Developmental Relations Between Home Literacy Environment,Reading Interest,and Reading Skills: Evidence From a 3-Year Longitudinal Study

We examined the bidirectional relations between home literacy environment, reading interest, and children’s emergent literacy and reading skills in a sample of 172 English-speaking Canadian children (M_age = 75.87 months) followed from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Results of cross-lagged analysis revealed that the reading comprehension activities (RCA) at home positively predicted children's reading skills at the end of Grade 2 and the reading skills negatively predicted the RCA in Grade 3. Parent-rated reading interest was bidirectionally related to reading skills, whereas child-rated reading interest was only predicted by earlier reading skills, but not vice versa. These findings suggest that parents are sensitive to their children’s reading performance and modify their involvement accordingly.     

Examining Gifted Students Who Are Economically At-Risk to Determine Factors that Influence Their Early Reading Success

The aim of this study was to determine whether the Frequency with which parents read to their children, Preschool Exposure and the initial Age that students “who are economically at-risk” were first exposed to significant literacy activities at home or in a preschool setting affected their reading grades. Students “who are economically at-risk,” for the scope of this study, are those students whose family incomes qualify them to receive either free or reduced lunches. The criteria set forth by the United States Department of Agriculture’s School Lunch Program and Child Nutrition Web site (United States Department of Agriculture, 2005) was used to determine whether families were qualified to receive reductions in the price of their school meals. Parents of students from six southeast Alabama schools were selected to participate in the study. All six schools administered the Questioning, Understanding, Enriching, Seeking and Thinking (QUEST) program for gifted or academically successful students. The subjects were 84 parents/families with public school children who are economically at-risk and participated in the QUEST program. Data were gathered using a questionnaire developed by the researcher. Instructional implications for this research study are to (1) improve reading instruction for economically at-risk students within our nation’s elementary schools; (2) equip parents with teaching tools and theories for providing critical pre-reading skills to their young children and (3) to provide sound research for teacher educators to base their instruction to preservice teachers preparing to teach students who are economically at-risk.     

Reading to young children: A head-start in life?

This paper investigates the importance of parents reading to their young children. Using Australian data we find that parental reading to children at age 4–5 has positive and significant effects on reading skills and cognitive skills (including numeracy skills) of these children at least up to age 10 or 11. The effects on skills more closely related to reading and language are larger than those on skills such as numeracy skills. However, all findings in relation to reading and other cognitive skills are persistent and robust to a wide range of sensitivity analyses. Although reading to children is also correlated with children's non-cognitive skills, after accounting for the endogeneity of reading to children, no causal effect remains.     

The Home Literacy Environment and Preschool Children's Reading Skills and Interest

Research Findings: This study explored the association between the home literacy environment (HLE), conceptualized as comprising parents’ reading beliefs and home literacy practices, and preschoolers’ reading skills and reading interest. It also identified factors in the HLE that predict emerging reading competence and motivation to read. A total of 193 children age 6 years from 14 preschools across Singapore and their parents participated in the study. The parents completed a reading belief inventory, a family literacy activity inventory, and a demographic questionnaire that surveyed the child's reading interest. The children were administered a battery of standardized literacy tests. The study found a moderate relationship between the HLE and children's reading competencies and a strong relationship between the HLE and children's reading interest. When parents’ education level and children's age were controlled, hierarchical multiple regression analyses found that family literacy activities contributed more unique variance to children's reading outcomes and reading interest than did parents’ reading beliefs. Active parental involvement was the strongest component of the HLE, with parent–child engagement in reading and writing emerging as the best predictor of both the child's emerging reading skills and reading interest. With respect to reading beliefs, parents’ efficacy in supporting literacy development before their child attended school positively predicted reading competence, as did parents’ affect and verbal participation in fostering reading interest. However, verbal participation negatively predicted Singapore children's reading competence. Practice or Policy: The implications of the results were discussed.     

The Relation Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Mediation and Longitudinal Models

We examined the role of a hypothesized factor in reading comprehension: morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the smallest meaningful units or morphemes. In this longitudinal study, we measured English-speaking children’s morphological awareness, word reading skills, and reading comprehension at Grades 3 and 4, in addition to their phonological awareness, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability as control measures. Path analyses revealed that word reading skills partially mediated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension at each grade. Further, children’s early morphological awareness partially explained children’s gains in reading comprehension, and their early reading comprehension partially explained their gains in morphological awareness. These findings support the predictions of recent models of reading comprehension: that morphological awareness impacts reading comprehension both indirectly through word reading skills and directly through the language system and that morphological awareness underpins the development of reading comprehension (e.g., Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005).     

E-Book and Printed Book Reading in Different Contexts as Emergent Literacy Facilitator

Research Findings: We present 3 studies that focused on preschoolers’ electronic book (e-book) reading in different contexts aimed at supporting children’s early literacy. In Study 1 we researched the impact of children’s age and number of independent readings on phonological awareness and word reading. We found that all age groups benefited from e-book reading, and 5 readings benefited most skills better than 3. In Study 2 we investigated (a) parents’ behavior during joint e-book reading with their children compared to joint printed book reading and (b) parental mediation in joint reading of a considerate e-book compared to joint reading of an inconsiderate e-book. The joint printed book reading yielded more expanding talk than the joint e-book reading, and reading the considerate e-book yielded higher expanding talk than reading the inconsiderate e-book. In Study 3 we compared adult support in joint e-book reading to joint printed book reading and compared both readings to children’s independent e-book reading. Reading the e-book with adult support assisted children in progressing in phonological awareness and word reading compared to other group reading. Practice or Policy: Well-designed e-books may serve as good tools to support children’s early literacy, and when parents or educators read them with children, children’s progress is enhanced. We recommend that these findings be taken into account by e-book designers, policymakers, teachers, and parents.     

A Family Strengths Approach to Early Language and Literacy Development

Language and literacy skills are an essential element of young children’s development and allow them to interact meaningfully with other people and to develop knowledge in all subject areas. Despite the importance of language and literacy development, however, more than one-third of children in the United States enter school with significant differences in language, early literacy skills, and motivation to learn that place them at considerable risk for developing long-term reading difficulties. The quantity and quality of language interactions children have with their parents and exposure to print in their home environment prior to entering school have an important impact on these individual differences. This paper provides teachers with guidelines and tools for helping families identify and create language and literacy opportunities in their home environment that reflect their unique strengths and routines.     

Reading vocabulary influences in phonological recoding during the development of reading skill: a re-examination of theory and practice

Children’s skill at recoding graphemes to phonemes is widely understood as the driver of their progress in acquiring reading vocabulary. This recoding skill is usually assessed by children’s reading of pseudowords (e.g., yeep) that represent “new words.” This study re-examined the extent to which pseudoword reading is, itself, influenced by orthographic rimes (e.g., eep) of words of the child’s reading vocabulary, during the development of reading skill. In Study 1, children with word reading levels of 6–10 years read matched pseudowords that do and do not share an orthographic rime with words of their reading vocabularies. Study 2 was conducted to further examine such a comparison for children of the 6- to 8-year word reading levels. There was a small and constant advantage of shared lexical orthographic rimes for children with reading levels 6–8 years but from 8 to 10 years that advantage increased significantly, as expected by Ehri’s phase account of word reading development. The pseudoword reading of children learning to read English involves use of lexical orthographic components as well as context-free recoding of graphemes to phonemes. This implies a qualification to the common interpretation of pseudoword reading as a measure of context-free grapheme–phoneme recoding. Such a measure should use selected pseudowords that do not share orthographic rime units or other multigrapheme components with words of the children’s reading vocabularies.     

Shared Book Reading: Parental Goals Across the Primary Grades and Goal-Behavior Relationships in Junior Kindergarten

Two studies are reported. The first investigated goals for reading with their children held by 294 parents in a cross-sectional sample from junior kindergarten through Grade 3, how these goals are related to parent beliefs about the development of literacy skills, and how these goals may differ across the primary years. The second examined how goals relate to parent behavior. From a different sample of 119 parents completing the same goal survey and observed in shared book reading, a subsample of 42 parents with contrasting goals was selected for analysis. Findings indicated 5 distinct parent goals for shared book reading—Stimulate Development, Foster Reading, Bond With Child, Soothe Child, and Enjoy Books—with the goals of enjoying books and bonding with the child rated the highest and equally highly at each grade. These were followed by fostering reading, stimulating their child's development, and lastly soothing their child. The goal of fostering reading was more highly rated by parents of Grade 1 children than by parents of children in any other grade. Only a modest relationship between goals and beliefs was found. Finally, parents who rated fostering reading high as a goal engaged in more print-referencing behaviors and echoed more reading than did parents with contrasting goal profiles.     

Reading instruction affects the cognitive skills supporting early reading development

This study examined the cognitive skills associated with early reading development when children were taught by different types of instruction. Seventy-nine children (mean age at pre-test 4;10 (.22 S.D.) and post-test 5;03 (.21 S.D.)) were taught to read either by an eclectic approach which included sight-word learning, guessing from context and analytic phonics, or by a synthetic phonics approach, where children were taught solely to sound and blend letters to read unfamiliar words. The results illustrated differences in the skills supporting children's word reading based on their method of reading instruction. For the eclectic group, pre-test letter knowledge, vocabulary and rhyming skills predicted later reading ability, whereas for the synthetic phonics group, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness and memory span predicted later reading skill. The results suggest that children will draw upon different cognitive skills when reading if they are taught to use different word recognition strategies.     

Guided Reading: A Research-Based Response to the Challenges of Early Reading Instruction

The purpose of this article was to illuminate for early childhood teacher practitioners how guided reading, as a research-based approach to reading instruction, could address the challenges of early reading instruction. The early years are the focus for the prevention of reading difficulties and research conducted over the past two decades has produced extensive results demonstrating that children who get off to a poor start in reading rarely catch up (Lentz, 1988; Neuman & Dickinson, 2001; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Torgesen, 1998; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001). One particular research-based strategy, guided reading, is an important “best practice” associated with today’s balanced literacy instruction. The National Reading Panel (2000) argued that balanced approaches are preferable when teaching children to read, based on their review of scientific research-based reading instructional practices used by teachers in classrooms across the country. Additionally, guided reading practices as part of a balanced literacy program conforms to the recommendations on literacy as suggested in position statements by the International Reading Association/The National Association for the Education of Young Children (1998), and the National Council of Teachers of English (2002).     

Socioeconomic status,parent report of children’s early language skills,and late literacy skills: a long term follow-up study among Chinese children

Previous research on the longitudinal prediction of literacy development has focused mainly on the relationship between early cognitive/language skills and late literacy skills. The present study aimed to test the reliability of a number of measures reported by parents as compared to measuring cognitive and language skills in predicting subsequent reading achievement. Two hundred sixty-two Chinese children were administered four cognitive and language skills over three years at the preliterate stage. Additional information on children’s family socioeconomic status (SES), children’s early language skills, familial reading performance and habits, and familial handedness based on the observations of parents was collected. Performance on these variables in relation to subsequent literacy skills at 11 years of age was examined. SES and children’s early language skills significantly predicted subsequent literacy skills. Even with a number of cognitive and language skills statistically controlled, parental reports of children’s early language skills still contributed to reading comprehension. Poor readers defined at 11 years of age had lagged behind in early language skills, as well as family reading performance and habits, as compared to typically developing readers. These findings suggest that SES and parental estimates of children’s early language skills are useful for predicting children’s subsequent reading achievement.     

Maternal Attitudes and Parent Education: How Immigrant Mothers Support Their Child’s Education Despite Their Own Low Levels of Education

A study of Mexican immigrant mothers of young children in the AVANCE-Dallas early childhood intervention program demonstrates that low-educational parents often exhibit ambitious attitudes about educational achievement for their children. Though they lack an extensive academic background, which places their children at risk for low education, their positive attitude manifested in daily pro-educational behaviors overcomes their low education level because they both motivate their children to pursue academic success and participate in their children’s learning. The best way to capitalize on immigrant parents’ educational drive for their children is to partner with them—either through an intervention program or through early childhood educators’ interaction with parents—by showing them how their participation in their children’s learning through concrete activities (such as regular mother–child conversation, daily reading, and playtime activities that teach developmental skills) may increase their chances of achieving academic success.     

From Reading Readiness to Reading Competence: The Role of Self-Regulation in At-Risk Children

This study investigated how self-regulation contributes to the development of reading competence in an at-risk sample of 157 children born to adolescent mothers. It was hypothesized that reading readiness at age 5 would shape self-regulation at age 10, which in turn would influence reading competence at age 14. Based on structural equation modeling, it was concluded that self-regulation partially mediated the relationship between early reading skills and later reading competence. These findings suggest the importance of socioemotional and cognitive self-regulation in the development of reading competence; implications for classroom practice are discussed.     

Mothers’ reading-related activities at home and learning to read during kindergarten

This longitudinal study investigates how the reading-related activities of mothers at home relate to the development of reading skills among their kindergarten children. A total of 1,529 children (5-to-6-year-olds) were tested on word reading twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of a kindergarten year. The mothers of the children (n = 1,529) answered a questionnaire on reading-related activities with their children at home (on shared reading, teaching letters, and the teaching of reading) and on their level of education, their child’s birth order, and the gender of the child. The results show that of the three reading-related activities, mothers’ teaching of reading is the best predictor of the development of reading skills among kindergarten children. The results also show that good reading skills at the beginning of the kindergarten year increase the maternal teaching of reading a child subsequently receives. The results further demonstrate that girls, firstborns, and children with more highly educated mothers are more likely to become good readers by the end of the kindergarten year.     

The Emotionally Intelligent Early Childhood Educator: Self-Reflective Journaling

A current interest in education is the growing awareness that the development of social and emotional skills in children is critical for the foundation of academic knowledge in the classroom. The early childhood educator is in a position to be a powerful nurturer of the social emotional development in young children. It is important, therefore, to challenge early childhood teachers, particularly veteran teachers, to take a closer look at their own social and emotional skills and to systematically reassess these skills through an emotionally intelligent “lens”. The field of emotional intelligence is a new and exciting area of academic research that looks at emotional abilities within the following four domains: (1) perception skills; (2) accessing skills; (3) understanding skills; and (4) regulation skills. This article presents a userfriendly methodology to assess and enhance the emotional intelligence abilities of teachers, and thereby impact the abilities of the young children they teach.     

Training Parents to be Home Reading Tutors: Generalization of Children's Reading Skills from Home to School

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a procedure for teaching parents of mildly retarded children to be home reading tutors and to examine generalization of the children's acquired skills from the home to the school setting. The parent‐tutor procedures were based on Glynn, McNaughton, Robinson and Quinn (1979). Four children aged 8 to 10 years, attending a special class, participated in the project. The reading tutor training procedure was implemented in a multiple baseline across participants design. Tutor behaviours measured were attention to errors, delayed attention, modelling, prompting and the use of praise; child reading behaviours assessed were accuracy of reading, number of errors, self‐corrections and prompted corrections. During intervention and maintenance phases substantial increases in targeted tutor behaviours and corresponding improvements in child reading behaviours were observed. Improvements in the children's home reading behaviours, particularly self‐correcting, generalized to the classroom setting.     

Emergent literacy skills for five kindergartners with autism spectrum disorder: a pilot study

In typical development, emergent literacy skills predict successful reading abilities. Code‐related literacy skills may include letter knowledge, print concepts, early writing and early phonological awareness. Meaning‐related literacy skills may include lexical and grammatical ability, story retelling and comprehension. Children with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) show, on the most part, poor reading comprehension abilities, yet up to date, research regarding emergent literacy skills in ASD is limited. We conducted a study to investigate a naturalistic, standards‐based national literacy programme, for five kindergartners with ASD, of age 5‐8 years in their kindergarten setting. We implemented an ASD‐adapted intervention as an intensive group treatment over 6 weeks, with a pretest–posttest design to examine emergent literacy gains. The children with ASD demonstrated gains in both code‐related and meaning‐related skills following intervention. The clinical and theoretical implications are discussed regarding the importance of an intensive structured literacy intervention for children with ASD before entering school.     

Can earlier literacy skills have a negative impact on future home literacy activities? Evidence from Japanese

We examined the cross‐lagged relations between the home literacy environment and literacy skills in Japanese, and whether child's gender, parents' education and child's level of literacy performance moderate the relations. One hundred forty‐two Japanese children were followed from Grades 1 to 2 and assessed on character knowledge, reading fluency and spelling. Their parents responded to a questionnaire assessing the frequency of their teaching and shared reading. Results showed that parent teaching increased and shared reading decreased from Grades 1 to 2. Cross‐lagged path analysis indicated that the literacy skills in Grade 1 were negatively associated with parent teaching in Grade 2. The results further suggested that more educated parents of higher performing children, particularly boys, adjusted their involvement to their children's literacy skills, while less educated parents of lower performing children did not. These findings indicate the importance of parents' sensitivity to their child's performance. What is already known about this topic

• Home literacy environment (HLE) plays an important role in children's literacy acquisition in Western and some East Asian contexts.
• Children's early reading skills can have an impact on later HLE.
• The direction of the relationship between HLE and children's reading skills may change from positive in Kindergarten to negative in Grade 1.

What this paper adds

• In line with the findings of previous studies in other languages, Japanese parents adaptively adjust their home literacy activities to their child's literacy skills.
• The effect of children's literacy skills on later shared reading is stronger among boys than among girls.
• More educated parents of higher performing children adjust their involvement to their child's literacy skills, while less educated parents with lower performing children do not.

Implications for theory, policy or practice

• We should encourage parents to be sensitive to their child's literacy skills to help them build a foundation that will boost future literacy development.
• This can be particularly true of less educated parents with poorly performing children.
• We should encourage educators to communicate the children's literacy achievement to their parents and also suggest the means by which HLE could be beneficial for their children's literacy development.

     

Reading and spelling among nonvocal children with cerebral palsy: Influence of home and school literacy environment

In literacy research, home literacy experiences and exposure to print have been ascribed a contributing role in later reading development along with metalinguistic and other cognitive skills. In a study on reading and spelling skills in nonvocal children the home and school literacy experiences of 35 children with cerebral palsy were studied by means of questionnaires. The questionnaires were completed by the parents and teachers. The answers from the disability group were compared with the answers from two comparison groups, one matched for mental age and sex and the other for sex and IQ. The results revealed few differences in the home literacy experiences of the three groups. The children of all three groups had access to a variety of printed materials, and there were no differences in the parents' reading habits or in their values and high priority given to literacy. The disabled children took a passive role in story reading with little linguistic interaction, and the parents took the active part. The results indicated that home literacy experiences in the groups studied at best had a marginal influence on reading development. Individual differences in speech and language abilities were proposed to have higher explanatory value of the low literacy skills found among nonvocal children.