What aspects of the home literacy environment differentiate Chinese children at risk for reading difficulties from their not at risk controls?

We examined what aspects of the home literacy environment (formal home literacy activities, informal home literacy activities, access to literacy resources, age of onset of literacy instruction, child’s interest in reading, and parents’ expectations) differentiate Chinese children at risk for reading difficulties from their not-at-risk controls. Eighteen children from Jining, China, who were at risk for reading difficulties and 32 not-at-risk controls participated in the study. Their parents also participated in the study by filling out a home literacy questionnaire, by recording the daily parent-child reading activities (diary), and by completing the Children’s Title Recognition Checklist. Group comparisons revealed significant differences only in items measuring children’s access to literacy resources and reading interest. Results of discriminant function analyses further showed that the home literacy environment variables could discriminate well between the children at risk for reading difficulties and their controls. Taken together, our findings suggest that to the extent environment plays a role in reading difficulties in Chinese, this should be traced to factors such as child’s interest in reading and access to literacy resources.

Parents’ Impact Belief in Raising Bilingual and Biliterate Children in Japan

Impact belief is the conviction that parents have that they can affect their children’s language development (De Houwer, 1999). This paper investigates how parents’ impact belief is shaped and how it transpires into language management which supports the bilingual and biliterate development of children in exogamous families. Interviews with eight English-speaking parents raising English-Japanese bilingual children in Tokyo, Japan were analyzed using the constructive grounded approach (Charmaz, 2014). The results revealed that the parents’ impact belief was influenced by their individual experiences, the support of their Japanese spouses, and peer influence. Specifically, it was positively affected by other parents with older bilingual children. The parents’ impact belief was also strengthened by their involvement in ‘communities of practice,’ i.e., English playgroup and weekend school. Their strong impact belief led to language management efforts which included their insistence on their children speaking English and the regular practice of home literacy activities.

The Contributions of Informal Home Literacy Activities to Specific Higher-Level Comprehension Processes

This study shows that home literacy activities contribute to kindergarten children’s higher-level comprehension processes, namely knowledge integration and knowledge access. Kindergarten children completed measures assessing literacy and language skills and then their performances on these measures were correlated with home literacy activities, which were assessed via a parental questionnaire. Consistent with previous research, the results revealed that informal home literacy activities were positively related to language comprehension and vocabulary but not to letter-word decoding and phonemic decoding skills. The results also revealed that home literacy activities were positively related to knowledge integration and knowledge access, two strong predictors of language and reading comprehension. Finally, the present results suggest that the contributions that home literacy activities make to language comprehension are the same contributions that home literacy activities make to higher-level comprehension processes. In other words, the contributions that home literacy activities make to language comprehension are not independent of the contributions that home literacy activities make to higher-level comprehension processes.

Interactive Audio Pens, Home Literacy Activities and Emergent Literacy Skills

Interactive audio pens – pens that contain a built-in speaker and that can be used in combination with books that are made for this purpose – are new, commercially available technological developments that have found widespread dissemination. In the current paper, we studied the availability and use of these interactive audio pens and their associations with home literacy activities and children’s emergent literacy skills in a sample of 103 German preschool children. We found that the availability of interactive audio pens at home showed small positive relations to children’s verbal short-term memory. Home literacy activities were not correlated to the availability of interactive audio pens. Results are discussed against the background of current research in multimedia storybook reading.