Research in Young Children's Literacy and Language Development

Olivia N. Saracho is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. She is a former bilingual teacher, and has taught Head Start, preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school classes. Her current research and writing is in the field of early childhood education, and she has conducted research on children’s play, emergent literacy, and family literacy. She is co-author of Foundations of early childhood education (with Spodek and Davis, 1991), Right from the start: Teaching children ages three to eight (with Spodek, 1994), Dealing with Individual differences in the early childhood classroom (with Spodek, 1994), and An integrated play-based curriculum for young children (2012); and co-editor of the Handbook of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education (2014).

• Introduction – Literacy and language: new developments in research, theory, and practice 1. Research, policy, and practice in early childhood literacy 2. Early reading and practice-inspired research 3. Creating mathematicians and scientists: disciplinary literacy in the early childhood classroom 4. Is dosage important? Examining Head Start preschoolers’ language and literacy learning after one versus two years of ExCELL 5. Testing a nested skills model of the relations among invented spelling, accurate spelling, and word reading, from kindergarten to grade 1 6. Young dual language learners’ emergent writing development 7. Quality standards matter: a comparative case study examining interactive writing in the preschool setting 8. Understanding influences on writing instruction: cases of two kindergarten teachers 9. Scaffolded writing and early literacy development with children who are deaf: a case study 10. Contributions of Skinner’s theory of verbal behaviour to language interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders 11. The effects of the Language for Learning programme on the social adjustment of kindergarten children 12. Are young children’s utterances affected by characteristics of their learning environments? A multiple case study 13. Translanguaging in a Reggio-inspired Spanish dual-language immersion programme 14. Conversation Compass© Communication Screener: a conversation screener for teachers 15. Talking about talk: reviewing oracy in English primary education 16. Talking the talk: translating research to practice 17. Language insights for caregivers with young children 18. Investigating predictors of fidelity of implementation for a preschool vocabulary and language curriculum 19. Parents’ shared storybook reading – learning to read 20. Multimodal play–literacy: a preschooler’s storytelling, drawing, and performing of dinosaur extinction theories 21. Increasing early reading skills in young signing deaf children using shared book reading: a feasibility study 22. Informational and fictional books: young children’s book preferences and teachers’ perspectives 23. A small-scale, feasibility study of academic language time in primary grade language arts 24. Literacy in the twenty-first century: children, families and policy 25. Family literacy programmes and young children’s language and literacy development: paying attention to families’ home language 26. Effective interventions to strengthen early language and literacy skills in low-income countries: comparison of a family-focused approach and a pre-primary programme in Ethiopia 27. Early literacy programme as support for immigrant children and as transfer to early numeracy 28. Childcare, language-use, and vocabulary of second-generation Latino immigrant children growing up in a new immigrant enclave in the United States 29. Supporting preschool dual language learners: parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about language development and collaboration 30. The relative importance of English versus Spanish language skills for low-income Latino English language learners’ early language and literacy development 31. Assessing the early literacy skills of toddlers: the development of four foundational measures 32. Development of the language proficiency of five- to seven-year-olds in rural areas 33. Evidence-based reform: enhancing language and literacy in early childhood education