Currents in Literacy

Understanding Early Literacy Development: A Review of Research and Practice

By William T. Stokes

Introduction

Following decades of often bitter debate, there is emerging a substantial consensus concerning the nature of literacy development. Researchers, educators and policy makers have begun to recognize that while important questions await further research, there is also general agreement about how children acquire language and develop competencies in reading and writing, as well as other dimensions of literacy.

A series of reports and policy statements have begun to appear from the national professional organizations: International Reading Association (IRA), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education and many other agencies, associations and organizations. The collective purpose of these reports and statements is to strive for clear understanding of what the best research has revealed about literacy and to outline areas requiring further research. Thus, the disagreements that remain may be set against a background of general agreement. The present consensus provides a sensible framework for understanding early literacy development and the roles of parents and teachers who support children's literacy learning. In the corresponding policy debates, there is also growing consensus, though here there also remain bitter political disputes concerning funding, accountability and the allocation of resources to low income, linguistic minority and special needs populations.

This report provides a review of recent advances in research on early literacy development and instructional practices during elementary school. Literacy learning is not in precipitous decline (over the past 25 years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has found that reading skills have remained virtually unchanged) and US students perform well in international comparisons in the fourth grade (1992 study of reading proficiency in 27 countries found that the fourth graders in the United States performed second only to Finland), but there remain many children who struggle with beginning reading and writing. Their prospects for future academic achievement are severely compromised unless basic competencies in language and literacy are established. As stated in a 1999 US Department of Education Report, Start Early, Finish Strong, "teachers need to understand the most up-to-date reading research and be able to implement it in their classrooms." This brief review is directed toward that understanding. Interested readers should examine the 400 page report published by the National Research Council in 1998 at http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/prdyc.

Defining Literacy

Literacy is more than simply the ability of individuals to read and write. Literacy is a characteristic of social and cultural groups that engage in social activities that entail the creation and use of texts (i.e., literate social activities). Individuals are literate to the extent that they may participate in the literate social activities that are important to the social groups to which they belong. In this sense, children become literate by a combination of participation in informal engagements with texts (e.g., observing parents' literate activities, sharing in storybook reading, etc.) and in formal efforts with adults to learn specific aspects of the complex competencies that comprise literacy (e.g., deliberate teaching of letter-sound correspondences, reading comprehension strategies, procedures for organizing and composing an essay, etc.). What we mean by literacy and how we understand the nature of learning and development will determine the nature of teaching practices, which should create the conditions that invite learners to become competent participants in the literate social practices that have genuine meaning for them.

Language Acquisition and Emergent Literacy

Research efforts of the past forty years have made tremendous progress in understanding the genetic, neurological, physiological, cognitive and social systems that make possible the acquisition of language and social communication. Among the core findings are:

1. All human societies use language and all children acquire their native language - with the relatively rare exception of those who suffer significant impairments in one or more of the systems that support language.

2. The five to six thousand languages that exist among the cultures of the world today have abstract features in common, and all particular languages are but variants of "human language"; the common or universal features of human languages are given by human genetic endowment.

3. Native language acquisition occurs rapidly without formal or expert instruction - by age five or six children have acquired the core features of all the rule systems that govern language form and use.

4. The broad stages of language acquisition are invariant across cultures and languages - although at finer levels of analysis patterns of individual differences emerge.

5. Language is acquired in use; it is a meaning making process through which children construct or reinvent the language while engaged in genuine communication.

6. Specific features of the social environment account for the specific language children will acquire, i.e., children will acquire the linguistic patterns of their parents and members of their immediate communities.

7. Specific features of the linguistic environment account for some of the differences in the nature of language acquisition between and within groups, e.g., using specific discourse styles, developing a large vocabulary or, learning modes of politeness.

Human language is a complex system that relates sound to meaning; an adequate description of language requires, at a minimum, the recognition of multiple, interacting sub-systems, each of which must be acquired: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology and the lexicon. Language production and comprehension requires the simultaneous, rapid processing of information from all sub-systems which are acquired without conscious reflection or formal instruction.

Literacy develops upon the foundation provided by language acquisition for children who are raised in a literate social environment. From the earliest recognition of street signs and product logos, to the earliest experiences with books, stories and other texts, children's literacy development interacts with language development. For example, lexical development (vocabulary) is an astoundingly rapid process. By age three a typical child will have a receptive vocabulary of 1000 words. By age six, a conservative estimate will be 10,000 words. Children who are richly exposed to the language of books will tend to acquire a more varied, rich vocabulary, which will in turn enable them to successfully engage with ever more challenging texts.

Children who are exposed to the alphabet from an early age will begin to associate letter names to the visual letters and later will begin to associate some speech sounds to letters. Nursery rhymes and children's songs and poetry will all help children recognize (and become "aware of") features of speech sounds and words - rhymes linking ending sounds of words, alliteration drawing attention to beginning sounds. Taken together, such experiences support phonological development, and in particular, phonemic awareness.

Family literacy provides children with many opportunities for learning the basic features of oral and written language. When parents read to children, or tell stories, sing songs, share family histories, say prayers, and so forth, they are providing opportunities for children to experience the pleasure of powerful texts and to become sensitive to the structures of narrative. Children's listening comprehension for texts will far exceed their independent reading skills for most of the elementary school years.

Finally, children who are given opportunities for writing in the pre-school years will have further occasions for linking letters to sounds to meanings. Whether with magnetic letters, alphabet blocks, pens and pencils, or computer key boards, children will string together letters in an attempt to "write" and to have adults "read" their creations. What children begin to learn is that written symbols correspond to speech. All early literacy experiences provide children with richly important opportunities to learn the relation between print and language.

Under the circumstances of exposure to a genuinely bilingual home or community, children from infancy can develop two languages simultaneously. In many places in the world bilingualism is the norm. When children are immersed in a second language during the pre-school years, and where that language is used for the full range of communicative purposes, then children can achieve fluent bilingualism to the same levels of competence of monolingual children within a few years. However, when children first encounter a second language in the context of an elementary school classroom, where instruction (and especially literacy instruction) will be primarily in the second language, then the children will face greater challenges in acquiring that language and developing literacy. Greater home support for the two languages and literacy in both languages will make it more likely for children to succeed.

Children whose home language is other than English may appear to be fluent in English because they have acquired the "language of the playground" during pre-school and kindergarten experiences. However, some of these children will exhibit fluency but not have achieved proficiency in the language to the level that will readily support literacy development. A first grader whose home language is other than English may appear fluent even if the child only has command of 1500 words of English. That number, however, will be far less than the 10,000 or more words known by the monolingual English child growing-up within a literate family. On the other hand, the child whose home language is, for example, Spanish, and whose parents provide a literate home environment in Spanish, will acquire the essential early literacy competencies in Spanish and be better prepared to transfer those competencies to the English speaking context.

Beginning Literacy
(Kindergarten and First Grade)

Children who enter school with those experiences that support language development and early literacy learning begin more formal literacy instruction with:

• knowledge of the language,
• an extensive vocabulary,
• initial phonemic awareness,
• knowledge of environmental print,
• knowledge of the alphabet,
• awareness of the organization of books and stories,
• experience with writing, and
• knowledge of some letter-sound correspondences.

Some children will also know some words and names by sight; they may also have memorized favorite stories or songs which they can "pretend" to read; and, they may have dictated or written their own stories with the help of parents, siblings or other caregivers. A few children will have become "early readers" who can read independently (whether silently or aloud) from so-called chapter books that are commonly read in third or fourth grade.

Children who have not been exposed to the informal opportunities for literacy learning in the home will enter kindergarten and first grade with a distinct disadvantage. And, children whose home language is other than the language of the schools will have the greatest challenge if they are expected to both learn the language of the school and begin to read and write for the first time in the unfamiliar language.

Kindergarten and first grade classrooms should provide a literate environment, i.e., teachers and students should engage in literate social practices for authentic purposes, in order to continue the powerful informal learning that underlies language acquisition and home literacy learning. Children need to share with each other and to participate in reading and writing activities with competent adults who can model their own literacy. Teachers need to read aloud from the best of literature for children, as well as encourage children to read for themselves by first engaging in shared reading and guided reading. Similarly, teachers need to support children's writing with varied opportunities ranging from taking dictation, to shared and guided writing, to independent writing.

Informal learning should be complemented by formal instruction. In order to successfully become literate, it may be sufficient for a small proportion of children simply to be exposed to competent models. Most children, however, will also require direct instruction that will guide them through the intricacies of letter-sound correspondences, the vast number of irregularities of English spellings (both for reading and writing), the complexities of comprehension across diverse genres, and the challenges of writing narrative and exposition for various audiences. And, a number of children - estimates range from 1 or 3% all the way to 10 or 20% - will experience greater difficulties achieving literacy, even when English is their first language and their parents provide a literate home environment. These children will require further, expert direct instruction, such as that provided by Reading Recovery, or other one-to-one tutor programs. Research clearly indicates that early, intensive intervention is more likely to be successful than later interventions.

Direct, planned, explicit instruction may take many forms. Researchers and practitioners continue to dispute the exact nature of direct instruction. Some call for rigid scripts, lesson sequences, highly controlled texts and heightened attention to isolated, specific features of print, e.g., letter-sound correspondences (sometimes referred to as phoneme-grapheme relations). Others call for direct instruction in the context carefully chosen, quality literature which will maintain a meaningful context while also allowing success (reading with comprehension) and attention to specific features of print. Collections of recommended books are sometimes "leveled" in an effort to more accurately determine appropriate "instructional level" materials. Greater training of teachers and greater varieties of books and materials are required for the latter approach.

The general consensus of experts in the field is that a balanced or integrative approach is best, with flexibility in arrangements of whole class, small group and individual instruction, which itself ranges from well-crafted informal learning environments to expertly planned formal learning opportunities. The primary goal of an integrative approach is to sustain meaningfulness, within an authentic literate classroom environment, while also providing explicit, direct instruction where it is judged to be most needed, including judicious attention to practice with isolated features of the language. Children need time to read and to write for pleasure and for the range of authentic purposes. Instruction should build upon prior knowledge, provide support where needed (scaffolds), and present challenges in reasonable measure to advance their competencies. Moreover, instruction should be guided by careful observation and on-going assessment of children's successes and struggles, thus instruction is responsive to the requirements of specific children in specific circumstances.

Reading and writing, like language processing (listening and speaking) require the simultaneous, rapid processing of multiple levels of information, i.e., parallel processing. At a minimum, the levels include:

• Orthographic (letters, spellings, capitalization, punctuation),
• Phonological (sounds),
• Morphological (word forms, plurals, tense, prefixes, suffixes, etc.),
• Syntactic (clause structures and sentences, larger discourse),
• Lexical (properties of words, including sounds, spellings and meanings)
• Semantic (meaning and comprehension),
• Pragmatic (intentions - e.g., narrative and expository) and
• Cultural (e.g., assumptions, background knowledge and cultural expectations).

Fluent, independent reading and writing require competence within each of these levels of processing. Instructional approaches that substantially neglect certain levels while attending exclusively to others, or that focus on reading while neglecting writing, will be less successful in supporting full literacy development.

Development Toward Independence
(Second and Third Grade)

If English provided a perfect alphabet system, then it might be possible for children to learn the alphabetic principle (letter-sound correspondences) in two or three months in first grade, and then all other language arts instruction would be directed toward developing language: greater vocabulary, more subtle comprehension, writing for an audience, greater knowledge of the physical and social world through texts. Learning to read, as such, would be very easy. The complexity of the English orthography tends, however, to require three or more years for children to gain independence in reading sufficient to take full advantage of their oral language competence. And, learning to spell in English becomes a lifelong challenge for many, including many well-educated adults.

Learning to read (accurately, fluently and with comprehension) will require both frequent access to demonstrations of mature literacy by competent models and continued direct instruction in effective strategies throughout elementary school. The same may be said for learning to write (including spelling, punctuation and conventions of composition). And, both reading and writing should be blended with other aspects of language development and language arts instruction. In discussions about the role of phonics in reading instruction, it is often forgotten that in learning to write children are confronted with the complementary problem of discovering the appropriate letters to represent sounds. They soon learn that letter-sound correspondences can take one only so far; word knowledge will be required to make further progress (e.g., consider homomyms such as pear, pair, and pare, or words with a common root such as native, nation, and nature).

Thus second and third grade continue the practices initiated in kindergarten and first grade, carefully advancing the richness and the challenges of the literate environment (sustaining informal learning), while continuing direct instruction where needed as children encounter ever more complex features of English. Exposure to larger vocabularies, wider varieties of texts, more complex ideas, all require expert instruction which includes continuous assessment of the progress of individual children and the willingness to make instructional decisions based upon that information. An integrative approach remains the consensus of experts in the field, though differences of opinion persist concerning the day-by-day, lesson-by-lesson recommendations. Those differences remain largely matters of emphasis.

Developing Proficiency and Fluency
(Fourth and Fifth Grades)

Extending the practices outlined above, the goals of the intermediate grades shift from learning to read to reading to learn - across the curriculum. Reading and writing are directed toward developing knowledge and understanding in an ever expanding range of texts, genres and purposes. Students continue to need opportunities for collaborative, informal learning within an authentic literate environment where teachers continue to model their competencies. They also continue to need explicit demonstrations, direct instruction, opportunity to practice, encouragement to achieve fluency as well as precision, and high expectations. Students need to engage in literacy for authentic purposes, for example, to write for genuine audiences (beyond the classroom teacher alone) and to read for interest, pleasure and self-directed learning.

Those students who for various reasons are still struggling with beginning reading and writing require special opportunities individually or in small groups for accelerated learning, guided by master teachers with the goal of having them catch up to their peers. Such instruction will be directed toward the students' greatest challenges (e.g., "phonics," or "comprehension strategies," or gaining necessary knowledge of English) and it will be required to support and build upon those areas within which the students have the greatest successes. Late interventions are less likely to achieve rapid results than earlier interventions, and they will tend to require greater allocation of resources. Support for home literacy and English language learning should be incorporated where appropriate.

It is important to stress the fact that genuine learning disabilities and linguistic minority conditions can not be removed by legislated standards, high stakes tests or executive orders. These circumstances require concentrated attention, significant resources, expert teachers and community support. Inexperienced tutors, well meaning volunteers, and minimally trained para-professionals will not be sufficient. More expert teachers with deep knowledge of language acquisition and literacy development are needed. Moreover, approximately 95% of teachers in this country are monolingual speakers of English who have little or no experience having attempted to acquire a second language. With approximately 20% of the national school population speaking a language other than English in the home and the community, it will be essential that teachers learn more about the challenges of second language learning and literacy.

Literacy Programs

In most nations, educational policy is determined at the national level. There will likely be a national science curriculum or math curriculum. And, there will be national guidelines for the language arts and all the curricular domains. The US differs with its tradition of state and local control of schools. Thus the fifty states, or even the 10,000 school districts, can determine their own policies. As a consequence, there are as many approaches to these matters as there are jurisdictions. Tradition provides for a long cooperation between school systems and numerous publishers, who also work closely with national professional associations and universities, in the design of curricula.

There are more than twenty well known published reading "programs" (e.g., Houghton-Mifflin, Scholastic, Scott-Foresman, Addison-Wesley, Heath, Merrill, Silver Burdett and Ginn, etc.). Each program offers attention to:

• mechanics of reading (grapho-phonemic details, visual processes),
• reading comprehension (strategies, purposes and critical reading),
• literature (varied genres),
• spelling and punctuation,
• word knowledge, vocabulary,
• grammar and conventions of written language,
• writing expressively and persuasively (with revision and editing),
• approaches to maintaining motivation and pleasure in literacy,
• approaches to integrating the language arts and literacy across the curriculum, and
• using reading and writing as tools for thinking and learning about the world.

Each also provides some form of assessment or record keeping procedures to aid teachers and administrators in on-going program planning. Most also include attention to new technologies. Some focus on children with specific difficulties (e.g., dyslexia or other reading disabilities), and others focus on the needs of children acquiring English as a second language. Yet, all draw from the same understandings of what reading and writing entail, and what variety of classroom activities are available to support literacy development. The famous "phonics vs whole language" debate was always the wrong dispute, and publishers and program developers have always combined, balanced and integrated the different elements listed briefly above, each with some difference in emphasis.

The basic options for curriculum and pedagogy have been "regular" education, special education, and bilingual education. Students who have struggled in "regular ed." have sometimes been retained to repeat a grade, or have been referred to "sped" or "bilingual" programs as deemed appropriate. These latter programs are usually substantially supported by state or even federal monies, rather than relying on local taxation. Title 1 (or Chapter 1) programs are an example of federal support for schools within low-income communities.

During the last twenty years there has been a proliferation of what might be called "name brand" or trade marked programs, beyond those offered by publishers. Among these are the well known Reading Recovery (plus ELLI or the Literacy Collaborative) and Success for All (plus Roots and Wings). Others, some focused on literacy - some more general, include (in no particular order) Direct Instruction (growing out of DISTAR), Bridge Reading Program, America Reads, Even Start, Book Buddies, Early Intervention in Reading, Waterford Early Reading Program, Soar to Success, Accelerated Schools, Core Knowledge, School Development Program, and literally hundreds of other projects and initiatives at local, state, national and federal levels.

There is no experimental research that definitively identifies one variant program as superior to another. Such research is not even possible because of the practical limits of experimentation with human subjects in the real world. When critics demand proof from randomized, experimental field studies, they must settle for small scale studies completed with small populations in specific locations, with particular, uncontrolled local conditions. Sorting through this research was indeed the task of the National Research Council. Their findings mention a few specific programs, but focus on underlying, common features that have been shown to contribute to the success of various programs. (See page 39 for commentary on Reading Recovery.)

Socio-economic Conditions

All children throughout the world acquire their parents' language - the "mother tongue." All learn the discourse patterns of their families and communities. There are more than 5,000 languages in the world today, but it should be noted that only a few hundred of these languages have a written form. Language is universal, but literacy is not. And, the conditions of schooling and literacy are certainly not equally distributed in society.

It should be immediately emphasized that there are no established general biological or cognitive bases for poor or marginalized children to achieve lesser success in school or, particularly, in literacy. However, it is well established in this country that socio-economic conditions are powerful predictors of both literacy and school success. The reasons have been much debated and a full discussion of these is beyond the scope of this review. But, it should be noted that in national and state testing programs that reach thousands of students across hundreds of communities, it will be reliably found that the correlation of test scores to measures of socio-economic conditions will be high, in the range of .80 to .90. The Boston Globe reported recently that 19 schools exceeded expectations, in each of the past three years, on the state mandated Iowa Reading Test for 3rd grade. These 19 schools had higher than average numbers of low-income students and achieved average test scores higher than the state averages. While these are fine results for the 19 schools, the report does not draw attention to the necessary implication: hundreds of schools performed as expected given the economic conditions. The nature of these "expectations" warrants further public discussion. Even the most cursory examination of the 1998 results of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing for all the communities in eastern Massachusetts will find overwhelmingly that the children in wealthy communities out-score those in middle class communities who will, in turn, out-score those in poor communities and diverse urban school systems.

Where it is possible to establish good measures of family literacy (both as levels of education and as literacy practices in the home) and sensitive measures of family support for schooling and literacy (e.g., parents' beliefs about the value of school success and literacy), then these factors can be combined with economic conditions to produce multiple correlations that exceed .90.

What this suggests is that the unique contributions of the schools (and teachers) should be understood in relation to other social conditions. It follows that research that focuses exclusively on school based conditions will be over-looking important, powerful conditions. And, it follows that only marginal differences will be found by new research into competing school-based programs, which, with minor differences, are themselves guided by the same body of knowledge and understandings of literacy development.

In the current debates on literacy there is an astounding silence on these issues. Most reports focus on the school or the classroom and largely avoid the larger social issues. In the call for consensus and the pressure for "best practices," there is a bias toward considering only the "best" research, which tends to mean only rigorously controlled experimental and quasi-experimental designs. Such designs require random assignment of subjects to conditions, or an approximation of randomization (perhaps by stratified sampling or other procedures). Since students (and parents) can not be randomly assigned to socio-economic categories, those variables, arguably the most powerful, are recognized in most research designs only as the "co-variates" - i.e., efforts are made to control for them rather than to directly investigate them. Other research approaches, especially ethnographic models, which can more fully investigate socio-cultural and economic influences, are given less attention in the current reports and efforts toward consensus. Quantification, control and replication are preferred over long-term, careful documentation ("thick description") of complex systems. In all the research reviewed in preparation of this report, there has been little or no attention whatsoever to classic studies of class and cultural conditions affecting literacy and success in schools.

Conclusions

The biological and social foundations of language acquisition are now reasonably well understood. In a similar sense, the nature of family literacy and school curricula that support reading and writing and the full scope of literacy development are well understood. Questions remain as to how we might best support language and literacy for children with special needs and for children who are learning English as a second language. There is consensus, however, that excellent and expert teaching succeed when conditions are most conducive, especially in relation to community support and to institutional variables such as the number of children who are to receive attention at the same time from the teacher. When teachers can flexibly move between large group, small group and individual modes of instruction, then children will most benefit. In some circumstances this may suggest a "division of labor" between teachers who are working in collaborative professional teams: some may provide whole classroom instruction on a routine basis while others provide intensive assistance in small groups or with individual students (e.g., Reading Recovery). Where such arrangements are most integrated and collaborative, then children will benefit most.

The general consensus of experts in the field is that a balanced or integrative approach is best, with both well-crafted informal learning environments (including competent models and demonstrations) and expertly planned formal learning opportunities. The primary goal of an integrative approach is to sustain meaningfulness, within an authentic literate classroom environment, while also providing explicit, direct instruction where it is judged to be most needed. Moreover, instruction should be guided by careful observation and on-going assessment of children's successes and struggles, thus instruction will be responsive to the requirements of individual children in specific circumstances.

Continued investigation of the social, linguistic, economic and political conditions of literacy development should be included within the current attention to "best practices" and experimental research efforts to compare one specified program with another. Only then, will we have the opportunity to move closer to universal literacy and full participation in the cultural, economic, and political life of this society.

Further Reading:
Understanding Early Literacy Development

Adams, Marilyn J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Askew, B.J., Fountas, I., Lyons, C.A., Pinnell, G.S., & Schmitt, M. C. (1998). Reading Recovery Review: Understandings, Outcomes and Implications. Columbus, OH: Reading Recovery Council of North America.

Berliner, David and Bruce Biddle (1995). The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on American Public Schools. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Chall, Jeanne S. (1983). Stages of Reading Development. NY: McGraw-Hill

Clay, Marie M. (1985). The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties (3rd Ed.) Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Clay, Marie M. (1991). Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Cummins, Jim (1984). Bilingualism in Special Education. San Diego,CA: College Hill Press.

Cunningham, Patricia and Richard Allington (1999). Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write (2nd ed.) NY: Addison Wesley Longman.

DeFord, D. E., Lyons, C., & Pinnell, G. S. (Eds.) (1991). Bridges to Literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Durkin, Dolores (1966). Children Who Read Early. NY: Teachers College Press.

Fountas, Irene and Gay Su Pinnell (1996). Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Holdaway, Don (1979). The Foundations of Literacy. Sydney, Australia: Ashton Scholastic.

Kozol, Jonathan (1985). Illiterate America. NY: New American Library.

Kozol, Jonathan (1991). Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. NY: Crown.

Krashen, Steven D. (1996). Every Person a Reader. Culver City, CA: Language Education Associates.

National Research Council (1998). Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. (editors: C. Snow, M. S. Burns, P.Griffin), Washington DC: National Academy Press.

National Research Council (1998). Starting Out Right: A Guide to Promoting Children's Reading Success. Washington DC: National Academy Press.

National Research Council (1997). Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda (editors: D. August and K. Hakuta) Washington DC: National Academy Press.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. NY: William Morrow.

Slavin, Robert, Nancy Madden, Lawrence Dolan and Barbara Wasik (1996). Every Child, Every School: Success for All. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Taylor, Denny and Catherine Dorsey-Gains (1988). Growing Up Literate: Learning from Inner-City Families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

William T. Stokes is a Professor at Lesley University, and director of the Hood Children's Literacy Project. For the past twenty-five years he has focused on children's language and literacy development.