Children with Down syndrome (DS) are reported to experience difficulty with spoken and written language which can persist through the lifespan. However, little is known about the spoken and written language profiles of children with DS in the New Zealand social and education environment, and a thorough investigation of these profiles has yet to be conducted. The few controlled interventions to remediate language deficits in children with DS that are reported in the literature typically focus on remediation of a single language domain, with the effectiveness of interventions which integrate spoken and written language goals yet to be explored for this population. The experiments reported in this thesis aim to address these areas of need. The following questions are asked 1) What are the phonological awareness, speech, language and literacy skills of New Zealand children with DS? 2) What are the home and school literacy environments of New Zealand children with DS and how do they support written language development? and 3) What are the immediate and longer term effects of an integrated phonological awareness intervention on enhancing aspects of spoken and written language development in young children with DS? These questions will be addressed through the following chapters. The first experiment (presented in Chapter 2) was conducted in two parts. Part 1 consisted of the screening of the early developing phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and decoding skills of 77 primary school children with DS and revealed considerable variability between participants on all measures. Although some children were able to demonstrate mastery of the phoneme identity and letter knowledge skills, floor effects were also apparent. Data were analysed by age group (5 - 8 years and 9 -14 years) which revealed increased performance with maturation, with older children outperforming their younger peers on all measures. Approximately one quarter of all children were unable to decode any words, 6.6% demonstrated decoding skills at a level expected for 7 - 8 year old children and one child demonstrated decoding skills at an age equivalent level. Significant relationships between decoding skills and letter knowledge were found to exist. In Part 2 of the experiment, 27 children with DS who participated in the screening study took part in an in-depth investigation into their speech, phonological awareness, reading accuracy and comprehension and narrative language skills. Results of the speech assessments revealed the participants’ speech was qualitatively and quantitatively similar to the speech of younger children with typical development, but that elements of disorder were also evident. Results of the phonological awareness measures indicated participants were more successful with blending than with segmentation at both sentence and syllable level. Rhyme generation scores were particularly low. Reading accuracy scores were in advance of reading comprehension, with strong relationships demonstrated between reading accuracy and phonological awareness and letter knowledge. Those children who were better readers also had better language skills, producing longer sentences and using a greater number of different words in their narratives. The production of more advanced narrative structures was restricted to better readers. In the second experiment (presented in Chapter 3), the home literacy environment of 85 primary school aged children with DS was investigated. Parents of participants completed a questionnaire which explored the frequency and duration of literacy interactions, other ways parents support and facilitate literacy, parents’ priorities for their children at school, and the child’s literacy skills. Results revealed that the homes of participants were generally rich in literacy resources, and that parents and children read together regularly, although many children were reported to take a passive role duding joint story reading. Many parents also reported actively teaching their child letter names and sounds and encouraging literacy development in other ways such as language games, computer use, television viewing and library access. Writing at home was much less frequent than reading, and the allocation of written homework was much less common than reading homework. In the third experiment (presented in Chapter 4), the school literacy environment of 87 primary school aged children with DS (identified in the second experiment) was explored. In a parallel survey to the one described in Chapter 3, the teachers of participants completed a questionnaire which explored the frequency and duration of literacy interactions, the role of the child during literacy interactions, the child’s literacy skills, and other ways literacy is supported. The results of the questionnaire revealed nearly all children took part in regular reading instruction in the classroom although the amount of time reportedly dedicated to reading instruction was extremely variable amongst respondents. The average amount of time spent on reading instruction was consistent with that reported nationally and in advance of the international average for Year 5 children. Reading instruction was typically given in small groups or in a one on one setting and included both ‘top-down’ and bottom up’ strategies. Children were more likely to be assigned reading homework compared to written homework, with writing activities and instruction reported to be particularly challenging. In the fourth experiment (reported in Chapter 5), the effectiveness of an experimental integrated phonological awareness intervention was evaluated for ten children with DS, who ranged in age from 4;04 to 5;05 (M = 4;11, SD = 4.08 months). The study employed a multiple single-subject design to evaluate the effect of the intervention on participants’ trained and untrained speech measures, and examined the development of letter knowledge and phonological awareness skills. The 18 week intervention included the following three components; 1. parent implemented print referencing during joint story reading, 2. speech goals integrated with letter knowledge and phoneme awareness activities conducted by the speech-language therapist (SLT) in a play based format, and 3. letter knowledge and phoneme awareness activities conducted by the computer specialist (CS) adapted for presentation on a computer. The intervention was implemented by the SLT and CS at an early intervention centre during two 20 minute sessions per week, in two 6 week therapy blocks separated by a 6 week break (i.e. 8 hours total). The parents implemented the print referencing component in four 10 minute sessions per week across the 18 week intervention period (approximately 12 hours total). Results of the intervention revealed all ten children made statistically significant gains on their trained and untrained speech targets with some children demonstrating transfer to other phonemes in the same sound class. Six children demonstrated gains in letter knowledge and nine children achieved higher scores on phonological awareness measures at post-intervention, however all phonological awareness scores were below chance. The findings demonstrated that dedicating some intervention time to facilitating the participants’ letter knowledge and phonological awareness was not at the expense of speech gains. The fifth experiment (presented in Chapter 6) comprises a re-evaluation of the speech, phonological awareness, and letter knowledge, and an evaluation of the decoding and spelling development in children with DS who had previously participated in an integrated phonological awareness intervention (see Chapter 5), after they had subsequently received two terms (approximately 20 weeks) of formal schooling. Speech accuracy was higher at follow-up than at post-intervention on standardised speech measures and individual speech targets for the group as a whole, with eight of the ten participants demonstrating increased scores on their individual speech targets. Group scores on both letter knowledge measures were higher at follow-up than at post-intervention, with nine participants maintaining or improving on post-intervention performance. The majority of participants exhibited higher phonological awareness scores at follow-up on both the phoneme level assessments, with above chance scores achieved by five participants on one of the tasks, however, scores on the rhyme matching task demonstrated no evidence of growth. Some transfer of phonological awareness and letter knowledge was evident, with five children able to decode some words on the single word reading test and three children able to represent phonemes correctly in the experimental spelling task. The emergence of these early literacy skills highlighted the need for ongoing monitoring of children’s ability to transfer their improved phonological awareness and letter knowledge to decoding and spelling performance. In the sixth experiment (presented in Chapter 7) the long term effects of the integrated phonological awareness intervention was evaluated for one boy with DS aged 5;2 at the start of the intervention. The study monitored Ben’s speech and literacy development up to the age of 8;0 (34 months post pre-school intervention) which included two years of formal schooling. Ben demonstrated sustained growth on all measures with evidence of a growing ability to transfer letter-sound knowledge and phoneme-grapheme correspondences to the reading and spelling process. The results indicated an intervention which is provided early and which simultaneously targets speech, letter knowledge and phonological awareness goals provides a promising alternative to conventional therapy, and that integrating spoken and written therapy goals for children with DS can be effective in facilitating development in both domains. This thesis provides evidence that the spoken and written language abilities of New Zealand children with DS exhibit a pattern of delay and disorder that is largely consistent with those of children with DS from other countries reported in the literature. The home and school literacy environments of children in New Zealand with DS are rich in literacy resources and are, for the most part, supportive of their literacy development. The immediate and longer term results of the integrated phonological awareness intervention suggest that it is possible to achieve significant and sustained gains in speech, letter knowledge and phonological awareness which may contribute to the remediation of the persistent and compromised spoken and written language profile characteristic of individuals with DS.

The current study sought to explore the relationship between four parent variables and children's Early Screening Inventory-Kindergarten (ESI-K) scores among families from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. The four parent variables were 1) parents' perceptions of school readiness, 2) parents' education, and 3) parents' attitudes towards their child's school, 4) the child's early development. The participants were 63 parents and their kindergarten children from three schools in Hillsborough County Florida. Results showed that parents are relatively good predictors of their children's readiness for school, with that variable alone accounting for 18% of the variance in ESI-K scores. The four variables together explained 41% of the variance in children's ESI-K scores. Implications for educators with regard to helping low-income families prepare their children for formal schooling are discussed.

This thesis consists of three separate papers broadly examining how different environmental and child variables affect language and literacy acquisition in two or more orthographies. The first paper is a quantitative meta-analysis of studies that have examined the effects of shared book reading on language, emergent literacy skills, and reading achievement with preschool children. The results suggest that shared book reading explained approximately 7% of variance in all the language and literacy measures combined. The mean effect size of shared book reading was slightly larger for the combined language measures (d = 0.77) than for the combined emergent literacy measures (d = 0.57), or the combined reading achievement measures (d = 0.63). An examination of the effects of shared book reading on specific language, emergent literacy, and reading skills revealed that shared book reading is more related to some skills than others. The second paper examines the effects of home literacy (shared book reading, teaching activities, and number of books), children’s task-focused behaviour, and parents’ beliefs and expectations about their child’s reading and academic ability on Kindergarten children’s (N = 61) phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge and on Grade 1 word reading. The results showed that after controlling for nonverbal IQ and vocabulary, parent teaching activities prior to Kindergarten predicted significantly letter knowledge; parents’ beliefs about their children’s reading ability predicted significantly phonological sensitivity and Kindergarten word reading; and children’s task-focused behaviour predicted significantly letter knowledge and Kindergarten and Grade 1 word reading The third paper reports on a cross-linguistic longitudinal study that examines the environmental, behavioural, and cognitive predictors of Grade 3 word reading fluency, passage comprehension, and spelling in children learning to read in an orthographically inconsistent language (English) and in an orthographically consistent language (Greek). Results indicated that home literacy factors did not directly predict Grade 3 reading or spelling skills for either the English- or Greek-speaking samples. Task-focused behaviour directly predicted spelling for the Greek-speaking sample. Vocabulary was more important for reading and spelling in English than in Greek. Letter knowledge was more important for spelling in Greek and for passage comprehension in English. / Special Education

The aim of the study is to investigate parents&rsquo / perceptions on emergent literacy. More specifically, the present study examined the perceptions of parents on emergent literacy and the frequency rates of the home literacy activities that parent engage in spending with their children at home to encourage emergent literacy through a questionnaire, which was developed by Nebrig (2007). Translation and reliability checks and a pilot study were implemented before the actual study was conducted. Parents were asked to complete the &ldquo / Home Literacy Activities&rdquo / questionnaire which consisted of 45 home literacy activities that parents can engage in or provide for their children to encourage emergent literacy. Participants of the study were 677 parents who had children between zero to seven years old were reached through home visits and schools. And who were living in Ankara. Results of this study revealed that the majority of participants believed that home literacy activities were important for emergent literacy development of their children. It was reported that parents gave more importance to the structured activities, such as using new and interesting words in conversations with the child more than unstructured activities that can be arranged during daily routines such as pointing out different types of printed materials around the house and in the community. Parents did not prefer spending time in rhyming and phonological awareness related activities as much as the other types of home literacy activities.

Studies have examined the impact of parents’ educational level on their child’s emergent literacy skills and have found positive associations (Korat, 2009). However, a review of the literature indicates that previous studies have not investigated whether parents’ oral and written language skills relate to their child’s emergent oral and written language skills. This is important in light of the fact that parents’ educational level does not provide a complete picture of their academic skills (Greenberg, 1995). In addition to parental characteristics, the home literacy environment (HLE) is seen as important in the growth of children’s emergent literacy skills (Hood, Conlon, & Andrews, 2008). The two studies in this investigation explored the relationships among parental oral and written language skills, the HLE, and preschoolers’ emergent literacy skills. Both studies included 96 parent-child dyads. The first study examined the relationship between parents’ oral and written language skills and their preschoolers’ oral and written language skills. All participants were assessed on various oral and written language measures. Descriptive analyses, one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), correlations, and regressions were conducted to assess the relationships between the parent skills and child skills. Most of the parental skills were found to have a relationship with the child skills. The second study extended the first study by examining the relationships between parental responses on a Home Literacy Environment Survey (HLES) and Title Recognition Test (TRT) of children’s books, parental characteristics (educational level and oral and written language skills), and children’s emergent literacy skills. Descriptive analyses, one-way ANOVA, correlations, and regressions were employed to gain information about the relationships among the variables. The HLE (measured by responses to the HLES and TRT) had positive relationships with parents’ skills and children’s skills. However, the HLE did not predict the children’s skills beyond the contribution of parental characteristics. Interpreting the results of this study promotes thought about the specific role of the HLE as a potential mediator between parental characteristics and child skills. Altogether, both studies provide preliminary information about parental factors that may influence preschoolers’ emergent literacy skills.

No description available.

Children with Down syndrome (DS) are reported to experience difficulty with spoken and written language which can persist through the lifespan. However, little is known about the spoken and written language profiles of children with DS in the New Zealand social and education environment, and a thorough investigation of these profiles has yet to be conducted. The few controlled interventions to remediate language deficits in children with DS that are reported in the literature typically focus on remediation of a single language domain, with the effectiveness of interventions which integrate spoken and written language goals yet to be explored for this population. The experiments reported in this thesis aim to address these areas of need. The following questions are asked 1) What are the phonological awareness, speech, language and literacy skills of New Zealand children with DS? 2) What are the home and school literacy environments of New Zealand children with DS and how do they support written language development? and 3) What are the immediate and longer term effects of an integrated phonological awareness intervention on enhancing aspects of spoken and written language development in young children with DS? These questions will be addressed through the following chapters. The first experiment (presented in Chapter 2) was conducted in two parts. Part 1 consisted of the screening of the early developing phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and decoding skills of 77 primary school children with DS and revealed considerable variability between participants on all measures. Although some children were able to demonstrate mastery of the phoneme identity and letter knowledge skills, floor effects were also apparent. Data were analysed by age group (5 - 8 years and 9 -14 years) which revealed increased performance with maturation, with older children outperforming their younger peers on all measures. Approximately one quarter of all children were unable to decode any words, 6.6% demonstrated decoding skills at a level expected for 7 - 8 year old children and one child demonstrated decoding skills at an age equivalent level. Significant relationships between decoding skills and letter knowledge were found to exist. In Part 2 of the experiment, 27 children with DS who participated in the screening study took part in an in-depth investigation into their speech, phonological awareness, reading accuracy and comprehension and narrative language skills. Results of the speech assessments revealed the participants’ speech was qualitatively and quantitatively similar to the speech of younger children with typical development, but that elements of disorder were also evident. Results of the phonological awareness measures indicated participants were more successful with blending than with segmentation at both sentence and syllable level. Rhyme generation scores were particularly low. Reading accuracy scores were in advance of reading comprehension, with strong relationships demonstrated between reading accuracy and phonological awareness and letter knowledge. Those children who were better readers also had better language skills, producing longer sentences and using a greater number of different words in their narratives. The production of more advanced narrative structures was restricted to better readers. In the second experiment (presented in Chapter 3), the home literacy environment of 85 primary school aged children with DS was investigated. Parents of participants completed a questionnaire which explored the frequency and duration of literacy interactions, other ways parents support and facilitate literacy, parents’ priorities for their children at school, and the child’s literacy skills. Results revealed that the homes of participants were generally rich in literacy resources, and that parents and children read together regularly, although many children were reported to take a passive role duding joint story reading. Many parents also reported actively teaching their child letter names and sounds and encouraging literacy development in other ways such as language games, computer use, television viewing and library access. Writing at home was much less frequent than reading, and the allocation of written homework was much less common than reading homework. In the third experiment (presented in Chapter 4), the school literacy environment of 87 primary school aged children with DS (identified in the second experiment) was explored. In a parallel survey to the one described in Chapter 3, the teachers of participants completed a questionnaire which explored the frequency and duration of literacy interactions, the role of the child during literacy interactions, the child’s literacy skills, and other ways literacy is supported. The results of the questionnaire revealed nearly all children took part in regular reading instruction in the classroom although the amount of time reportedly dedicated to reading instruction was extremely variable amongst respondents. The average amount of time spent on reading instruction was consistent with that reported nationally and in advance of the international average for Year 5 children. Reading instruction was typically given in small groups or in a one on one setting and included both ‘top-down’ and bottom up’ strategies. Children were more likely to be assigned reading homework compared to written homework, with writing activities and instruction reported to be particularly challenging. In the fourth experiment (reported in Chapter 5), the effectiveness of an experimental integrated phonological awareness intervention was evaluated for ten children with DS, who ranged in age from 4;04 to 5;05 (M = 4;11, SD = 4.08 months). The study employed a multiple single-subject design to evaluate the effect of the intervention on participants’ trained and untrained speech measures, and examined the development of letter knowledge and phonological awareness skills. The 18 week intervention included the following three components; 1. parent implemented print referencing during joint story reading, 2. speech goals integrated with letter knowledge and phoneme awareness activities conducted by the speech-language therapist (SLT) in a play based format, and 3. letter knowledge and phoneme awareness activities conducted by the computer specialist (CS) adapted for presentation on a computer. The intervention was implemented by the SLT and CS at an early intervention centre during two 20 minute sessions per week, in two 6 week therapy blocks separated by a 6 week break (i.e. 8 hours total). The parents implemented the print referencing component in four 10 minute sessions per week across the 18 week intervention period (approximately 12 hours total). Results of the intervention revealed all ten children made statistically significant gains on their trained and untrained speech targets with some children demonstrating transfer to other phonemes in the same sound class. Six children demonstrated gains in letter knowledge and nine children achieved higher scores on phonological awareness measures at post-intervention, however all phonological awareness scores were below chance. The findings demonstrated that dedicating some intervention time to facilitating the participants’ letter knowledge and phonological awareness was not at the expense of speech gains. The fifth experiment (presented in Chapter 6) comprises a re-evaluation of the speech, phonological awareness, and letter knowledge, and an evaluation of the decoding and spelling development in children with DS who had previously participated in an integrated phonological awareness intervention (see Chapter 5), after they had subsequently received two terms (approximately 20 weeks) of formal schooling. Speech accuracy was higher at follow-up than at post-intervention on standardised speech measures and individual speech targets for the group as a whole, with eight of the ten participants demonstrating increased scores on their individual speech targets. Group scores on both letter knowledge measures were higher at follow-up than at post-intervention, with nine participants maintaining or improving on post-intervention performance. The majority of participants exhibited higher phonological awareness scores at follow-up on both the phoneme level assessments, with above chance scores achieved by five participants on one of the tasks, however, scores on the rhyme matching task demonstrated no evidence of growth. Some transfer of phonological awareness and letter knowledge was evident, with five children able to decode some words on the single word reading test and three children able to represent phonemes correctly in the experimental spelling task. The emergence of these early literacy skills highlighted the need for ongoing monitoring of children’s ability to transfer their improved phonological awareness and letter knowledge to decoding and spelling performance. In the sixth experiment (presented in Chapter 7) the long term effects of the integrated phonological awareness intervention was evaluated for one boy with DS aged 5;2 at the start of the intervention. The study monitored Ben’s speech and literacy development up to the age of 8;0 (34 months post pre-school intervention) which included two years of formal schooling. Ben demonstrated sustained growth on all measures with evidence of a growing ability to transfer letter-sound knowledge and phoneme-grapheme correspondences to the reading and spelling process. The results indicated an intervention which is provided early and which simultaneously targets speech, letter knowledge and phonological awareness goals provides a promising alternative to conventional therapy, and that integrating spoken and written therapy goals for children with DS can be effective in facilitating development in both domains. This thesis provides evidence that the spoken and written language abilities of New Zealand children with DS exhibit a pattern of delay and disorder that is largely consistent with those of children with DS from other countries reported in the literature. The home and school literacy environments of children in New Zealand with DS are rich in literacy resources and are, for the most part, supportive of their literacy development. The immediate and longer term results of the integrated phonological awareness intervention suggest that it is possible to achieve significant and sustained gains in speech, letter knowledge and phonological awareness which may contribute to the remediation of the persistent and compromised spoken and written language profile characteristic of individuals with DS.

Litteraturstudiens syfte är att belysa hur läsförståelsen hos elever påverkas av olika undervisningsaktiviteter i skolan samt vilken betydelse en elevs socioekonomiska status har. För att kunna besvara dessa frågor har vi genom manuell och elektronisk sökning hittat och läst 15 vetenskapliga artiklar som legat till grund för vår studie. Resultatet av vår studie har vi fått genom att beskriva, analysera och diskutera de olika resultaten författarna presenterat. Vår litteraturstudies resultat visar att det för främjande av elevers läsförståelse i klasserna F-3 är bra att använda sig av läsförståelsestrategier i undervisningen. Genom att bearbeta en text med hjälp av de olika strategierna ökar elevens förståelse för det som lästs. Vi har även fått fram ett resultat som pekar på att klassrumsmiljön ska vara stimulerande och intressant för att bringa fram kreativitet hos eleverna och öka deras motivation och vilja att läsa. En annan faktor som spelar stor roll för en elevs läsförståelse är vilken läsmiljö som finns i hemmet, även kallat home literacy environment. En god home literacy environment har i vår studie visat sig vara viktigare än familjens socioekonomiska status när det gäller barnets läsförståelseutveckling.

The rationale for this study was to evaluate the home literacy environments of educators and non-educators to investigate whether educators provide "richer" home environments than non-educator mothers. This research explores the mothers' perceptions of their children, views of reading, methods of promoting a positive reading environment, dealing with personal demands and emotions, and their expectations related to promoting reading. The participants in the study are 2 elementary school teachers with preschool children and 2 non-educator mothers with preschool children. Results indicated that being an educator is not an isolated characteristic of providing a rich home environment. The educational attainment of the mother was discovered to have greater influence on home literacy environment than the mother's profession. Higher educated mothers provided richer home environments than their less educated counterparts.

In light of the fact that the number of Hispanic children enrolled in American schools is dramatically increasing and that these children are at higher risk of academic difficulty than any other group, the present study investigates the educational and child-rearing beliefs held by Hispanic parents. Understanding these beliefs is pivotal in any attempt to improve Latinos' educational attainment since current research recognizes that parental educational beliefs influence home-literacy practices, which in turn influence subsequent academic achievement. The research questions focus on two types of potential differences in terms of educational and child-rearing beliefs: (1)intercultural (Anglo-Americans vs. Hispanics), (2) intracultural (Hispanics with varying educational levels). To address these questions, 199 participants (114 Hispanics and 85 Anglo-Americans) filled out two surveys, The Parental Modernity Scale and The Rank Order of Parental Values, about educational and child-rearing beliefs. The two instruments used yielded a total of five scores for each participant. One-way ANOVAs followed by Tukey post-hoc tests revealed the existence of statistically significant intercultural differences (p < .0001) while no significant intracultural differences were observed. Overall, Hispanic participants had a propensity to endorse the following beliefs while Anglo-Americans tended to disagree with the same beliefs: (1) the home and the school are two separate entities and parents should not question the teacher's teaching methods, (2) children should be treated the same regardless of differences among them, (3) children are naturally bad and must therefore be trained early in life, (4) the most important thing to teach children is absolute obedience to adults, and (5) learning is a passive process where teachers fill children's heads with information. However, both groups shared the following beliefs: (1) what parents teach their children at home is important to their school success, (2) children learn best by doing rather than listening, (3) children have a right to their own point of view and should be allowed to express it. Possible explanations behind the apparent paradox of having Hispanic parents agree with opposite beliefs are presented. Implications for the results of this study and suggestions for future research are discussed.