Developing Pre-Literacy Skills via Shared Book Reading: Assessment of a Family Intervention Program for Preschool Children at Risk of Becoming Reading Disabled

This paper reports on a low cost intervention program implemented into the homes of 34 preschool children at risk of reading failure. The intervention was targeted at families where there was a history of reading disability. Families were instructed in dialogic reading via videotaped examples of good practice. The intervention took place over eight weeks. Pre- and post- measures of language and literacy were taken for experimental and control groups. The intervention was successful in raising levels of concepts about print for the experimental group; receptive vocabulary and alphabet knowledge improved for the control group. There were no significant changes in measures of expressive vocabulary, rhyme and initial sounds. For students in both groups, gender was associated with rhyme, and concepts of print; parent educational level was associated with alphabet knowledge, and expressive vocabulary

Identifying Indonesian-core Vocabulary for Teaching English to Indonesian Preschool Children: a Corpus-based Research

This corpus-based research focuses on building a corpus of Indonesian children's storybooks to find the frequent content words in order to identify Indonesian-core vocabulary for teaching English to Indonesian preschool children. The data was gathered from 131 Indo¬nesian children's storybooks, which resulted in a corpus of 134,320 words. These data were run through a frequency menu in MonoConc Pro, a corpus program. Data analysis was analyzed by selecting the frequent nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs before each of them was lemmatized. The result showed that the children were already exposed to both ordinary and imaginative concepts, antonym in adjective, time reference, and compound nouns. The narrative discourse clearly influenced the kind of verbs the children exposed t

A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers

Examines available research, and arguments by proponents and critics, of electronic educational media use by young children. Examines educational claims in marketing and provides recommendations for developing research and product standards

Young children learning in Gaelic: Investigating children's learning experiences in Gaelic-medium pre-school. Research Briefing 6E. Stirling

Gaelic-medium (GM) education is an important part of current efforts to re-vitalise the language in Scotland. Beginning Gaelic-medium education in preschool is seen as a crucial entry point, enhancing the numbers entering GM primary education and facilitating transition to the school learning environment. However, it is essential that GM preschool is of high quality. Government-funded provision is expected to offer children the same learning opportunities as their peers who attend English-medium settings. Meeting these expectations is challenging because most children enter Gaelic-medium preschool from English-speaking homes so that the nursery or playgroup is their only exposure to Gaelic. Our earlier study mapped the range and extent of Gaelic-medium early education and childcare provision but in the research reported here our focus was on what happens within settings, the children’s activities in the playroom and the ways in which practitioners help them to learn Gaelic, as well as ensuring that national expectations about curriculum and learning outcomes are met

Biligvalni pristup u obrazovanju gluve i nagluve dece

The bilingualism of deaf and hard of hearing children implies the knowledge and regular use of sign language, which is used by the community of deaf people, and of spoken language, which is used by the hearing majority. At preschool and school age, it is necessary to allow children to continue adopting the language that they started in the family (either sign language or spoken language). Children will adopt both language modalities best through interactions with other fluent speakers. Results of numerous studies indicate that the best approach in the process of development of speech and language and the education of the deaf and hard of hearing children is the bilingual approach. The aim of this approach is to develop communication skills in children, to provide a higher level of education for them, and to include them in the life of the community. It is necessary to improve the existing education system in the direction of developing a kind of a model that will respond to their specificities and limitations caused by their primary impairment.Bilingvizam gluve i nagluve dece podrazumeva poznavanje i redovnu upotrebu znakovnog jezika, koji koristi zajednica gluvih i govornog jezika koji koristi čujuća većina. Na predškolskom i školskom uzrastu, potrebno je omogućiti deci da nastave da usvajaju jezik koja su počela da usvajaju u porodici (znakovni ili govorni). Deca će najbolje usvojiti oba jezička modaliteta kroz interakcije sa drugim fluentnim govornicima. Rezultati mnogobrojnih istraživanja ukazuju da je najbolji pristup u procesu razvoja govora i jezika i obrazovanju gluve i nagluve dece - bilingvalni pristup. Cilj ovog pristupa je razviti komunikacijske veštine kod dece, omogućiti im viši nivo obrazovanja i uključiti ih u život društvene zajednice. Neophodno je usavršavanje postojećeg obrazovnog sistema u pravcu razvijanja takvog modela koji će da odgovori na njihove specifičnosti i ograničenja uzrokovana njihovim primarnim oštećenjem

Towards a new framework of English language learning in Malaysian preschools

At the preschool level in Malaysia, all preschools, including those from public and private sectors are required to follow the guidelines stated in the National Preschool Standard-based Curriculum (NPSC) issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in 2017. However, the NPSC is very general and schools are not provided with any further guidance on the program, which leads to some preschools, mainly private ones, to supplement their curriculum by subscribing to various private education franchisors available on the market. There seems to be a need to propose improvements to current curriculum practices. It is proposed that this is best done by investigating the theoretical foundations of language learning. In particular, this paper discusses Pienemann‟s Processability Theory (1998, 2005) and elaborates on the Developmentally Moderated Focus-on-Form instruction (DMFonF) (Di Biase, 2002,2008). It proposes the development of a new model of English language learning based on the latter leading towards a new framework aiming to assist teachers, linguists and syllabus-designers to create a developmentally moderated English curriculum

Pairing craft-making with Mandarin eBooks: An investigation into the use of craft for language learning by pre-schoolers

Bilingual ethnic Chinese parents are concerned about their preschoolers’ learning of their mother tongue. Many allow their children to learn Mandarin by accessing language applications on mobile devices. However the effectiveness of solely using mobile devices as a learning tool for preschoolers is debatable. This paper presents a field investigation on how adult-facilitated craft-making, generates greater interest the reading of Mandarin eBooks and retention of the stories. The data suggests pairing of activities may be useful to children from across language abilities. This also highlights a need for designers and educators to formulate a holistic design approach in the development of preschool mobile learning content

The Index Of Narrative Microstructure: A Clinical Tool For Analyzing School-Age Children's Narrative Performances

Purpose: This research was conducted to develop a clinical tool-the Index of Narrative Microstructure (INMIS)-that would parsimoniously account for important microstructural aspects of narrative production for school-age children. The study provides field test age- and grade-based INMIS values to aid clinicians in making normative judgments about microstructural aspects of pupils' narrative performance. Method: Narrative samples using a single-picture elicitation context were collected from 250 children age 5-12 years and then transcribed and segmented into T-units. A T-unit consists of a single main clause and any dependent constituents. The narrative transcripts were then coded and analyzed to document a comprehensive set of microstructural indices. Results: Factor analysis indicated that narrative microstructure consisted of 2 moderately related factors. The Productivity factor primarily comprised measures of word output, lexical diversity, and T-unit output. The Complexity factor comprised measures of syntactic organization, with mean length of T-units in words and proportion of complex T-units loading most strongly. Principal components analysis was used to provide a linear combination of 8 variables to approximate the 2 factors. Formulas for calculating a student's performance on the 2 factors using 8 narrative measures are provided. Conclusions: This study provided a method for professionals to calculate INMIS scores for narrative Productivity and Complexity for comparison against field test data for age (5- to 12-year-old) or grade (kindergarten to Grade 6) groupings. INMIS scores complement other tools in evaluating a child's narrative performance specifically and language abilities more generally.Communication Sciences and Disorder

Identifying Stuttering in Arabic Speakers Who Stutter: Development of a Non-word Repetition Task and Preliminary Results

Stuttering and other conditions that affect speech fluency need to be identified at an early age in order that effective interventions can be given before the problems becomes chronic. This applies in countries where several languages are spoken including those in which English and Arabic are both widely used which calls for assessment procedures that work across these languages. The 'universal' non-word repetition task (UNWR) has been established as an effective screening tool for discriminating between children who stutter (CWS) and children with word-finding difficulty for a number of languages. However, the UNWR does not apply to languages such as Arabic and Spanish. The present study aimed to: (1) introduce an Arabic English NWR (AEN_NWR); which was developed based on the same phonologically informed approach used with UNWR; (2) present preliminary non-word repetition data from Arabic-speaking CWS and adults who stutter (AWS). The AEN_NWR items comprises twenty-seven non-words that meet lexical phonology constraints across Arabic and English. The set of items includes non-words of two, three and four syllables in length. Preliminary non-word repetition data were collected from ten CWS between the ages of 6;5 and 16;7 (M age = 12:1) and fourteen AWS between the ages of 19;2 and 31;0 (M age = 24). Participants performed the non-word repetition task and provided a sample of spontaneous speech. The spontaneous speech samples were used to estimate %stuttered syllables (%SS). To validate that AEN_NWR performance provides an alternative way of assessing stuttering, a significant correlation was predicted between %SS and AEN_NWR performance. Also, word length should affect repetition accuracy of AEN_NWR. As predicted, there was a significant negative correlation between the AEN_NWR and %SS scores (r (25) = -0.5), p < 0.000). Overall, CWS were less accurate in their repetition than AWS at all syllable lengths. The AEN_NWR provides a new assessment tool for detecting stuttering in speaker of Arabic and English. Future studies would benefit from a larger sample of participants, and by testing a population-based sample. These studies would allow further investigation of the AEN_NWR as a screening measure for stuttering in preschool children