Attention and Effort

1 Front Matter 2 Executive Summary 3 Part I: Introduction to Reading 4 1. Introduction 5 2. The Process of Learning to Read 6 Part II: Who Are We Talking About? 7 3. Who Has Reading Difficulties? 8 4. Predictors of Success and Failure in Reading 9 Part III: Prevention and Intervention 10 5. Preventing Reading Difficulties Before Kindergarten 11 6. Instructional Strategies for Kindergarten and the Primary Grades 12 7. Organizational Strategies for Kindergarten and the Primary Grades 13 8. Helping Children with Reading Difficulties in Grades 1 to 3 14 Part IV: Knowledge into Action 15 9. The Agents of Change 16 10. Recommendations for Practice and Research 17 References 18 Biographical Sketches 19 Index

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Preventing reading difficulties in young children

Two instructional studies directed at the comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities of seventh grade poor comprehenders are reported. The four study activities were summarizing (self-review), questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The training method was that of reciprocal teaching, where the tutor and students took turns leading a dialogue centered on pertinent features of the text. In Study 1, a comparison between the reciprocal teaching method and a second intervention modeled on typical classroom practice resulted in greater gains and maintenance over time for the reciprocal procedure. Reciprocal teaching, with an adult model guiding the student to interact with the text in more sophisticated ways, led to a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries and questions. It also led to sizable gains on criterion tests of comprehension, reliable maintenance over time, generalization to classroom comprehension tests, transfer to novel tasks that tapped the trained skills of...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3233567.pdf

Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities

Emergent literacy consists of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are developmental precursors to reading and writing. This article offers a preliminary typology of children's emergent literacy skills, a review of the evidence that relates emergent literacy to reading, and a review of the evidence for linkage between children's emergent literacy environments and the development of emergent literacy skills. We propose that emergent literacy consists of at least two distinct domains: inside-out skills (e.g., phonological awareness, letter knowledge) and outside-in skills (e.g., language, conceptual knowledge). These different domains are not the product of the same experiences and appear to be influential at different points in time during reading acquisition. Whereas outside-in skills are associated with those aspects of children's literacy environments typically measured, little is known about the origins of inside-out skills. Evidence from interventions to enhance emergent literacy suggests that relatively intensive and multifaceted interventions are needed to improve reading achievement maximally. A number of successful preschool interventions for outside-in skills exist, and computer-based tasks designed to teach children inside-out skills seem promising. Future research directions include more sophisticated multidimensional examination of emergent literacy skills and environments, better integration with reading research, and longer-term evaluation of preschool interventions. Policy implications for emergent literacy intervention and reading education are discussed.

Child development and emergent literacy

At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.

Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age

The achievement of labelling was investigated in a longitudinal study of one mother–infant dyad, using video-recordings of their free play in a period between 0; 8 and 1; 6. Analysis of joint picture-book reading revealed that this activity had very early on the structure of a dialogue. The child's lexical labels might be regarded as more adult-like substitutes for earlier communicative forms that he had utilized in the dialogue. These were smiling, reaching, pointing and babbling vocalizations, all of which were consistently interpreted by the mother as expressing the child's intention of requesting a label or providing one. Participating in a ritualized dialogue, rather than imitation, was found to be the major mechanism through which labelling was achieved.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0305000900001896

The achievement and antecedents of labelling

NINIO, ANAT. Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel. CmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 587-590. This study investigated vocabulary acquisition in the context of joint picture-book reading in mother-infant dyads belonging to 2 social classes. 20 middle-class and 20 lower-class dyads were observed, the infants ranging in age between 17 and 22 months. In both groups interaction focused on the eliciting or the provision of labeling information. The most frequent formats consisted of cycles headed by "What's that?" questions, by "Where is X?" questions, and by labeling statements emitted by the mother. Cluster analysis revealed that these formats and other measures of input language fell into 3 groups, each apparently representing a different dyadic interaction style. In the high-SES group, each style was associated with the size of a different vocabulary in the infant: productive, comprehension, and imitative vocabularies. In the low-SES group, the proportion of maternal "what" questions was correlated with the infant's level, whereas "where" questions and labeling statements were not adjusted to the infant's level. Low-SES mothers talked less and provided less varied labels for actions and attributes. They asked less "what" questions and more "where" questions. High-SES infants had a bigger productive vocabulary, and low-SES infants had a bigger imitative vocabulary. The rate of development was slower in the low-SES group, as evidenced by lower correlations with the age of the infant.

Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel

Anat NinioHebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, IsraelThis study investigated serial effects in recurrent ostensive definitions of wordsin the context of joint picture-book reading by 20 mother-infant dyads. Contentanalysis revealed a number of labeling formats, among them simple labeling bythe mother or by the infant, elicitation of labeling by "what-questions," elicitationof pointing by "where-questions," and elicited and spontaneous imitation by theinfant. The dyads applied a mixture of labeling formats to the same referent onits successive occurrences. Imitation was more likely following previous error inlabeling than were correct labeling and pointing by the infant. No difference wasfound in the correct labeling rate following production, comprehension, and im-itation. Mothers tended to follow errors and no responses with simple labelingof the same referent on its next appearance, whereas they followed correct re-sponses with attempts to elicit labeling or pointing from the infant. The resultsimply that imitation, comprehension, and productive responses to words by vo-cabulary-learning infants do not represent different levels of word knowledge, andalso that the respective vocabularies are overlapping at a given point in time.Joint attention of mother-infant dyads torepresentational materials such as picturebooks constitutes a context that is especiallyappropriate for the acquisition of the first lex-icon (e.g., Werner & Kaplan, 1963). The coreprocess through which vocabulary teachingand practice occurs seems to be the so-called"ostensive definition," in which a name ismatched to a representation of its referent(e.g., a picture), the latter in joint attentionof the participants.The realization of this core process in ac-tual mother-infant interaction might takevarious forms. One of the participants mightsimply label the picture after bringing it tothe attention of the other. The second par-ticipant might subsequently imitate that la-bel, either spontaneously or in response toa demand to do so. Participants might de-mand labeling by asking a question of thetype, "What is this?" or demand the provi-sion of the matching picture by a question

Joint Book Reading as a Multiple Vocabulary Acquisition Device

The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3-12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1.1-2.1) and ending when they were well into multiword speech (1.8-2.7). The results indicate that the more verbs children already know to combine in a certain pattern, the faster they learn new ones. Apparently children induce from individual word-combinations some general principles that facilitate further learning. The 'pathbreaking verbs' that begin the acquisition of a novel syntactic rule tend to be generic verbs expressing the relevant combinatorial property in a relatively pure fashion: the same verbs that children first combine with direct objects, are typical grammaticalized markers of transitivity in many languages. These verbs do not have HIGH TRANSITIVITY as defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Rather, they express fundamental 'object relations' of incorporation into, and ejection from the personal. Crosslinguistic evidence indicates that this may be the basic transitivity construct in languages. The results raise the possibility that lexical-specific learning of positional patterns is sufficient to account for the formation of syntactic abstractions.

Anat Ninio

Papers

The achievement and antecedents of labelling

Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel

Joint Book Reading as a Multiple Vocabulary Acquisition Device

Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity.

Classifying communicative acts in children's interactions.