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Argumentation is a fundamental communicative ability that children develop over time through formal schooling and daily practice with peers and family members. Literature on children's argumentation appears to have focused on their social interactions out of school, clinical environment, or informal pedagogic contexts. Even though there are research inquiries into children's argumentation in formal academic learning, many have been focused on argumentative writing in math or science classes. Much less is known about teacher-led argumentation and the youngest children's emerging argumentation in language art classes, where argumentation is formally and systematically introduced and learned. This paper reports a year-long ethnographic study on argumentation in a first-grade English language art classroom in the United States. Ethnographic discourse analysis was conducted to analyze two key literacy events from the daily reader's and writer's workshop. It is supplemented with qualitative analysis of the researchers' field notes and the students' artifacts. Our findings highlight the inherent intertextual nature of children's argumentation and a critical role the teacher played in eliciting and steering the children's argumentation construction through strategic instructional conversations (especially accountable talk). Our findings also revealed teacher-led children's intertextual argumentation as a powerful heuristic process and tool to enrich students' learning. The paper concludes some classroom argumentation teaching practices based on the research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication and literacy development of young children is shaped by the nature of social and cultural relationships in everyday situations. Few studies, however, have explored early story experiences encountered by infants and toddlers in naturalistic settings. We argue that personal stories about everyday lived experiences are a vital context for considering how toddlers develop communicative competencies as they participate in these stories within their families and communities. The paper presents selected findings from a qualitative study underpinned by a broad theoretical view of story embedded in a sociocultural, participatory framework. We contend that stories are collaborative, social endeavours in which intersubjectivity is accomplished collectively and multimodally. Evidence is offered of the communicative process enacted by 1-year-old Lexie, her parent, teacher and peers, as they shared meaning together in a personal story about eating lunch. Lexie and her family were participants in a wider study of the story experiences of 1-year-old toddlers, within and across their family home and early childhood settings, in a culturally diverse community of Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on multimodal ethnography and video data, findings illustrate how Lexie and her family, teacher and peers actively participated together in the weaving of a shared personal story using verbal, visual and kinaesthetic forms of communication. The study contributes to the field of early childhood literacy by providing unique insights into the potential of everyday personal stories as a valuable context for exploring ways children's communicative competencies are developed through relationships in family and community settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the contemporary focus on literacy and digital stories in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. When a group of young children create an animated story together, they might collaborate, both with their peers and with their teacher. By drawing on social semiotic multimodal perspectives as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this paper is to describe and explore how different modalities and narrative devices contribute to the development of an animated story created by six children (aged 4-5 years) and a teacher in collaboration. The study is a qualitative case study, focusing on contemporary events in a Norwegian kindergarten. The empirical material consists of video-recorded field observations of the process as well as the final product. Through an inductive exploration of the development of verbal narrative, three analytical strands are identified: i) verbal narrative in the final product, ii) multimodal narrative in the final product, and iii) narrative devices applied by the children during the process. The findings demonstrate the importance of including and considering the process, the product, narrative devices and all the modalities—in particular the kineikonic mode—when creating an animated story with young children. An implication of these findings is for ECE teachers and researchers to acknowledge and integrate all the various aspects that contribute to the final product when young children create animated stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has consistently established the positive impact of sharing books with young children. Evidence suggests several important factors when evaluating book sharing with young children, including the quality of educator practice = and the nature of groupings, as well as the frequency and duration of book sharing sessions and access to books. Other evidence suggests book sharing may be particularly important for children from low ses backgrounds attending early learning settings. This paper reports on a larger study which investigated the factors and relationships influencing the use of children's literature to support principles of diversity in kindergarten rooms of long day care centres. A mixed methods approach was adopted and a convergent design was employed to synthesise the qualitative and quantitative data and interpret significant relationships and their meanings. The quality of educator practice was measured through the Systematic Assessment of Book Reading (SABR) and Children's engagement in book sharing was assessed using the Children's Orientation to Book Reading Rating Scale. Detailed analysis of 148 video recorded book sharing sessions produced statistical representations of the frequency and duration of book sharing across the contexts and the nature of involvement of the children in the study. Twenty four educators and 110 children from four long day care centres in Western Australia participated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, video-based observations, field notes, document analysis and a book audit. The results showed that while the children in this study had a range of book sharing experiences, few of these were frequent or of high quality. Of great concern is the finding that the children in this study most likely to be considered at risk of educational disadvantage were those with the least exposure to book sharing in general, and, even less so, to high quality book sharing, raising concerns about equitable outcomes for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores learning to read for minority children who are emergent readers (aged 6–7). The research took place in a multicultural, multi-faith inner city primary school. The research concerned children learning to read and the meanings they made of the books they learnt to read with. The article concludes that using reader-response with young children can help us understand children's worlds and lived experiences with reading and learning to read at school. The combination of harnessing reader-response in qualitative, sociological research, which brings together concepts from literature studies, and methodologies from the Sociology of Childhood is a novel approach explored here. The article contributes to new knowledge around the issue of involving children in the teaching and learning of literacy from children's own perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a study of family literacy provision in England and focuses on the effects of family literacy programmes on the home literacy environment. The fieldwork took place between September 2013 and December 2014 and involved 27 school-based programmes for pupils aged between 5 and 7, and their parents. The study used mixed methods, which involved observations of family literary sessions, a quantitative pre- and post-survey of 118 parents, and pre- and post-telephone qualitative interviews with a sub-sample of 24 parents. Building on previous theoretical work, the study conceptualises the home literacy environment into four areas (family resources; parental literacy behaviours and attitudes; parental beliefs and understandings; and family literacy activities and practices). The paper develops understandings of how parents translate and implement messages from family literacy into the home setting, and it shows how participation in these programmes leads to changes in family literacies across all four areas identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents initial findings from a project that explored the use of digital cameras by preschool children in classroom science investigations. Children's science experience was viewed through a multimodal, social semiotic lens. A qualitative approach to data analysis was used to track and codify the visual choices made by the child photographers. This paper characterizes the precise visual choice-making in which the children engaged to compose their photographs. Focusing on one investigation of mixture and separation, the paper contrasts case studies of two of the focal children, arguing that a series of child-composed photographs can be viewed as a visual structuring of perceptual experience. In fact, the photographs provided visual evidence of the children's relationships to the investigation. These photographs are also compared with the children's post-investigation drawings to demonstrate differences in the use of image-as-photograph and image-as-drawing to visually characterize their roles in the science investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates mothers' views regarding the purpose of shared reading with their two-year-old children, confidence in using printed and electronic texts, and selfreported practice, framed around a focus on mothers' motivation to engage in shared reading with their children. Research into adult--child shared reading experiences has traditionally focused on early reading behaviours and talk patterns captured in video data, reporting on the literacy or cognitive benefits of these experiences as viewed by researchers. Parent contributions have typically been sought to provide background information such as parent education, frequency of home reading and socio-economic factors. There is limited research that invites parents' voices. Findings from this study have been drawn from quantitative and qualitative data, collected from questionnaires and individual interviews with 12 reading-proficient mothers of two-year-old children in Victoria, Australia. Findings show that mothers acknowledged the educational affordances of shared reading, and the love of reading that the practice invites. Self-reported practices and confidence levels showed a strong preference for using printed picture storybooks as part of a bedtime routine, and that access to electronic texts does not necessarily equate to the same guided engagement with electronic texts as with printed texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many young children become literate within an environment in which different writing systems exist, there is little research on what children know about different writing systems and how they understand and develop them when they are learning more than one simultaneously. This qualitative study discusses how Korean EFL (English as a Foreign Language) children understand two different writing systems, the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and the Roman alphabet, used for English, within a peer teaching setting. The findings show that they were able not only to discover key orthographic principles which characterise each writing system but also to find similarities and differences between Hangul and English from different points of view: shapes of letters (block shaped vs linear), language units (syllables vs letters) and sound–letter relationship (shallow orthography vs deep orthography). The paper suggests that young children are able to look for key concepts in different writing systems by constructing their own ideas about the principles of reading and writing from an early age as active language learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines student and teacher talk in a first grade classroom in a two-way immersion school in Central Texas. Drawing on audio and video data from a year-long study in a first grade two-way classroom and using a methodology that fuses ethnography and discourse analysis, the authors explore how pluralist discourses are constructed and lived in by bilingual students and teachers. These findings have implications for understanding the ways in which teachers and students are influenced by language policy, as well as how they might either support or undermine that policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Mauritius, English, the least socially used language, is the main language of literacy and the main written medium of instruction throughout the education system, starting from the first year of compulsory primary education. The importance of English as a school language is reflected in the 2003 Preschool Curriculum Guidelines, which mention the need for preschools to introduce children to English in preparation for compulsory primary schooling in English. The development of oral English proficiency as a basis for literacy instruction and education in English is in line with the extant evidence-based reading research which shows that oral language proficiency, often investigated and tested through receptive vocabulary, is a stepping stone to early literacy development. The aim of this study is to test the receptive English vocabulary of a group of preschoolers at the beginning and end of their final preschool year, in order to assess their developing English language proficiency. To do so, a contextually relevant test was designed and administered to a group of 4-year-olds using a pre-test/post-test design. The results indicate that during their final preschool year, preschoolers develop minimal English receptive vocabulary skills, characterized mainly by their knowledge of English number names and related number concepts, body parts and marginal familiarity with general English vocabulary items. This negligible and slow progress in English receptive vocabulary development is discussed in relation to the quantity and quality of comprehensible input being provided in the preschool classroom, as revealed by the data collected from a longitudinal study using ethnographic data collection tools. The paper ends with pedagogical implications for preschool education in Mauritius and other similar contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we analyse one aspect of home–school book sharing, namely the activity of borrowing a book. We describe how the borrowing activity is accomplished in daily practice in two Dutch preschools and which emergent literacy practices can be embedded in this routine. We followed fifteen children, aged from two years to four years, and analysed how they were involved in the borrowing activity as part of home–school book sharing. In total we analysed sixty borrowing events. We found three variations of the borrowing act: children were not involved at all; they were involved in a basic borrowing routine; and they were involved in an extended borrowing routine. In the case of no involvement, the teacher chose a book without the child being present, or the child did not get a new book at all. In the other two cases there was teacher–child interaction. The structure of the basic routine is: (1) the teacher orients the child to the activity; (2) the child browses books and selects one; and (3) the teacher acknowledges the child’s choice. In the extended routine there are supplemental orientations to literacy practices, either about (future) reading or about writing down the choice. Microanalysis of borrowing interactions revealed that although both preschools had implemented the home–school book sharing programme, literacy experiences for individual children differed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]