David K Dickinson

Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Department of Teaching and Learning

In gaining word knowledge, children’s semantic representations are initially imprecise before becoming gradually refined. We developed and tested a framework for a digital receptive vocabulary assessment that captured varied levels of representation as children learn words. At pre-test and post-test, children selected one of four images to match a...

Bringing together an international team of scholars, this pioneering book presents the first truly systematic, cross-linguistic study of variation in literacy development. It draws on a wide range of cross-cultural research to shed light on the key factors that predict global variation in children's acquisition of reading and writing skills, coveri...

Shared book reading is a common and effective way to support vocabulary knowledge. However, it is not the only pedagogy for supporting this learning goal. We propose a “toolbox” of activities that teachers can use to foster vocabulary acquisition in young children. We first discuss the science behind why these activities are effective (they are act...

This study examined preschool teachers' fidelity in implementing a vocabulary intervention. The purpose of the study is to inform the scaling up of vocabulary interventions, identifying strategies that are both feasible for teachers and effective for vocabulary learning. We analyzed data from a vocabulary intervention in which teachers (n = 10) tau...

Vocabulary knowledge in the primary grades predicts later reading comprehension and academic success. For young children, low initial knowledge about academically-valued words at school entry can serve as a barrier to accessing text and sustaining reading achievement in school. Many studies focus on direct vocabulary instruction and shared book rea...

This study addresses the dearth of research on preparing pre-service early childhood educators to support young children’s language development. Taking a design-based approach to an undergraduate course for early childhood majors, qualitative data analysis examined the seven participating pre-service teachers’ knowledge of, perspectives on, and str...

Preschool vocabulary interventions have reported modest increases in learning of target words, with wide variability among participants. To design interventions that are effective for all learners, more fine-grained information is needed. In the present study, English-only and dual language learner preschoolers (n = 128) were taught new words durin...

High‐quality lexical representations are important for reading comprehension; however, prior research has focused primarily on the verbal aspects of these lexical representations. In this article, the authors argue for the importance of considering nonverbal representational elements of lexical knowledge and for more systematic attention to how non...

The present study examines the perceptual, linguistic, and social cues that were associated with preschoolers’ (4;11) growth in word-learning during shared book-reading and guided play activities. Small groups of three preschoolers ( n = 30) and one adult were video-recorded during an intervention study in which new vocabulary words were explicitly...

We examined the relationships among language and code-related abilities between preschool and grade one to test the hypothesis that code- and language-related abilities that the Simple View of Reading describes as distinct emerge from an early period when they are interrelated. We assessed multiple language abilities, phonological awareness, and le...

Little analytical scrutiny has been devoted to teacher accommodation of academic language at the early childhood level, despite being a critical school-level factor to consider when addressing at-risk learners’ academic needs. The present study investigates how fifteen Head Start teachers support three components of academic language during whole-c...

Despite the prevalence of educational apps for children, there is little evidence of their effectiveness for learning. Here, children were asked to learn ten new words in a narrative mobile game that requires children use knowledge of word meanings to advance the game. Study 1 used a lab-based between-subjects design with middle-SES 4-year-olds and...

In this study we sought to identify profiles of talk during Head Start preschool mealtime conversations involving teachers and students. Videos of 44 Head Start classrooms’ lunch interactions were analyzed for the ratio of teacher–child talk and amount of academic vocabulary, and then coded for instances of academic/food, social/personal, and manag...

This paper reports results from two studies conducted to examine word learning among preschool children in group book reading while we developed a scalable method of teaching words during book reading. We sought to identify factors that fostered both depth and breadth of learning by varying the type of information children heard about words while h...

In this study, the authors examined the impact of a vocabulary intervention designed to support vocabulary depth, or the building of semantic networks, in preschool children (n = 30). The authors further investigated the effect of specific instructional strategies on growth in vocabulary depth. The intervention employed shared book reading and guid...

There is need for empirically-based educational practices shown to support learning, yet validation tends to require a high-degree of experimental control that can limit ecological validity and translation to classrooms. We describe our iterative intervention design to support preschoolers’ vocabulary through book reading coupled with playful learn...

Two studies explored the role of play in a vocabulary intervention for low-income preschoolers. Both studies presented new vocabulary through book-readings. Study 1 children (N = 249; Mage = 59.19 months) were also randomly assigned to participate in Free Play, Guided Play, or Directed Play with toys relating to the books. Guided and Directed Play...

The importance of early vocabulary development to later reading comprehension has been well-established. However, there have been a number of criticisms that the assessments typically used to measure oral vocabulary knowledge do not adequately capture the complexity of this construct. This conceptual review works towards a more robust theoretical f...

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers’ natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52 cl...

Decades of research have identified features of classrooms and teachers’ talk that are associated with children’s language growth. Unfortunately, much of this work has not yet translated to widespread practice in early childhood classrooms. Given the important contributions that early language development makes to later academic achievement, enacti...

We examined the relations between teachers? use of comments during book reading sessions in preschool classrooms and the vocabulary growth of children with low and moderately low language ability. Using data from a larger randomized controlled trial, we analyzed comments defined as utterances that give, explain, expand, or define. Comments were cod...

This study described the commenting practices of Head Start teachers, and the relationship of comments to the expressive and receptive vocabulary growth of children with below-the-mean language ability across one year of preschool. Participants included 52 Head Start teachers, and 489 children (247 early intervention candidates and 242 Head Start t...

The present study moves beyond previous investigations to examine whether an educational intervention combining shared book-reading with a vocabulary game increases children’s vocabulary knowledge. Four-year-olds (N = 44) were randomly assigned to dyads in either an intervention (shared book-reading plus vocabulary review game) or comparison condit...

This article defines academic language by examining the central features of vocabulary, syntax, and discourse function. Examples of each feature are provided, as well as methods of identifying them in oral language and printed text. We describe a yearlong study that found teachers used different types of academic language based on instructional con...

Well-developed lexical representations are important for reading comprehension, but there have been no prior attempts to track growth in the depth of knowledge of particular words. This article examines increases in depth of vocabulary knowledge in 4-5-year-old preschool students (n = 240) who participated in a vocabulary intervention that taught w...

This study examined teacher language use in Head Start classrooms (N = 43) from the perspective of the Systemic Linguistics Approach (SLA) to describe the nature of teacher support for children's acquisition of academic language and factors that shape language use. Using a sample of teachers who were part of a larger study on early language/literac...

This study used an age-cutoff regression discontinuity design to examine the impact of a well-resourced Early Reading First prekindergarten program designed to foster the language and literacy development of 4-year-old children from low-income homes. A special challenge for the application of the language-rich curriculum and professional developmen...

Historical FramingStarting Points for Examining Language in Classroom SettingsAudiotaping and Transcribing InteractionsTime SamplingRating ToolsConcluding ThoughtsReferencesFurther Reading and Resources

Research on literacy development is increasingly making clear the centrality of oral language to long-term literacy development, with longitudinal studies revealing the continuity between language ability in the preschool years and later reading. The language competencies that literacy builds upon begin to emerge as soon as children begin acquiring...

Early childhood programs have long been known to be beneficial to children from low-income backgrounds, but recent studies have cast doubt on their ability to substantially increase the rate of children's academic achievement. This Review examines research on the role of language in later reading, describes home and classroom factors that foster ea...

Indirect effects of preschool classroom indexes of teacher talk were tested on fourth-grade outcomes for 57 students from low-income families in a longitudinal study of classroom and home influences on reading. Detailed observations and audiotaped teacher and child language data were coded to measure content and quantity of verbal interactions in p...

Abstract— Research evidence supports the importance of a high-quality early education to foster young children’s school readiness and success. In particular, programs that focus on eliminating the readiness gap for young minority children, including dual language learners (DLLs), have increased in importance given the current demographic shifts in...

Although the National Early Literacy Panel report provides an important distillation of research, the manner in which the data are reported underrepresents the importance of language. Unlike other predictors with moderate associations with later reading, language exerts pervasive and indirect influences that are not described by the effect sizes us...

Videotapes of morning meetings in two primary grade classrooms are analyzed using a sociolinguistic scheme for describing formal meetings devised by Judith Irvine. Possible cognitive and affective effects of the structuring of meetings are considered. It is suggested that classroom meetings may vary in the extent to which they help children learn t...

Successful acquisition of the ability to read with comprehension is essential for school success and for full participation in the mainstream technological society. The ability to read with comprehension draws on multiple intellectual skills, with vocabulary and other language abilities being of central importance (Hoover and Gough, 1990; Rapp, van...

Research Findings: This article is based on the premise that the field of early childhood education needs to begin to study the details of teacher–child interaction if it is to understand fully what aspects of classrooms foster development and to create effective professional development interventions. To this end, we report analyses of four Head S...

There is a substantial and persistent gap in achievement between children from different backgrounds [National Center for Education Statistics. (2002). Children's reading and mathematics achievement in kindergarten and first grade. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office] that can be traced to the preschool years [Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S.,...

Research conducted in preschool classrooms has long relied on measures of classroom quality that were developed in the 1980s based on theory and data available at that time. They examine classroom quality broadly, provide limited detail about supports for pre-academic instruction, and only weakly predict variation in children's acquisition of skill...

Discourse analysis of interaction in a course on language and literacy development elucidates and exemplifies how preschool teachers constructed new knowledge that can be assumed to contribute to the improved literacy instruction observed in their classrooms. An analytic framework rooted in socio-cultural theory and interactional sociolinguistic me...

This article describes 2 points of view about the relationship between oral-language and literacy skills: The phonological sensitivity approach posits that vocabulary provides the basis for phonological sensitivity, which then is the key language ability supporting reading, and the comprehensive language approach (CLA) posits that varied language s...

The relationship between researchers and practitioners is complex, affected by numerous factors, both internal and external. The present manuscript explores a unique practitioner-researcher relationship: that between Communities United, Inc., an agency overseeing the delivery of Head Start services in the Boston area and the New England Quality Res...

However, we must be aware that heightened visibility brings risks. The new emphasis on accountability will put added pressure on teachers to raise children's scores on assessments. To meet this challenge and take advantage of the current climate, now is the time for early childhood educators to ensure that programs are of the highest quality. Staff...

Three position statements are reviewed with respect to their changing treatment of literacy: two versions of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (Bredekamp, 1987;Bredekamp & Copple, 1997) and Learning to Read and Write: Developmentally Appropriate Practices for Young Children (IRA & NAEYC, 1998). Such position statements are then compared to the N...

In this book, early childhood professionals, educators, and parents will travel into the homes and schools of more than 70 young children from diverse backgrounds and observe parent–child and teacher–child interactions. This book explores both the home and the school environments of children at ages 3, 4, and 5. Shows how families talk to their you...

This publication summarizes a panel discussion held at the National Association for Bilingual Education meeting.

In order to better understand the role of child-centered learning strategies in creating democratic, collaborative behaviors for states of the former Soviet Union, this study evaluated the impact of Step by Step, an early childhood development program in Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, and Ukraine. The study compared educational performance and deve...

Emergent literacy research has demonstrated that children begin constructing notions of literacy during the preschool years and that early experiences support children's literacy growth. Given that parents may have valuable insight into their preschool children's literacy development, we examined the hypothesis that parental reports from the presch...

The Center for Children and Families is discovering the kinds of teaching practices that stimulate language and literacy development.

This article describes the nature of children's oral language experiences in Head Start and in other preschools serving low-income children, and relates those experiences to broader features of the classrooms' programs. The data are drawn from multiple sources, including general demographic information, teacher interviews, and audiotapes of teacher...

present data from an ongoing long-term study of language and literacy development [the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development] with low-income children [age 3 through early school years] and the various ways in which home and preschool experiences affect their emerging literacy skills / because the study is based on a theory that em...

Teachers can enhance their students' vocabularies and provide a foundation for subsequent reading achievement by engaging them in discussions that include low-frequency words.

This article presents results of a study of low-income children's book-reading experiences with their mothers and during group reading times in preschool when they were 3 and 4 years old. Models describing possible patterns of book-reading experiences in home and preschool are proposed and examined by analyzing the quantity and nature of talk about...

A study examined the association between specific features of the preschool language context and the development of children's literacy-related language skills. Teachers were interviewed about the frequency with which they read to student groups during the school day; their preferences about literature; and the nature of their curriculum. Teachers...

A study examined the effects of specific literacy-related activities in preschool on subsequent language and literacy-related knowledge. All of the subjects were eligible for Head Start or comparable programs, with half of the classrooms being Head Start classrooms. When the subjects were 3 years old, a total of 63 children were visited in 48 diffe...

This article reports the findings relating the predictor variables identified through the analyses discussed in the previous articles to the outcome measures of early literacy from the test battery administered to the children in the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development at age five. The test battery, called the SHELL-K (School Hom...

This article reports on data describing the classroom language environments in the classrooms which the children in the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development attended when they were three and four years old. Sources of data for this article include: (a) a teacher interview; (b) a curriculum check list; and (c) spontaneous conversat...

language consists of . . . phonology, semantics, syntax, discourse, reading, and writing / consider the development of this language / separately examine milestones of development / examine the way in which a typical five-year-old has integrated these various aspects of language acquisition / [discusses] implications of the language acquisition pro...

Informal evaluation need not be restricted to evaluation of children; evaluation ofthe extent to which classrooms provide settings conductive to development may also be valuable. This article reports a set of instruments used for the evaluation of aspects of preschool classrooms hypothesized to have important effects on children's literacy and lite...

Investigated the amount of exposure preschool-aged children from 10 low-income families had to experience that might promote their narrative skills. Ss were visited at home when the children were 3 yrs old and again when they were 4 yrs old. The mothers completed a questionnaire on their reading habits and the child's access to literary activities...

Revue des recherches autour du theme des relations entre les habiletes langagieres precoces de l'enfant et la scolarite ulterieure. Deux approches principales de ce probleme sont presentees: la connaissance de l'enfant de la maniere dont il faut parler dans la salle de classe, et leur controle des capacites cognitives qui sous-tendent l'utilisation...

Three day‐care teachers were audiotaped as they read books to their group of 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds. The books included some read spontaneously and six that we provided. Book‐reading sessions were transcribed and analyzed to discover patterns of teacher‐child exchange and to describe the content of book discussions. While the familiarity and complexity...

Children's ability to learn new words quickly (Carey, 1978; Dickinson, 1984b; Heibeck & Markman, in press) indicates that they have strategies for constraining hypotheses about word meaning. The initial hypotheses children entertain about the meaning of words that name materials were examined in two studies. The first study examined the effects of...

Thirty-three kindergartners from two social classes were tested on an array of prereading and oral language skills. Prereading test results were clustered into composite scores reflecting skill interpreting environmental print, understanding how print functions, producing and decoding print, isolating phonemes, and comprehending stories. Several de...

Two experiments examined factors affecting the initial phase of word learning. Four- to 11-year-olds heard new words in three presentation conditions: A conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Overall the results indicate that children at all ages could identify the new words as “words,” were sensitive to correct usage, and could acqui...

Several cognitive psychologists have proposed that people use story schemata to guide comprehension and recall. Using Stein and Glenn's (1979) story grammar, the story recall abilities of severely disabled readers were tested. With the stories and procedures developed by Stein and Glenn, there were few differences between normal and disabled reader...

This article is an extension of work reported earlier in this journal (Weaver 1978). In that paper, we echoed the commonly suggested need for examining reading difficulties in relation to higher-order language processes and offered a schema-theoretical framework for guiding such an examination. In this article we report the findings and implication...

The story recall abilities of 26 dyslexic children were tested, using a story schema representation previously used in research with normal children. Comparisons within the disabled reader group found significant differences in story schema knowledge, but comparisons between normal and disabled readers revealed no significant differences. However,...

This chapter sheds light on typical book-reading practices in classrooms serving children from low-income families and makes suggestions regarding the effective use of books in preschool classrooms. The author first discusses elements of book programs that are particularly helpful to children, drawing on data for 61 of the children in the Home–Scho...

in the research program we are engaged in, we have made an effort to incorporate insights from both these research traditions [psycholinguistic and ethnographic/anthropological/sociological] in the hopes that the results will be of interest to both groups of researchers / in this essay, we will outline the conception of literacy that underlies this...

The need for early childhood programs that foster literacy by supporting both the family and the child is clear and compelling, especially when we consider those families who are most at risk due to poverty, immigrant status, language spoken, or racial background. If we are to prepare children for success in Western technological societies, we must...