Research in Young Children's Literacy and Language Development : Language and literacy development for different populations

This book presents a series of studies, and researchers’ ideas, that describe how children acquire language and literacy and how their knowledge in language and literacy progress from infancy through the preschool years and to the early years of school. Based on the results of the studies, all authors offer research and practical applications in early childhood education. Readers can use this book as a starting point to conduct future studies that contribute to theory, while practitioners can use the studies’ results to promote and support the children’s language and literacy in their classrooms. This book was originally published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.

The importance of the early years in young children’s lives and the rigid inequality in literacy achievement are a stimulating backdrop to current research in young children’s language and literacy development. This book reports new data and empirical analyses that advance the theory of language and literacy, with researchers using different methodologies in conducting their study, with both a sound empirical underpinning and a captivating analytical rationalization of the results. The contributors to this volume used several methodological methods (e.g. quantitative, qualitative) to describe the complete concept of the study; the achievement of the study; and the study in an appropriate manner based on the study’s methodology.

The contributions to this volume cover a wide range of topics, including dual language learners; Latino immigrant children; children who have hearing disabilities; parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about language development; early literacy skills of toddlers and preschool children; interventions; multimodalities in early literacies; writing; and family literacy. The studies were conducted in various early childhood settings such as child care, nursery school, Head Start, kindergarten, and primary grades, and the subjects in the studies represent the pluralism of the globe – a pluralism of language, backgrounds, ethnicity, abilities, and disabilities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.