What are the most important steps parents can take to encourage their childs language and literacy development?
In the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development we found that there were a variety of activities that parents and children were involved in that led to children’s language and literacy achievement in kindergarten. The best overall advice based on this research would probably be to start talking to your child early even infants are learning the sounds of the language and keep talking with your child about interesting topics throughout the early childhood time period. We found that conversations during the day while parents and children were playing with toys, or reading books, or eating meals could be full of interesting talk using lots of new words. For example, we found that when parents told stories (narratives) or explained how things work (explanations) in the course of a mealtime conversation, their children did better on the kindergarten assessments. The second most important advice would probably be to read and talk about books with your child often, as we found th
