Author Description

How do children acquire language and literacy knowledge in many different contexts? How can teachers effectively promote the development of oral and written language? This book is all about teaching the language arts--facilitating children's reading, writing, speaking, and listening development in pre-K through grade 5. It gives readers an authoritative look at how children acquire language and literacy in a variety of contexts, and how teachers can effectively promote oral and written language growth. This unique focus integrates a constructivist/emergent literacy perspective with "science-based" instructional practices proven successful in supporting children's reading, writing, and speaking development. The authors first present a solid foundation of language and literacy learning; examine children's oral language development in depth; discuss family literacy and what children learn about reading and writing in the early years; show how to provide opportunities for reciprocal conversation and discussion; and present a section new to this edition that focuses on vocabulary instruction for young children and more content on promoting oral language in the elementary grades. The second part of the book deals with language arts instruction at the pre-K and kindergarten levels, and in Part 3, the focus is on elementary-grade reading and writing instruction and assessing older children's literacy performance.