Journal of Early Childhood Research

Young children are surrounded by ubiquitous environmental print (e.g. signs, product labels) on a daily basis in their homes and communities. Parent–child interactions with environmental print has the potential to foster emergent literacy. A randomised controlled pre–posttest study was conducted to examine the effects of a parent–child environmental print programme on emergent literacy skills (letter knowledge, letter and name writing, print concepts, environmental print reading, numeral name knowledge). Parent–child dyads (N = 32, M child age = 3.63 years) participated in an 8-week (30 minutes per week) programme that used multisensory strategies to identify, trace and write letters and words embedded in environmental print. At post-test, the environmental print group showed improvements across all measures, making significant gains in letter knowledge and environmental print reading. These findings highlight potential benefits of coaching parents to use environmental print to support aspects of young children’s growth of emergent literacy skills.

This article explores the notion of curiosity as a gateway to value dilemmas in early childhood education and care practices. The concept of dilemmatic space (Honig) is used to highlight the complexity of educational practices. Through an ethnographic approach based on video-observation and stimulated recall interviews, the reflections of the practitioners in three early childhood education and care institutions in Norway are analysed regarding situations in which curiosity was challenging and in which explorative behaviour was stopped, transferred or adjusted. The analyses allowed the construction of several axes of dilemmatic space, such as Equality versus Supporting the Individual, Social Order versus Questioning Status Quo and Being Professional versus Being Private. This highlights the entanglement of values, which is part of the ongoing process of constructing professional identity. It is argued that even in the case of widely accepted notions like curiosity, standardised and fixed guidelines on practice cannot be the sole answer to the complexity of early childhood education and care.

Families are pivotal in terms of facilitating children’s language development, including their ability to read. However, to date, there is little research designed to understand how shared reading operates within the realm of everyday family practices. Drawing on data from a study which set out to explore shared reading practices in the home, this article considers reading within the context of the family and everyday family life. In-depth interviews were carried out with 29 parents of pre-school children to investigate shared reading practices within a socially and culturally mixed sample. This study revealed that the relationship between shared reading practices and family practices is recursive. In particular, building on the seminal work of Finch reading was seen to be a specific feature of family practice and routine, and acts as a form of family display. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how shared reading contributes toward the ways in which structure and agency may operate in a family setting. Constructing reading as a family practice and a form of display makes an important contribution to understandings of home literacy practices and behaviors. This article concludes that endeavors to engage families with shared reading therefore require a comprehensive understanding of family life and family practices and the role of shared reading within.

Children engage in a multitude of reciprocal relationships of care within Early Childhood Care and Education settings; they act as both care-receivers and care-givers. In order to better understand the ways in which children construct care (i.e. as they receive it and provide it to others), this study investigated how 15 three- to five-year-olds expressed, enacted, and then subsequently described and explained their experiences of care in one preschool classroom in the Midwestern United States. Data were captured using the Mosaic approach and included observations, photographs, videos, child conferences, and book-making. Analysis of the data revealed that children constructed care in five ways: to minimize the discomfort or pain of others, support relationships, promote positive emotion, enhance healthy and safe habits, and ensure the longevity and sustainability of their shared resources. Interpretations and implications of the mosaic of care generated in the site are discussed.

The effect of digital literacy practices upon young children’s learning is a contentious and growing area for research and debate. Nowadays, children encounter many different types of texts through their everyday engagement with digital technologies. The study reported here investigated the relationships between 6 and 7-year-old children’s home digital literacy practices, parental views about the use of technology and children’s attitudes towards reading as perceived by the children and their parents. A total of 105 children and their parents, from two primary schools in Istanbul participated in this study. Parents completed a questionnaire about their views on the use of technology, their children’s digital literacy experiences and their perceptions of their children’s reading attitudes, while the children engaged in individual interviews. The results from this study indicate that children’s attitudes towards reading are significantly related to both the frequency of their engagement in digital literacy activities in their homes and their parents’ perception of their child’s attitudes to reading. The findings suggest that parents can support children’s enjoyment in reading by engaging in both digital and non-digital print experiences with their children.

An increasing amount of attention and public funding has been dedicated in recent years to the field of Early Childhood Education and the expansion of early childhood programs in the United States. Program quality in early childhood is evaluated based on program-level structural features and instructional support (e.g. problem solving, feedback, and language modeling), but quantifiable measures of structural and process features do not necessarily equate to quality instructional interactions. Questions remain about the presence and strength of socially constructed power dynamics found in pedagogic practice. This case study seeks to illuminate interactions between children and teachers in federally funded Head Start classrooms, teachers’ views of children, and influences to novice project work using the Project Approach. The project work served as a frame for viewing interactions between teachers and children as mediated by varying degrees of power and control of teacher–child interactions at the classroom level (identified as “socio-structures”). Questions investigated were the following: (1) What are the socio-structures inside these Head Start classrooms before and during the implementation of the Project Approach? (2) How do existing socio-structures relate to teacher–child instructional language interactions during the implementation of the Project Approach?

The goal of this study is to inform teachers’ practice by identifying specific language strategies that young children use in their play and suggesting ways that teachers can build on our findings to support students’ language and literacy. Deductive analyses of video-recordings of 5-year old children playing at the sand center revealed that children used cohesive strategies, such as repetitions and conjunctions, to tie together the ideas from one speaker to the next, in order to maintain the flow of the play. Children also used facework strategies, such as complimenting peers, softening regulatory language with words such as “just,” and showing interest in others’ activities. These strategies helped children to build relationships with peers and enhance their positive self-esteem as members of the play group. Children used language primarily for imaginative purposes, in addition to communicating information, regulating others’ behavior, and expressing their individuality and emotional responses to activities at the sand center. Primary teachers may find these results useful for guiding assessment of children’s knowledge of and flexibility in using linguistic and semiotic resources to achieve social purposes and to create cohesive narratives in informal interactions.

As educators begin to understand the need for a social-emotional learning curriculum for young students, finding opportunities to implement a curriculum that supports students’ social-emotional development is important. Research supports that using shared reading opportunities that are common in young students’ in-school and out-of-school routines to embed social-emotional learning could have potential impact for young students’ social emotional as well as academic development. This article describes an exploratory mixed-methods case study that examines the use of dialogic book reading strategies in promoting social-emotional skills of young elementary students in an after-school program in the United States. A pre–post case study design was employed to examine preliminary social-emotional outcomes. In addition, parent interviews were conducted to explore the perceived benefits of the intervention in the home environment. The results suggest that dialogic reading may be a helpful strategy to promote young students’ social-emotional learning. The implications for research and practice are discussed.