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  • Continuity and change in the home literacy environment as predictors of growth in vocabulary and reading

    Resource Type:
    Article
    Creator:
    LeFevre, Jo-Anne and Sénéchal, Monique
    Abstract:
    One hundred and ten English-speaking children schooled in French were followed from kindergarten to Grade 2 (Mage: T1 = 5;6, T2 = 6;4, T3 = 6;11, T4 = 7;11). The findings provided strong support for the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002) because in this sample the home language was independent of the language of instruction. The informal literacy environment at home predicted growth in English receptive vocabulary from kindergarten to Grade 1, whereas parent reports of the formal literacy environment in kindergarten predicted growth in children's English early literacy between kindergarten and Grade 1 and growth in English word reading during Grade 1. Furthermore, 76% of parents adjusted their formal literacy practices according to the reading performance of their child, in support of the presence of a responsive home literacy curriculum among middle-class parents.
    Date Created:
    2014-01-01

  • The role of invented spelling on learning to read in low-phoneme awareness kindergartners: A randomized-control-trial study

    Resource Type:
    Article
    Creator:
    Lever, Rosemary, Ouellette, Gene, Pagan, Stephanie, and Sénéchal, Monique
    Abstract:
    The goal of the present intervention research was to test whether guided invented spelling would facilitate entry into reading for at-risk kindergarten children. The 56 participating children had poor phoneme awareness, and as such, were at risk of having difficulty acquiring reading skills. Children were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: invented spelling, phoneme segmentation, or storybook reading. All children participated in 16 small group sessions over eight weeks. In addition, children in the three training conditions received letter-knowledge training and worked on the same 40 stimulus words that were created from an array of 14 letters. The findings were clear: on pretest, there were no differences between the three conditions on measures of early literacy and vocabulary, but, after training, invented spelling children learned to read more words than did the other children. As expected, the phoneme-segmentation and invented-spelling children were better on phoneme awareness than were the storybook-reading children. Most interesting, however, both the invented spelling and the phoneme-segmentation children performed similarly on phoneme awareness suggesting that the differential effect on learning to read was not due to phoneme awareness per se. As such, the findings support the view that invented spelling is an exploratory process that involves the integration of phoneme and orthographic representations. With guidance and developmentally appropriate feedback, invented spelling provides a milieu for children to explore the relation between oral language and written symbols that can facilitate their entry in reading.
    Date Created:
    2012-04-01

  • Discussing stories: On how a dialogic reading intervention improves kindergartners' oral narrative construction

    Resource Type:
    Article
    Creator:
    Sénéchal, Monique and Lever, Rosemary
    Abstract:
    Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge, however, has not been clearly established. The present research tested whether an 8-week shared-reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize elements of story knowledge. Forty English-speaking five- and six-year-olds were assigned to either the dialogic-reading or an alternative-treatment group. ANCOVA results found that the dialogic-reading children’s post-test narratives were significantly better on structure and context measures than those for the alternative-treatment children, but results differed for produced or retold narratives. The dialogic-reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains. Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.
    Date Created:
    2011-01-01