Beginning Literacy with Language: Young Children Learning at Home and School

Dickinson, David K., & Patton O. Tabors, (Eds.). (2001). Beginning Literacy with Language: Young Children Learning at Home and School. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. 409 pp. ISBN 1-55766-479-X.

This book is a must read for educators and researchers. Dickinson and Tabors pick up where Hart and Risely leave off in their longitudinal home-school study project in which the contributing authors followed the lives children and their families and teachers of children ages 3 to 5. Throughout the book the editors show the significant influence that opportunities for talking in routine activities with three-year olds has on emergent literacy achievement in kindergarten. The abundant excerpts of dialogue between the children and parents or teachers will engage readers as much as they provide a rich context for thinking about the lives of the children.

Dickinson and Tabors argue that preschool classrooms contribute to children's language and literacy development and "access to particular language and literacy learning experiences in preschool makes a big difference to child outcomes. Teacher language use and auricular focus are crucial to optimal effects" (p. 330). At the same time, Dickinson and Tabors show that families make a difference. The kinds of talk about books at home, for instance, influences literacy achievement later in school. Parents making connections with their children between what they read and their lives enhances achievement later much more than talking about the literal information in the stories they read with their children. Where parents spend time talking about words, children have a greater capacity for listening, or receptive vocabulary later in kindergarten.

Divided into three sections, the book's first section concerns the home, book sharing and reading, mealtime conversations, play talk focusing on three categories of pretend and non pretend talk related to toys and talk that is not related to the toys, and exploration of vocabulary, or more generally, the character of the...