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Developing Literacy and Language Competence: Preschool Children Who Are at Risk or Have Disabilities

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Handbook of Early Childhood Special Education

Abstract

An increasingly robust scientific literature documents the importance of both code-related and oral language skills for young children’s development of skilled reading. Children’s code-related skills reflect their knowledge of letters and sounds and are strongly associated with learning to read in studies with preschool and kindergarten children who are typically developing and at-risk or have disabilities. While there has been substantial work related to understanding and improving language and literacy outcomes for young children who are at-risk and have identified disabilities, much of what we know comes from descriptive, correlational studies. Random assignment studies of professional development interventions provide evidence that interventions designed to improve teachers’ early literacy instruction lead to changes in teachers’ instructional behaviors, particularly those behaviors related to decoding instruction. A continuing challenge is to demonstrate that when the professional development intervention is effective in changing teachers’ instruction, it also results in greater gains for children. Research follow-up with teachers who participate in interventions provides evidence about teachers’ continued use of effective teaching strategies targeted in the intervention and can facilitate our understanding of factors related to teachers’ adoption and continued use of effective instruction and curricula. Follow-up with children provides evidence for longer-term intervention effects as well as information about factors that may moderate those outcomes. Finally, research that promotes our understanding of how to adapt effective teaching practices to meet the needs of individual children in different circumstances, including children with moderate and severe disabilities, is also needed if we are to maximize early literacy and language outcomes for all.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We note, however, that some preschool children who are at risk because they live in low-income families enter preschool with age-appropriate performance in language and literacy skills and continue to achieve grade-level performance in kindergarten (Cabell, Justice, Konold, & McGinty, 2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Health and Human Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Karen E. Diamond & Douglas R. Powell

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  1. Karen E. Diamond
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Correspondence to Karen E. Diamond .

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  1. University of Florida, Newberry, Florida, USA

    Brian Reichow

  2. Dept Allied Health Sciences, UNC, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Brian A. Boyd

  3. Department of Special Education, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

    Erin E. Barton

  4. Frank Porter Graham Child Development In, Univ of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Samuel L. Odom

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Diamond, K.E., Powell, D.R. (2016). Developing Literacy and Language Competence: Preschool Children Who Are at Risk or Have Disabilities. In: Reichow, B., Boyd, B., Barton, E., Odom, S. (eds) Handbook of Early Childhood Special Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28492-7_8

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