‘Hey diddle diddle,the cat and the fiddle: What ever happened to Mother Goose?’

Mother Goose and other types of playful rhymes are an important part of children's oral language development and help them understand several important oral and written language concepts, including words, phonemes, segmentation, matching, and position. Inclusion of nursery rhymes in the early childhood curriculum provides a natural, enjoyable way to help children develop these language skills.Joanne R. Nurss is Professor of Early Childhood Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta.     

Using Stakeholder Input to Guide Cultural and Contextual Adaptations for a Universal School-Based Intervention

The Urban Review - Strong student–teacher relationships foster students’ social, emotional, and academic development, particularly for students from marginalized racial/ethnic groups....     

The tensions of preparing pre-service teachers to be assessment capable and profession-ready

There is both a growing appreciation of teacher assessment capability for the improvement of school student learning and achievement and a commensurate drive for graduates in Australian Initial Teacher Education institutions to demonstrate impact on school student learning as part of a national accreditation process. We argue in this article that if institutions are to prepare assessment capable graduates who are “profession-ready”, attention to practice architectures is warranted. Practice architectures are the features in schools that enable and/or constrain practice. Skills, knowledge and understandings do not just cleanly transfer across Initial Teacher Education institutions and practicum contexts into graduate teacher classrooms. Practitioner identities are produced through “relatings” within specific social-political arrangement, “doings” that constitute activities afforded in material-economic conditions, and “sayings” that are a dominating medium in cultural-discursive frameworks.     

The Processing of Inflectional Morphology: A Comparison of Children with and without Dyslexia

Children aged 11–12 years with a diagnosis of dyslexia (DR) were compared to chronological and reading-age matched poor readers (PR), and two normal reader groups, age-matched (CA) and spelling and reading-age matched (SA–RA), on their processing of inflectional morphology. In comparison to SA–RAs and PRs, the DRs made more spelling errors on regular past tense verb endings relative to irregular past tense verbs and non-verbs. In reading, the DRs took longer than the other groups to make decisions in the written but not oral condition of a tense judgement task. In addition, they were less affected than the PR and SA–RA groups by case altered disruption to the morpheme boundary of inflected verbs. The findings suggest dyslexic children do not show deficits in morphological processing in spoken language, but they are slower at reading and less accurate at spelling regularly inflected verbs compared with normally developing younger children. This difference could plausibly be accommodated within the Phonological Deficit Hypothesis of dyslexia.     

A study of handwriting in written stories of normal and learning disabled children

Written stories of normally achieving and learning disabled children in grades one through three were compared, using a Handwriting Evaluation Scale designed for this study. The subjects also were given tests for receptive language, figure copying and spelling. The Non-LD and LD groups differed on figure copying, spelling and written productivity, but not receptive language. The Non-LD grade level groups differed significantly on two components of the handwriting scale (Letter Size and Control), while the LD grade level groups differed on three components (Letter Formation, Alignment and Spacing, and Letter Size). The most pronounced differences between the LD and normally achieving children were on Formation and Size. A separate analysis of the third grade stories revealed that handwriting was less related to productivity than spelling and visual-motor skills. Nevertheless, the results indicated that many LD students have weak visual-spatial-motor skills. Implications for intervention are discussed.     

Assessing emergent literacy in preschool classrooms

Recent research on the literacy development of children during the preschool years has emphasized the notion of “emergent literacy,” according to authors Kontos (1986) and Teale and Sulzby (1986). According to this view, preschool children learn about reading and writing as they participate in a literate culture. Early social interactions involving print are crucial to children's reading and writing development, according to the Early Childhood and Literacy Development Committee (1986).