Table Of ContentLANGUAGE AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT
Also from James P. Byrnes
Minds, Brains, and Learning:
Understanding the Psychological and Educational Relevance
of Neuroscientific Research
Language
and Literacy
Development
What Educators Need to Know
S ECO N D E D I T I O N
James P. Byrnes
Barbara A. Wasik
THE GUILFORD PRESS
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from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4625-4004-4 (Paper)
ISBN 978-1-4625-4005-1 (Hardcover)
To Ruth and Thomas Wasik
who, from the very start, provided us
with the love and support we needed
to accomplish our goals,
among them writing this book
About the Authors
James P. Byrnes, PhD, is Professor of Educational Psychology and Applied
Developmental Science in the College of Education at Temple University.
He is a Fellow of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American
Psychological Association, has served as Vice President of the Jean Piaget
Society, and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Cognition and Devel-
opment. Dr. Byrnes has published over 90 books, chapters, and articles on
several different areas of cognitive development, such as language develop-
ment, logical reasoning, and mathematical learning. His most recent work
has focused primarily on developing and testing a comprehensive theoreti-
cal model of academic achievement (the opportunity– propensity model) in
order to provide insight into ways to eliminate or substantially reduce gen-
der, ethnic, and racial gaps in achievement. Dr. Byrnes has received awards
for his teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.
Barbara A. Wasik, PhD, is Professor of Educational Psychology and holds
the PNC Endowed Chair in Early Childhood in the College of Education
at Temple University. She is a recipient of the University’s Paul W. Eberman
Faculty Research Award. Her research interests are emergent literacy and
early intervention in beginning reading, with a focus on disadvantaged
children. Dr. Wasik has extensive experience in program and curriculum
development and is specifically interested in the role that teachers play in
the development of children’s language and literacy skills. She has written
several books and numerous articles on early literacy, one of which received
the Dina Feitelson Research Award from the International Literacy Asso-
ciation. Also interested in educational policy issues, Dr. Wasik is the author
of several papers that have affected teaching practices in classrooms.
vi
Preface
Over the past 30 years, experts in the field of education have learned
much about the important role that language plays in young children’s
literacy development, and the critical impact it consequently has on chil-
dren’s success in school and, ultimately, in life. Communicating this infor-
mation to educators (i.e., students in teacher education programs, teachers
in schools, and administrators making curricula or professional develop-
ment decisions) has been our primary motivation for writing the second
edition of this book. In both our teaching and research, we have become
keenly aware that classroom instructional practices do not necessarily mir-
ror the strategies that research has found to be effective, and, as a result,
an important gap between research and practice has emerged. Our inten-
tion in writing this second edition is to inform the field about how children
develop language and literacy skills and what children need to experience
in order to fully develop these skills. We especially wanted to address chil-
dren who are English learners and those who are in high- poverty schools.
We have both had opportunities in our undergraduate and graduate
courses to communicate much of this information to our students. These
experiences have been very helpful in shaping both the content of this book
and suggestions for delivering that content. Research and developments
on many issues, such as vocabulary development, were new, interesting,
and striking to students. Our hope is that educators can learn about what
children need to develop with respect to language and literacy skills, and
understand how to implement practices in classrooms that support chil-
dren’s learning.
The revised content in the book has also been influenced by our work
with teachers in schools. Teachers want to know how to provide the best
instruction to children, yet they do not always have easy access to current
vii
viii Preface
research findings or information on how to bring these findings into their
classrooms. Through providing professional development to teachers and
observing them in their classrooms, we learned from them creative ways to
implement research findings. We have also developed greater awareness of
challenges that they experience and modifications that need to be made to
implement research- based practices in classrooms.
Since 2009, when the previous edition of this book was published,
research on language and literacy has made significant strides in under-
standing the nuances of how children acquire language and literacy skills,
and what factors in their environments can contribute to children develop-
ing the abilities and skills needed to learn to read. For example, we know
teachers need to do more than just ask children open- ended questions: they
need to allow children to respond to those questions and then provide mean-
ingful feedback to what children say. All of this is part of the complex pro-
cess of scaffolding and developing language in young children. Adults play
a critical role in this process, and we hope this book informs teachers how
to better interact with children as they foster development of these skills.
The reader will also discover that much has been added to this second
edition. The changes include:
• Over 150 updated references;
• Dividing the material in the original “Beginning Reading” chapter
into two chapters (one on predictors of early reading, and another
on sentence processing and fluency) and greatly expanding this con-
tent;
• Enhanced attention to research on low- income children, children
with special needs, and English learners in each chapter;
• Increased discussion of the literacy- related findings of large- scale
national databases;
• Extensive coverage of the emerging consensus on usage- based theo-
ries of language acquisition (as opposed to the once- dominant nativ-
ist theories) as well as descriptions of recent longitudinal studies on
the role of parental input in vocabulary development;
• Extensive coverage of the important role of phonological processing
skills (including prosody) in oral language acquisition, reading flu-
ency, and reading comprehension;
• Enhanced coverage of the role of morphological knowledge in
vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension;
• Updated and expanded coverage of important factors in the develop-
ment of writing skills based on a number of meta- analyses that have
emerged in the last few years;
• Expanded coverage of recent studies examining the role of family
income and dialect in the development of reading skills;
• Coverage of recent, converging lines of evidence across multi-
ple chapters that demonstrate the interconnections of semantic,
Preface ix
phonological, syntactic, and morphological forms of knowledge in
both speaking and reading.
The intended audiences are primarily students in preservice under-
graduate programs who are training to become teachers, and master’s stu-
dents who already have their teaching certificates but who want to learn
more about the development of language and literacy skills so that they can
be more effective in literacy instruction. However, the book should prove
useful to a variety of educators in fields such as early childhood education,
educational leadership, and educational policy, because the information is
essential for making good decisions about curricula and policy as well.
There is an unfortunate gap between the fields of developmental and
cognitive psychology on the one hand and the field of education on the
other. Scholars in the former disciplines know the theories and research
but typically do not know how to apply this information in the classroom.
In contrast, scholars and practitioners in the field of education know lit-
eracy practices but lack knowledge of the theories and research that could
explain why practices are effective or ineffective. This book tries to bridge
the gap. In so doing, we hope not only to help educators see the theoretical
explanations behind sound instructional practices but also to help develop-
mental and cognitive psychologists understand how to apply their work on
language and reading skills in actual classrooms. Thus, graduate students
in developmental and cognitive psychology programs who have an interest
in education should also find this book useful.
As with most projects, we have benefited from relationships formed
over the years with colleagues who have expertise in areas such as language
development, literacy, motivation, and early childhood education. Since the
publication of the first edition of this book, these individuals have included
Wanda Brooks, Annemarie Hindman, Judy Flanigan, Avi Kaplan, Mary
Alice Bond, Steve Graham, Moddy McKeown, Meredith Rowe, Laura Jus-
tice, Barbara Bowman, Kate Anderson, and Carol Hammer. We would also
like to thank Craig Thomas at The Guilford Press, who encouraged us to
write this book and sought expert advice on how to improve it, and Alicia
Power at Guilford, who skillfully managed the revision and publication
process.
Finally, we would like to thank our children, Julia and Tom, for pro-
viding wonderful insights into the natural course of language and literacy
skills in children by their own example, through experiences we shared with
them as they were growing up. We also are grateful to them for expressing
their appreciation as young adults for the endless books we read to them
and conversations we had with them; we agree with them that it was all
worth it.
James P. Byrnes
BarBara a. Wasik
