Jeanne M. De Temple

Longitudinal Prediction of Child Outcomes from Differing Measures of Parenting in a Low-Income Sample.

This study examined predictions from preschool parenting measures to middle childhood cognitive and socioemotional child outcomes to explore whether parenting assessment methodologies that require more time, training, and expense yield better predictions of child outcomes than less intensive methodologies. Mother-child dyads (N = 278) in low-income African American families were assessed when the child was in preschool, using maternal report, the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment-Short Form (P. Baker & F. Mott, 1989; R. Bradley & B. Caldwell, 1984), and structured observational measures of parenting. Child outcomes reported by children, mothers, teachers, and direct assessment were collected 4 years later. All parenting methodologies showed some predictive value; however, observational parenting measures showed the strongest and most consistent predictions of child outcomes.

Book reading with preschoolers: Coconstruction of text at home and at school

Abstract This article presents results of a study of low-income childrens book-reading experiences with their mothers and during group reading times in preschool when they were 3 and 4 years old. Models describing possible patterns of book-reading experiences in home and preschool are proposed and examined by analyzing the quantity and nature of talk about books in both settings. Talk about texts was coded as immediate (e.g., labeling pictures), nonimmediate (e.g., recall, analysis), organizational , or extending (e.g., requesting clarification, feedback). The types of books read also were considered. When they were 3 years old the primary focus of book readings in both settings was on immediate information. Compared with teachers, mothers were likely to use more extending and fewer organizational comments. When children were 4 years old, talk in the home was again dominated by immediate talk, but compared with when they were 3, there was less extending talk by mothers, and more extending comments by children. In school there was more extending talk by teachers and nonimmediate utterances by children than was found the previous year. Home-school comparisons revealed more nonimmediate talk by teachers and children and more extending, organizational, and total talk by teachers. The patterns of talk about books in both settings and the changes from year-to-year support a Partnership model of home-school relationship: Mothers provide an introduction to book reading that teachers expand by engaging children in discussions of a cognitively challenging nature.

Language processing in bilingual children: Giving formal definitions: a linguistic or metalinguistic skill?

As children go farther and farther in school, they are required to devote relatively more and more attention to the form as compared to the content of their language productions. Tasks which might seem straightforwardly communicative and linguistic, such as writing paragraphs, telling stories, answering comprehension questions, and explaining how things work, must increasingly also be dealt with as metalinguistic problems as form becomes a codeterminant of success along with content. One such task, which we will argue shifts from being linguistic to metalinguistic in the course of the elementary grades, is defining words. Young children very reasonably respond to a question like “Whats a hat?” with “You wear it,” and such a response is tolerated if the child is young enough. Older children, on the other hand, are expected to respond to such questions by giving “formal definitions,” which conform to particular standards for form as well as for content, for example, “A hat is an article of clothing worn on the head.” Definitions, though a rather specialized speech genre, are of both theoretical and practical interest to students of language development. In school settings, definitions are often requested of children, and giving definitions (or having children look them up in dictionaries and copy them) is a standard and frequent technique for vocabulary training.

Family Talk: Sources of Support for the Development of Decontextualized Language Skills.

This article reports the findings regarding the home language environments of the children in the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development. Home visits were made to collect interview data about family practices and to tape record specific types of talk between child and mother including a book reading, a toy play, and an elicited report. A mealtime conversation was also recorded by the family after the visit without the experimenter present. This article discusses the results of the analyses of these tasks reporting the central tendencies of the measures and particular styles of interaction between mother and child within tasks and across tasks. Developmental changes that occur in these dyads are also examined. The home environments of three selected children are profiled as well.

“l'animal qui fait oink! oink!”: Bilingual children's oral and written picture descriptions in English and French under varying instructions

How do children perform on four distinct picture description tasks in French, a language that has limited use in their lives? How does their performance on these tasks in the “limited use” language compare to the performance on the same tasks in English, the broader use language of their school and the society? And what are the effects of the childrens home language environments on their performances both in French and in English? Fifty‐two 2nd‐ through 5th‐grade children at an independent school in Manhattan produced oral and written picture descriptions for a present audience (contextualized condition) and for an absent audience (decontextualized condition) in English and French. Descriptions were coded for measures of quantity, specificity, density, main theme, and narrativity. For the French tasks, children were most influenced by whether the task was written or oral. By contrast, in English, the instructions (contextualized vs. decontextualized) had a more powerful effect. Overall, English descripti...