,教师应激发学生的学习兴趣,提供一个友好、轻松的学习环境,使学生有一种成就感,鼓励学生广泛阅读,了解英语语言国家的文化背景,学生也应灵活运用精读、泛读和略读来加快阅读进程,把握各种体裁的文章结构特点,提高阅读能力。     

Designing a formative e‐assessment: Latent class analysis of early reading skills

Computer‐based testing, or e‐assessment, has the potential to deliver immediate results for the benefit of schools. This paper describes a project that aimed to exploit this potential by designing e‐assessments where the results were intended for use by teachers in planning the next steps in teaching and learning: low‐stakes, formative assessment. A pair of tests assessing early reading was developed, with the test items based on a range of distinct skills, including phonological segmentation, rhyming and word recognition. The tests were administered on a screen with the questions presented aurally and visually. In trials, a total of 1345 test results were obtained from pupils aged 5–7 years from 26 schools. Latent class analysis was used to identify patterns of performance within the data. Four latent classes were distinguished, each characterised by a pattern of responses related to the different test items. The strengths and weaknesses in early reading skills implied by each of these latent classes were described in terms of formative ‘profiles’ provided for teachers in an online reporting package together with indicators for the next steps in teaching. The research resulted in an automated marking and analysis system that can be genuinely formative.     

Component reading skills in Down Syndrome

This study investigates word reading skill in Down Syndrome (DS). Two main questions are addressed: (1) Is reading an island of ability in DS? and (2) What are the cognitive correlates of word reading ability in DS? In particular, how do language versus visual-spatial skills relate to individual differences in reading ability in DS? Participants were 19 individuals with DS, ranging in age from 10 to 19 years, and 19 typically developing children (mean age = 4.9 years) matched with the DS individuals for mental age. Overall, reading ability in DS was very poor. There was no evidence that reading represents an “island of ability” in DS; instead, the average reading level of DS participants was even lower than would be predicted by their IQ. However, there were substantial individual differences in literacy among DS participants. DS word reading and spelling skill correlated strongly with the ability to read by phonological recoding. It also correlated with several language measures. As a matter of fact, the often reported language-mental age gap was found only among the poor readers with DS.