Paul P. M. Leseman/Anna F. Scheele/Aziza Y. Mayo/Marielle H.Messer

Home Literacy as a Special LanguageEnvironment to Prepare Children forSchool

SummaryThe present study examined the relationship be-tween language and literacy activities at home andthe emergence of so called academic language in asample of 68 four-year-old Dutch children. Thefocus was on children’s understanding and pro-duction of narrative texts, seen as a common age-appropriate pre-academic text genre. Home lan-guage and literacy was measured with a shortquestionnaire, administered in personal interviewswith the mothers. Other measures were the fam-ily’s socioeconomic status (SES), children’s re-ceptive vocabulary and working memory. Chil-dren’s productive language in narrative text(re)telling already revealed many features of aca-demic language. Furthermore, moderate to strongcorrelations were found between children’s emer-gent academic language and the language and lit-eracy activities at home. Multiple regressionanalyses indicated that, in addition to workingmemory, home talking and reading predicted chil-dren’s vocabulary, and especially children’s textcomprehension and text (re)telling. Finally, mainand interaction-effects of working memory andhome language and literacy on emergent academiclanguage were examined. Although the resultswere not conclusive regarding the expected mod-erator effect of working memory, they revealedthat children with both low working memory ca-pacity and low academic language input weremost disadvantaged.

ZusammenfassungElterliche Sprachkompetenz als besondereSprachumgebung zur Heranführung des Kindes andie SchuleDie vorliegende Studie untersuchte den Zusammen-hang zwischen der im Elternhaus entwickeltenSprach- bzw. Lesepraxis und der Entwicklung derso genannten akademischen Sprachkompetenz, inDeutschland auch als ‚bildungssprachliche Kompe-tenz’ bezeichnet. Hierzu wurden in den Niederlan-den insgesamt 68 Kinder im Alter von 4 Jahren un-tersucht. Es wurde insbesondere untersucht, inwie-weit die Kinder in der Lage sind, Geschichten zuverstehen und zu produzieren. Geschichten werdenim Rahmen der Studie als altersgemäße vor-akademische Texte aufgefasst. Der Familiensprach-gebrauch und die literarische Praxis wurden anhandeines kurzen Fragebogens und in Interviews mit denMüttern erhoben. Zusätzlich wurden der sozioöko-nomische Status der Familie sowie der passiveWortschatz der Kinder und deren Merkfähigkeitunter Arbeitsbedingungen (working memory) her-angezogen.

Die Nacherzählungen der Kinder wiesen sprach-lich bereits viele Merkmale der so genannten aka-demischen Sprache auf. Außerdem zeigte sich einmittlerer bis starker Zusammenhang zwischen dersich entwickelnden Sprachfähigkeit der Kinder(akademische Sprache) und den sprachlichen undliterarischen Praktiken der Familie. Multiple Re-gressionsanalysen haben gezeigt, dass – neben demArbeitsgedächtnis (working memory) der Kinderinsbesondere die Qualität der Sprache innerhalb der

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Keywords: academic language; home literacy;story retelling; text comprehension; workingmemory.

Familie und das gemeinsame Lesen im Elternhauspositiven Einfluss auf den Wortschatz und dasTextverständnis der Kinder hatten. Außerdem wur-de die Fähigkeit, Geschichten nachzuerzählen da-durch besonders gefördert.

Schließlich wurde die Wirkung des Arbeits-gedächtnisses und der mitgebrachten Sprachkom-petenz auf die Entwicklung einer akademischenSprache überprüft. Obwohl die Resultate den er-warteten Effekt nicht vollends bestätigen konnten,zeigte sich, dass Kinder mit geringer Merkfähig-keit bei gleichzeitig geringem Kontakt mit akade-mischer Sprachpraxis im Elternhaus in besondererWeise benachteiligt waren.

Schlüsselwörter: akademische Sprache (Bildungs-sprache); Bildungsgrad der Eltern; Nacherzählun-gen; Textverständnis; Arbeitsgedächtnis (workingmemory).

Previous research has revealed firm relationships between home literacy and children’s lan-guage development, emergent literacy and later school achievement in reading and writing(BAKER et al. 2001; BUS/VAN IJZENDOORN/PELLEGRINI 1995; DE JONG/LESEMAN 2001;EVANS/SHAW/BELL 2000; FRIJTERS/BARRON/BRUNELLO 2000; KARASS/BRAUNGART-RIE-KER 2005; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002; WHITEHURST/LONIGAN1998). Home literacy, in this context, refers to a manifold of activities in families involvingliteracy products and literacy technologies, including among others shared book reading andname writing with children, but also adults’ own reading and writing behaviour that mayserve as a model for children. Home literacy, according to several authors, also includesforms of spoken language. This concerns in particular genres of spoken language that followto some extent the linguistic features of written language (BEALS 1997, 2001; HOFF 2006;OLSON 1991; RAVID/TOLCHINSKY 2002). Frequently studied examples are personal conver-sations at the dinner table, oral story telling, and discussions about topics of general interest– topics that might also occur in books, newspapers, and magazines.

Current research attempts to identify which aspects of home literacy contribute to chil-dren’s development and learning. Basically, three hypotheses are tested. First, home liter-acy helps children to discover the principles and the conventions of use of written lan-guage, especially when parents teach children explicitly about these principles (EVANS/SHAW/BELL 2000; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002). For instance, home literacy makes chil-dren aware of the use of arbitrary symbols (letters, written words, printed texts) to codespoken language. A significant accomplishment in early childhood, often reached longbefore school begins, is acquiring knowledge of the letters of the alphabet. This processprobably starts with observing adults’ writing activities and is strongly related to fre-quently occurring practices of pointing to the letters of the child’s first name and demon-strating how to write them (BOT-DE VRIES 2006; EVANS/SHAW/BELL 2000; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002). Letter knowledge, along with well-developed phonological skills, fa-cilitates initial reading in first and second grade (SCHNEIDER/ROTH/ENNEMOSER 2000).Second, home literacy influences children’s cognitive skills, in particular symbolic, or ab-

336 P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

stract thinking. This, in turn, may explain the broad effects on later school achievement.Discussing a story, finding explanations for certain events, inferring states of mind ofactors in the story, or anticipating next events to come in a narrative involves cognitivedistancing, that is, a cognitive shift from the immediate situation and from what is liter-ally given or depicted to symbolic representations and reasoning (PELLETIER/ ASTINGTON2004; HAMMETT/VAN KLEECK/HUBERTY 2003; VAN KLEECK et al. 1997; LESEMAN/DEJONG 1998; SIGEL/STINSON/KIM 1993). Thus, according to this hypothesis, broadly con-ceived home literacy promotes school achievement via enhanced cognitive ability.

The third hypothesis is the topic of the present study. Home literacy, including par-ticular forms of spoken language interactions in the family, is presupposed to providechildren with a special kind of language input at the lexical, grammatical, and textuallevel. A convenient term for the kind of language meant here is ‘academic language’, be-cause many linguistic features, as will be argued, are shared with the language in instruc-tion situations and textbooks in school, and with formal language use in newspapers,books, and official media. For instance, storybooks that are read to children contain rarewords that have a special technical sense. Through repeated shared book reading theymay become part of children’s vocabulary. Storybooks contain texts, that is, pieces of co-herently connected discourse conveying complex language acts – narratives, statements, orarguments. Learning how to relate words, how to analyze the meaning of sentences, how toconnect sentences, and how to infer implicit knowledge in order to understand texts, whilebeing supported by accompanying illustrations or ‘scaffolding’ adults, may contribute tolanguage and reading comprehension (HOFF 2006; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002).

The current interest in the emergence of academic language as a mediating link be-tween exposure to home literacy and (later) school achievement, arises from findings inprevious studies that show wide ranging effects of home literacy that are not confined toemergent literacy and initial reading. LESEMAN and DE JONG (2001) found in a Dutchsample that broadly conceived home literacy not only predicted decoding and readingcomprehension, but also math achievement in primary school. DE JONG and LESEMAN(2001; LESEMAN/DE JONG 2004) found long lasting effects of early home language andliteracy on reading comprehension many years later, in grade 3 of primary school, evenafter controlling for cognitive ability (working memory and nonverbal intelligence),phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and first and third grade decoding skill.Moreover, whereas the effects of early home literacy on decoding decreased over time,probably as a result of effective instruction in this subject, the effects of early home liter-acy on reading comprehension increased. As these effects were independent of generalcognitive skills (e.g., intelligence and working memory), the acquisition of academic lan-guage fostered by particular home activities might be an explanation. Similar findingshave been reported by SÉNÉCHAL and LEFEVRE (2002), SNOW (1991, 1999) and STORCHand WHITEHURST (2002) and have led them to conclude that literacy development fol-lows (at least) two distinct trajectories, one associated with the technical aspects of read-ing and one associated with language comprehension. Although vocabulary is at the heartof the second trajectory, evidence is accumulating that grammatical knowledge, such asknowledge of verb frames and grammatical morphemes, is needed as well in order tobootstrap unknown word meanings (BLOOM 2000; HOFF/NAIGLES 2002; HUTTENLOCHERet al. 2002). Moreover, with increasing age, vocabulary acquisition concerns, in particu-lar, words with complex meanings that can only be fully grasped by understanding andintegrating the multiple ways in which these words are used in spoken or written aca-

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demic texts. Learning this, so called ‘deep’, vocabulary from context is an important ac-complishment in the later grades of primary school and depends on the ensemble of lexi-cal, grammatical, and textual skills of children (VERHALLEN/SCHOONEN 1998; SCHLEP-PEGRELL 2004; VERMEER 2001).

In sum, the purpose of the present study was to examine if home literacy does indeedcontribute to the early beginnings of academic language in young children.

Emergent academic language

The notion of academic language, as used in this article, is derived from the FunctionalGrammar (FG) approach in linguistics (cf. HALLIDAY 1994; SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004).Academic language, according to this approach, refers to a special register of the lan-guage that at the lexical, morpho-syntactic and textual level differs fundamentally fromother registers, such as the register of everyday interpersonal communication. The notionof register emphasizes the interrelatedness of the purpose and content of communication,the social context and communicative expectations of the audience, and the proper lin-guistic means to convey the content to an audience in a particular situation. The interre-latedness of cognitive content, social context and linguistic form is regarded as func-tional, meaning that the use of appropriate linguistic structures facilitates effective and ef-ficient communication. Academic language, in this view, is especially suited to convey –either in spoken or written form – cognitively complex information in context-poor – or‘decontextualized’ – circumstances to a distant or unfamiliar audience that expects truth-fulness, expertise and authority.

SCHLEPPEGRELL (2004), using HALLIDAY’s FG framework, analyzed the linguisticfeatures of academic language use in instruction situations, exercises, essays, and textbooks in primary and secondary school, and compared these with the linguistic charac-teristics of ordinary interactive-interpersonal communication. Some of the main featuresare summarized below. At the lexical level, academic language is characterized by the useof specific, technical words (e.g. ‘the industrial revolution’), by lexical and grammaticalstrategies of condensing information (‘the tiny, old, worried history teacher’), and by theuse of explicit and specific references to time and space (‘In the 18th century, in the capi-tal of France, the guillotine …’) in order to establish a shared frame of reference with theaudience. As a result, academic discourse consists of relatively information-dense sen-tences that contain many content words compared to utterances in interactive talk. At themorpho-syntactic level, academic language differs from interpersonal communicationwith respect to the relatively frequent use of elaborate forms of tense and aspect to furtherelaborate the frame of reference. Also typical is the frequent use of the declarative, per-suasive or argumentative mood of the verb predicate, as a way to code authority and ex-pertise, and the use of particular adverbs and auxiliaries to represent the speaker’s orwriter’s stance and epistemological attitude (for instance, whether what is said is con-sidered a fact or a possibility). In addition, academic language is typified by the more fre-quent use of coordinate, relative and subordinate clause combining to express in a con-densed way complex meaning propositions. Mostly this also involves the use of con-nectives that express logical relationships, such as addition, conjunction, disjunction,temporal and logical conditionality, causality, contrast, or comparison. Finally, at the

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textual level, academic language more often has the form of a monologue than a dialogue,requiring a speaker or writer to construct relatively long stretches of cohesive discourseand to structure the discourse in a narrative, hierarchical or argumentative way.

Although young children, generally, are not yet confronted with academic language usein formal instruction situations, it is presupposed here that several forms of informal oraland literate language used in family routines support them in the process of initial acquisi-tion of the lexical, grammatical, and textual structures of academic language. Frequently oc-curring activities in the home environment, such as talking about children’s experiences,sharing memories, explaining and discussing topics of general interest to children (like ani-mals or dinosaurs), reveal linguistic features that resemble academic language use in in-struction situations (BEALS 1997, 2001; HADEN/HAINE/FIVUSH 1997). Verbally recon-structing experiences and memories, for instance, requires clarification of the context ofreference. It also requires coherent – narrative, logical, hierarchical – ordering of the se-quence of events that is reported, and explanation of spatial, causal, and intentional relation-ships that are crucial for understanding (GAUVAIN 2001; HADEN/HAINE/FIVUSH 1997).Talking about topics of interest affords the use of specific, technical vocabulary, the use ofconventional definitions, and complex sentences that express abstract relationships, func-tions, and processes (cf. SNOW/KURLAND 1996; WEIZMAN/SNOW 2001). Shared bookreading not only means fun and emotionally satisfying interactions, but it also presents thechild with coherently interrelated sentences that usually contain many new, often specificand rare words in a semantically rich context that helps the child to grasp the elaboratemeanings of these words (WEIZMAN/SNOW 2001). Moreover, shared book reading oftensets the stage for talking about extratextual, but semantically related topics of general inter-est stimulating the use of specific, rare vocabulary and elaborate grammatical constructions(HAMMETT/VAN KLEECK/HUBERTY 2003; LESEMAN/DE JONG 1998). Illustrations of thecomplex language used in children’s storybooks are presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Examples of academic language use in picture books for children in the pre-school age.

(…) Men and machines began work as lorries tipped mountains of bricks and sand, drainpipes andplanks, ladders and poles, and piles of tiles over the grass and wild flowers (…)From: Molly Brett (1962): Tom Tit moves house. London: The Medici Society Ltd.(…) The strange craft floated gently downstream, sometimes turning in an eddy as if taking part in anold-world dance, sometimes lingering against the water-reeds, but always going on and carrying thefriends further and further from home and always nearer to the sea (…)From: Racey Helps (1970): Pinny’s holiday. London: The Medici Society Ltd.(…) When frog finds a teddy bear all alone in the forest, he takes him home. He plays football withhim in the daytime, and tells him stories in the evening to teach the little bear to talk, which indeed hedoes! One day he doesn’t want to play anymore, or to say anything. He wants to go home, but thatdoesn’t mean he can’t come back again, does it? (…)From: Max Velthuijs (2004): Frog finds a friend. London: Andersen Press. (…) The Maiasaura mother dinosaur has been guarding her eggs for many weeks. Now, one by one,her babies crack through their shells and wriggle out into the huge nest. Some stop to nibble at theblanket of rotting plants that has been keeping them warm. Others peer over the tip of the nest to taketheir first look at the world, 75 million years ago (…)From: Christopher Maynard (1998): My best book of dinosaurs. London: Kingfisher Publications Plc.

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Socioeconomic and individual differences

Several studies have revealed that home literacy varies between families, both in amountand content, as a function of parents’ own uses of literacy and traditions of talking, theireducation, jobs and involvement in the practices of their wider cultural and religiouscommunity (HEATH 1983; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006; RAVIV/KESSENICH/MORRISON2004; SYLVA et al. 2004). Although, at least in the industrialized countries, forms of liter-acy are present in virtually all families, families may differ strongly in the opportunitiesthey provide to their children to learn about the formal and informal aspects of literacy(ANDERSON/STOKES 1984; PURCELL-GATES 1996). The use of literacy may be mainly in-strumental (e.g., using the television guide, reading advertisements) or, in contrast, alsoserve informative and educational goals (e.g., reading newspapers and text books). Simi-larly, talking with children is ubiquitous in most families, yet differences between fam-ilies may arise regarding the predominant functions of talking. For instance, in somefamilies, social and instrumental talk may be far more frequent than informative and edu-cational talk (CRAIN-THORESON/DAHLIN/POWELL 2001; HEATH 1983; HOFF 2006; LESE-MAN/VAN TUIJL 2006). Therefore, of particular interest are differences between familiesin the types, or genres, of talking and reading parents and children engage in regularly.Consistent with the functional linguistic approach, we presuppose that the use of aca-demic language is more strongly promoted by genres of talking that are about distantsituations, such as past experiences and memories, about fictitious situations, as in fairytale telling, or about topics of general interest, than by other genres. In the same vein, wepresuppose that reading narrative fiction, and education and information books with thechild stimulates the use of academic language more than reading comic books, glossymagazines, advertisement papers, and other forms of printed language (PURCELL-GATES1996).

The present study stands in a long tradition of sociological, sociolinguistic, and educa-tional research of social class and ethnic differences in school achievement as related tohome language and literacy (cf. BERNSTEIN 1977; BOURDIEU/PASSERON 1977; HEATH1983). The aim of the present study was to deepen understanding of the role of home lan-guage and literacy by applying a functional linguistic framework (cf. SCHLEPPEGRELL2004). In addition to language and literacy, other home environmental factors are alsorelevant for children’s language and literacy development, in particular, and their schoolachievement, in general. Several studies have documented the negative effects on schooladjustment of factors such as poverty, health problems, parenting stress, and non-re-sponsive parenting (see for recent reviews BRADLEY/CORWYN 2002; BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005; LANDRY/SMITH/SWANK 2003). A focus on language and literacy athome, however, is justified, because they concern the most influential home factorsunderlying the ‘education gap’ between children from different socioeconomic and cul-tural backgrounds (BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005).

Acquiring the linguistic features of academic language is a special case of general lan-guage acquisition. While acknowledging that major controversies in language acquisitionresearch are far from resolved (cf. TOMASELLO 2003), we assume that, especially in thecase of emergent academic language, special language input is required to provide theyoung language learner with sufficient tokens and types of the lexical, grammatical, andtextual forms of academic language that are rare in ordinary interpersonal language use(HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002; RAVID/TOLCHINSKY 2002; SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). In ad-

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dition, language learning not only depends on input, but also on children’s ability to learnfrom input. Current research focuses in particular on the role of working memory, as adomain-general information processing system involved in learning in many areas, in-cluding language (ADAMS/GATHERCOLE 2000; BADDELEY 2003). Differences betweenchildren in their capacity to store verbal information temporarily, while operating on thestored information and integrating temporary representations in long term memory, wasfound to predict differences in the rate of development of several aspects of language,such as receptive and productive vocabulary, specificity of vocabulary, mean length ofutterances and syntactic diversity. In addition, working memory is involved in under-standing text, because of the role of working memory in the construction of an episodicmental representation (BADDELEY 2003) or mental situation model (KINTSCH 2004) ofthe text. Having a global understanding of a text is especially important for learning theelaborate, ‘deep’ meanings of abstract words and expressions. Although most researchhas concentrated on verbal working memory, recent results from our own lab with youngchildren who had to answer comprehension questions about a narrative text (VLAARDIN-GERBROEK et al. 2007) and studies of reading comprehension with older children(GOFF/PRATT/ONG 2005) suggest that visuo-spatial working memory is also involved intext understanding, because constructing episodic representations involves integrationand representation of visual, spatial, and kinaesthetic information as well.

To the best of our knowledge, no studies to date have examined the joint effects of inputand working memory on emergent academic language. Yet, knowing how both factors areinvolved in emergent academic language is important for understanding differences betweenchildren, for identifying children at increased risk for school failure, and for preventativeand remedial education. Therefore, this was the object of the study presented here.

Research questions and hypotheses

We presuppose that most parents, either intentionally or unintentionally, start preparingtheir young children for academic language use long before children enter primaryschool. Particular genres of talking and reading in the family provide the main contextsfor this. More specifically, we presuppose that the amount of talking with the child aboutpersonal experiences, memories and stories, and about topics of general interest, on theone hand, and reading narrative books, picture books, and information books to the child,on the other hand, are the main ways of providing the special language input that childrenneed to acquire the beginnings of academic language. As a consequence, children’s lan-guage use is already expected to reveal some of the features of academic language as afunction of this special language input at an early age. Previous research has revealed dif-ferences in home language and literacy between families, which strongly correlate,among other factors, with socioeconomic status. In the present study we are particularlyinterested in the role of home language and literacy as a mediating proximal process be-tween socioeconomic status and academic language development. Based on previous re-search (cf. DE JONG/LESEMAN 2001; LESEMAN/DE JONG 1998; RAVIV/KESSENICH/MORRISON 2004), we expect that effects of SES on children’s academic language devel-opment can be largely, but perhaps not fully (SYLVA et al. 2004), explained by differ-ences in broadly conceived home literacy. Finally, children’s domain-general ability to

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learn from input is presupposed to be an additional source of variance in emergent aca-demic language. More specifically, in addition to the main effects of working memory,we also expect to find interaction effects indicating that children profit differentially fromacademic language input depending on their working memory capacity.

The present study was set up to examine these hypotheses focusing on four-year-oldchildren’s ability in understanding and producing narrative texts. The choice for the nar-rative text genre was motivated by the consideration that for children of this age narra-tives are the most common type of pre-academic texts. However, it should be noted inadvance that future research should also include other text genres. In the subsequent sec-tions we will try to answer the following research questions:

(1) Do four-year-old children show the beginnings of academic language in narrative textcomprehension and production?

(2) Is children’s emergent academic language related to particular home language and lit-eracy activities, and do these activities mediate effects of SES on emergent academiclanguage?

(3) Is children’s emergent academic language also related to domain-general cognitiveability, more specifically – to working memory, and does working memory also medi-ate effects of SES on emergent academic language?

(4) Does children’s working memory moderate learning academic language from aca-demic language input?

Method

Subjects. The present study involved 68 Dutch speaking four-year-old children living inthe city of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, who had just started in the kindergarten de-partment of primary school. The children were recruited in two steps. First, using a list ofaddresses made available by the municipality of Rotterdam, primary schools were con-tacted with the request to participate in the study. Of the 88 contacted schools, 31 werewilling to participate. The positive response rate was 35%, a normal response rate in re-search with primary schools in the Netherlands. The main reason for refusing participa-tion was the expected workload. Second, in each classroom two to four children wererandomly selected for participation in the study. Their parents were asked for written con-sent. The positive response rate was 80%.

Measurements

Vocabulary. The Diagnostic Test of Bilingualism of the national educational testingservice, CITO, was used to assess children’s receptive Dutch vocabulary. The test has asimilar format as the well-known Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The test-assistantmentions a target word and the child is required to point to one out of four pictures, pre-sented on a computer screen, that he or she thinks represents the target word. Test words,30 in all, were derived from a large database of words considered by teachers to be im-

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portant for successful participation in primary school and for understanding instruction inschool subjects. CRONBACH’s alpha of the test was .83.

Working memory. A Dutch version of the Automated Working Memory Assessment(AWMA), developed by ALLOWAY, GATHERCOLE and PICKERING (2006), was used tomeasure children’s digit span (recalling random series of numbers between 1 and 9, with se-ries increasing in length), visuo-spatial span (remembering the locations of a previously pre-sented dot in a series of 4 x 4 matrices presented on a screen, with an increasing number ofplaces in the matrix in which the dot was successively presented), verbal processing (re-membering the first word of an increasing number of spoken sentences, while decidingabout the semantic correctness or incorrectness of the last presented sentence), and visuo-spatial processing (remembering the locations of a series of three icons presented on a screen,while deciding which icon does not belong in the series). Test-retest reliabilities were be-tween .81 and .84 (ALLOWAY/GATHERCOLE/PICKERING 2006). The intercorrelations be-tween the four measures ranged from .35 to .55. For the present purpose, test scores werecombined by addition after z-transformation into a single measure of working memory witha mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1. CRONBACH’s alpha of the new measure was .69.

Narrative text comprehension. The test-assistant read a story to the child using an age-appropriate narrative picture book with pictures and text (approximately 350 words). Thestory was about a cat, Loekie, who wants to play, first with a fly, than with a bird, causinga lot of turmoil in the house. After reading the story, the test-assistant asked the childquestions about the story, 10 in all. The questions were at first open-ended (“What didLoekie think when he saw the fly?”). If the child did not answer the question, a closedalternative question was posed (“Did Loeki want to play with the fly when he first sawhim?”). A correct answer to the open question was awarded 2, a correct answer to theclosed alternative 1, and no answer or an obviously wrong answer 0. CRONBACH’S alphaof the test was .76.

Narrative text production. After the comprehension test, children were asked to readtwo books to a doll, Ernie, a character from Sesame Street who was well known to allchildren. The first book was the book used in the comprehension test. The second bookwas also about Loekie, but contained a new story (Loekie meets the cat of the new neigh-bors who just have moved in the house next door). Both books were recently released andnot already known to the children. Children were asked to pretend read and to tell thestories to Ernie using the pictures in the books. The test-assistant provided support byplaying the doll Ernie, showing interest and sometimes voicing Ernie to stimulate thechild to tell more by using general prompts (“tell me more”). The story telling was re-corded on videotape, and transcribed and coded afterwards in the laboratory. Utterancesof the child were defined as units of speech containing a single, sometimes complexmeaning proposition. A coding scheme, based on SCHLEPPEGRELL (2004), but adapted tothe age of the children in this study, was used to evaluate each utterance with regard tothe following coding categories (The coding scheme of the present study is a shortenedversion of an extensive coding scheme developed within the DASH-project (2006). Thecoding manual, in English, can be obtained from the authors.):

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– Number of content words in each utterance (all nouns, verbs, adjectives and countwords and a selection of adverbs with a clear, expressible meaning).

– Use of either no, deictic (‘here’, ‘this one’), explicit but non-specific (‘somewhere’), orexplicit and specific references to time and place (‘under the pile of leaves’).

– Use of verb predicate tense and aspect (subcategories: no verb, present simple, presentperfect, past simple, past perfect, present future, or past future tense).

– Use of verb predicate mood (subcategories: no verb, declarative, persuasive, interroga-tive or imperative verb predicate mood).

– Use of connectives (subcategories: additive, temporal, causal, contrastive, and com-parative connectives).

– Use of clause combining (subcategories: coordinate, subordinate, including relativeand embedded clause combining).

In addition, coders rated the discourse produced by the child during storytelling in a ho-listic manner on the following dimensions:

– Textual cohesion of the story told by the child using a 7-point rating scale, with scalepoint 1 meaning ‘very low cohesion between separate utterances, virtually all utter-ances are semantically or linguistically unrelated’, and 7 meaning ‘the discourse ishighly coherent, all utterances together forming one complex statement’.

– Degree of abstractness of the story on a 4-point rating scale derived from BLANK,ROSE and BERLIN (1978), with scale point 1 meaning that the story produced by thechild sticks closely to the immediate situation, e.g. merely labeling the pictures, andscale point 4 meaning that the child reasons about not directly observed aspects of thestory.

– Narrative competence of the child using SULZBY’s (1986) 12-point scale of narrativereading development with scale point 1 meaning ‘the child separately labels depicteditems without attempt to connect them into a meaningful whole’, and 7, the highest ob-served score in this study, meaning ‘the child does not read, but tells the picture bookin a way that closely resembles actual reading’.

Intercoder reliability was determined on the story (re)telling of five children. Two codersindependently coded over 200 utterances and 30 holistic evaluations (five children × twostories × three ratings). The mean intercoder correlation was 0.67 (p < .01; range 0.40 to0.91) for the utterance-based coding. The mean intercoder agreement of the ratings, basedon exactly matching scores, was 81% (chance level 14% to 25%). For the purpose of thepresent article, means and frequencies were computed on those utterances that were partof the story (re)telling, excluding side remarks or procedural utterances, largely inaudibleor not understandable utterances, as well as simple yes or no utterances.

Home language and literacy. A short questionnaire was administered in a personal in-terview with the caregiver of the child who was most in charge of daily care and supervi-sion, in the present study always the mother. A number of questions addressed the homelearning environment, including language and literacy activities, but also counting andmath, and a number of other subjects not further considered here. Two scales were con-structed by computing the mean of the items included in these scales; a few missingvalues were substituted by the mean of the scale. The scale talking represented the self-reported mean frequency of mothers’ talking with their children about personal experi-

344 P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

ences and shared memories, about topics of general interest (e.g., history, biology), andtelling stories and fairy tales. The scale consists of five items with a CRONBACH’s alphaof .85. A sample item is: “How frequently do you talk with your child about what he/sheexperiences in school?” Scale point 1 represents ‘almost never’, whereas 5 stands for ‘atleast daily, sometimes several times a day’. The scale reading measured the self-reportedfrequency of shared reading with the child, including books containing narratives (as inpicture books), informative books, and ABC-letter books. A sample item is: “How fre-quently do you read a picture book to your child?” Answers were coded on the same five-point scale. CRONBACH’s alpha with 7 items was .75.

Socioeconomic status and other family background characteristics. The highest edu-cational level attained by the parents was used to construct a measure of the family’s so-cioeconomic status (SES) by computing the mean level of both parents’ education. Incase of single parent families, the measure was based on the education level of the motheronly. The mean educational level ranged from 1 “only primary school” to 6 “universitydegree”. Educational level of father and mother correlated r = .61 (p < .01) in the presentsample. In addition, information was collected about the employment status of the parentsand the composition of the family.

Procedures. Children were individually tested by trained female research-assistants, stu-dents in psychology and educational sciences, in a quiet room in the school during schooltime on two days in a two-week period. Both test sessions took about 75 minutes. Testswere administered in a fixed order using laptop computers. Pictures and visual stimuliwere projected on the computer screen, voiced target words and sentences presentedthrough the computer’s speakers. Children’s answers were directly entered in a data file.After each test, children received a small gift, e.g. a booklet with attractive, colorfulstickers. The story comprehension and (re)telling tasks were conducted in an informalatmosphere, while assistant and child were seated at a table. The doll Ernie was used toplayfully stimulate the child. The book reading was videotaped with a small digital cam-era on a tripod, standing about 1.5 meters away from the table. The interviews with themothers were held in school in the morning, after the mothers had brought the children tothe classroom or, in few cases, at home. Female research assistants interviewed themothers using a short, semi-structured questionnaire.

Analysis plan. The first research question, whether the four-year-old children in thisstudy showed emergent academic language, will be answered by presenting the meanscores of the narrative text comprehension task and the mean numbers and frequencies ofacademic language features found for the narrative text production task. The results ofcorrelation analysis will be presented to answer the second and third research question,concerning the relationships of academic language in text comprehension and productionwith particular genres of talking and reading at home and with children’s working memorycapacity. In addition, multiple regression analysis will be used to address the questionwhether effects of SES on emergent academic language are mediated by working memoryand patterns of home talking and reading. Finally, the question whether what childrenlearn from the talking and reading activities at home is moderated by their working memorycapacity will be answered by testing the interaction effect with an analysis of variance.

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Results

Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and score ranges of the variables in-cluded in this study. The mean socioeconomic status (SES) was 4, representing an aver-age SES in the present sample at the intermediate vocational or general training level.69% of the mothers and 98% of the fathers had a paid (part time) job, which is represen-tative of the non-immigrant, Dutch speaking population in the Netherlands. About 18%of the families was a single parent family, which is slightly above the national average forfamilies with young children. The mean number of children in the family was 2.2, alsoslightly higher than the national average (which is just below 2). The reported mean fre-quencies of talking and reading to the child in different genres were around 3, represent-ing an average frequency of the different talking and reading activities subsumed in thesescales of once a month to once a week. Note that some activities included in the scalesmight actually have occurred more often. The mean age of the children was 52 months(i.e., 4 years and 4 months). The sex ratio was uneven. More boys than girls were in-volved in the study. The mean scores on the working memory composite and the vo-cabulary test did not reveal bottom or ceiling effects.

Table 1: Home and child characteristics: means/frequencies, standard deviations, andobserved score ranges (n= 68)

m/f sd observedrange

Home characteristicsSES (mean educational level of both parents) 4.1 1.3 1.5-6.0Percentage of mothers with a (part time) paid job 69.2 46.5 –Percentage of fathers with a (part time) paid job 97.9 14.4 –Number of children at home 2.2 1.1 1-6Frequency shared reading 3.1 1.1 1.0-5.0Frequency shared talking 2.9 1.1 1.0-4.9

Child characteristicsAge of the child (in months) 52.1 2.8 48-62Percentage of boys 64.7 0.5 –Working memory composite (z-score) 0.0 1.0 -1.7-3.0

Receptive academic languageReceptive vocabulary 12.1 3.6 5-19Narrative text comprehension 12.8 4.8 2.0-20.0

Productive academic languageMean number of content words per utterance 2.5 0.5 1.2-3.5Mean% utterances with explicit reference 36.4 18.0 5.0-82.0Mean% utterances with past / perfect tense 34.0 26.1 0.0-97.0Mean% utterances in declarative mood 79.7 15.1 21.0-100.0Mean% utterances with at least one connective 7.2 6.7 0.0-29.0Mean% utterances with two combined clauses 7.0 7.0 0.0-29.0Rating textual cohesion 3.5 1.3 1.0-6.5Rating degree of abstraction (Blank-scale) 1.9 0.5 1.0-3.5Rating narrative skill (Sulzby-scale) 2.8 1.2 1.0-7.0

The results of the narrative text comprehension and production tasks are most of interest.The mean score on the comprehension task was 12.8, with a theoretical maximum of 20.The standard deviation as well as the observed score range indicated big inter-individual

346 P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

differences in narrative text comprehension (observed range 1.9 – 20.0). Table 1 alsogives the pooled results of the two text (re)telling tasks, based on an average number of48 utterances per child (sd = 16.4; range 13 to 102). The mean number of content wordsper utterance was 2.5; the observed range was again considerable. Children frequentlyused explicit non-deictic references to time and place in their stories. No reference to timeor place at all was found in on average 30% of the utterances. The vast majority of verbpredicate tenses used were present, present perfect, and past simple (only very few othertenses, such as past perfect, present future, and past future were found). For the purposeof this article, present perfect, past simple, and past perfect were pooled in a single measure,namely the use of past/perfect tense. On average 34% of children’s utterances used a dif-ferent tense than present simple, whereas on average about 18% of children’s utterancescontained no verb at all. However, it should again be noted that children differed vastly inthis respect. Children’s utterances were in majority in the declarative mood. Interroga-tives and imperatives, more characteristic of interpersonal language use, were quite infre-quent and, therefore, not further considered here. The use of connectives, and, related tothat, the use of clause combining was much less frequent, especially subordinate clausecombining. Therefore, coordinate and subordinate clause combining were pooled. Onaverage 7% of children’s utterances were marked by clause combining. Note that also forthis aspect the range of scores was considerable, with a few children using clause com-bining in almost 30% of their utterances. Finally, the holistic ratings indicated that chil-dren even at this young age were already quite able to produce a reasonably cohesive dis-course, to distance themselves cognitively from the immediate situation, mainly by de-scribing inferred relations between entities and/or persons in their stories and by inferringthe states of mind of the persons, and to apply the structure of a narrative in their storytelling (none of the children attempted to really read).

Table 2 presents the intercorrelations of all coded academic language features in chil-dren’s story (re)telling. Overall, most features were moderately to strongly intercorre-lated. Some of the stronger correlations partly reflected structural interdependencies. Forinstance, included in the number of content words per utterance were verbs (also countedin the category past/perfect tense), adverbs (frequently part of an explicit reference), andconnectives (also counted separately, also often involved in clause combining). Principalcomponents analysis yielded a first component that explained 56% of the variance (withmost features having standardised factor regression scores > .20) and a second componentthat explained an additional 15% of the variance (with use of explicit reference, past (per-fect) tense and declarative mood having the biggest factor scores). CRONBACH’s alpha ofall features was .83. The results indicated that academic language indeed is a rather ho-mogeneous construct, at least at this age and at least with respect to narrative story(re)telling. A composite measure was constructed for further analyses as the sum of allacademic language features after z-transformation. The correlation of this composite withthe text comprehension measure was r = .43 (p < .01), suggesting that productive aca-demic language use shares a common core with receptive academic language use, butalso includes different component skills.

In summary, to answer the first research question, the results confirm that even at theage of four, while not yet attending formal education, children implicitly (narrative textcomprehension) and explicitly (in narrative text (re)telling) showed emergent academiclanguage.

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Table 2: Pearson intercorrelations of academic language features in narrative text(re)telling (n = 68)

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1 Content words .63 ** .52 ** .70 ** .56 ** .58 ** .66 ** .58 ** .61 **2 Explicit reference - - .66 ** .58 ** .19 .36 ** .48 ** .40 ** .43 **3 Past / perfect tense - - .47 ** .27 * .24 + .46 ** .33 ** .42 **4 Declarative mood - - .27 * .38 ** .46 ** .56 ** .36 **5 Connectives - - .78 ** .60 ** .52 ** .60 **6 Clause combining - - .46 ** .59 ** .53 **7 Textual cohesion - - .70 ** .73 **8 Abstraction degree - - .63 **9 Narrative skill - -

+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01

The correlations of children’s receptive vocabulary, narrative text comprehension, anduse of academic language in narrative text production with the working memory compos-ite, the family’s SES, and the indicators of the home language and literacy environmentare presented in Table 3. Working memory, as expected, was rather strongly related tovocabulary and text comprehension, and moderately to most of the academic languagefeatures in text production. SES correlated weakly to moderately with vocabulary, textcomprehension, and most features of academic language use in text production. The re-sults of the correlation analyses with talking and reading at home revealed an interestingpattern. Whereas talking at home was stronger associated with receptive vocabulary andnarrative text comprehension, reading at home was stronger associated with most featuresof academic language use in narrative text production. As a consequence, reading athome was also stronger correlated with the academic language composite than talking athome. Moreover, talking and reading at home were both stronger correlated with the re-ceptive and productive language measures than SES.

Table 3: Pearson correlations of vocabulary, narrative text comprehension, andacademic language features in narrative text (re)telling with working memory,SES, and home language and literacy activities (n = 68)

Working Memory SES Talking at Home Reading at Home

Receptive vocabulary .52 ** .33 ** .47 ** .29 **Narrative text comprehension .56 ** .40 ** .63 ** .56 **

Content words .37 ** .36 ** .52 ** .54 **Explicit reference .31 ** .23 + .24 + .22 +Past / perfect tense .26 * .21 + .27 * .21 +Declarative mood .28 * .32 ** .43 ** .51 **Connectives .21 + .09 .28 * .34 **Clause combining .20 + .01 .33 ** .34 **Textual cohesion .42 ** .28 * .49 ** .53 **Abstraction degree .27 * .21 + .47 ** .51 **Narrative skill .17 .15 .27 * .48 **

Academic language (composite) .38 ** .29 * .49 ** .55 **

+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01

Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the joint effects of workingmemory and the home language and literacy environment on children’s receptive vo-

348 P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

cabulary, narrative text comprehension, and academic language use in narrative text pro-duction, using the academic language composite. As the talking and reading scales werestrongly intercorrelated in this sample, r = .77 (p < .01), both were also pooled into onevariable, namely talking and reading at home, in order to avoid bias due to multicolline-arity. In all analyses, SES was added as an additional predictor in the second analysis stepto determine to what extent working memory and home language and literacy mediatedeffects of SES. To test the mediation hypothesis, two conditions should be met: first, theindependent predictor should be moderately to strongly correlated with the mediators;note that in this study the correlation of SES with working memory was r = .41 (p < .01)and with the pooled variable talking and reading at home r = .45 (p < .01); and second,the predictor should not predict an additional, statistically significant amount of variancein the dependent after taking the variance predicted by the mediators into account.

The results of the multiple regression analyses are presented in Table 4. Workingmemory, as an indicator of children’s domain-general cognitive ability, and talking andreading at home, as an indicator of the home language and literacy environment, togetherpredicted statistically significantly children’s vocabulary, text comprehension, and aca-demic language use in text production. The total amount of predicted variance was sub-stantial, with R2’s ranging from 0.31 to 0.49 (p’s < .01). Working memory was a strongpredictor of both vocabulary and narrative text comprehension, but not of academic lan-guage use in narrative text production. Home talking and reading was a strong predictorof both narrative text comprehension and narrative text production, but a less strong pre-dictor of vocabulary. SES predicted no statistically significant additional amounts ofvariance in the dependents, suggesting that the measured home language and literacy ac-tivities, together with children’s cognitive ability, fully accounted for early arising socio-economic differences in academic language.

Thus, to answer the second and third research question, home literacy in its broad con-ception and working memory were moderately to strongly related to emergent academiclanguage, while fully mediating the effects of SES.

Table 4: Multiple regression analysis with vocabulary, narrative text comprehension,and academic language use in narrative text (re)telling as dependents, in twosteps; R2-change by step, βs of the final model, and R2-total (n = 68)

Vocabulary Narrative text comprehension Academic language in text retelling

Δ R2 Final β Δ R2 Final β Δ R2 Final β

1. Working memory .32 ** .41 ** .48 ** .35 ** .32 ** .191. Talking & Reading .26 * .47 ** .45 **2. SES .02 .15 .01 .09 .00 .01

Total R2 .32 ** .49 ** .31 **

+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01

Finally, to explore moderation effects of working memory, analysis of variance (ANOVA)was conducted with a pooled measure of z-transformed narrative text comprehension andproduction as dependent variable. Text comprehension and text production (r = .43; p <.01; see above) were joined for this analysis to obtain a broad construct of emergent aca-demic language that comprised both receptive and productive aspects. Working memoryand talking and reading at home were recoded into two levels, below and above the me-

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dian, and included as fixed factors in the ANOVA. The results are graphically shown inFigure 2. In addition to main effects of working memory (F(1,67) = 12.13, p < .01) andtalking and reading at home (F(1,67) = 15.12, p < .01), a borderline significant interactioneffect was found (F(1,67) = 3.10, p < .08). Although an interaction effect was expected, thepattern provided no conclusive support for the moderation hypothesis. As Figure 2 shows,the interaction effect can be interpreted as indicating that low working memory capacitystrengthens the negative effect of low academic language input (children learning evenless from the relatively impoverished input), whereas high working memory capacity canpartly compensate for low academic language input (children learning more efficientlyfrom the relatively impoverished input). However, another interpretation is more likelygiven the pattern of scores: high academic language input can partly compensate for thenegative effects of low working memory capacity, thus equalising differences betweenchildren in learning ability. According to this interpretation, the moderator effect is thereverse of what was expected: the home language and literacy environment moderates theeffect of working memory on emergent academic language.

In sum, the present results did not allow a conclusive answer to the fourth researchquestion. Nonetheless, the interaction effect was a relevant finding. As Figure 2 reveals,children with below median working memory capacity and below median academic lan-guage input at home constituted a clear at risk group. The standardised difference in aca-demic language scores, d, between the most favourable and the most unfavourable condi-tion was about d = 1.3.

Figure 2: Main and interaction effects of working memory and home language andliteracy on emergent academic language use in narrative text comprehensionand production (standardised composite score)

-1

-0,75

-0,5

-0,25

0

0,25

0,5

0,75

1

low HOME LITERACY high HOME LITERACY

low Working Memory high Working Memory

Low Home Literacy High Home Literacy

Low Working Memory High Working Memory

350 P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

Discussion

The purpose of the present study was to examine a possible mechanism underlying thebroad and long lasting effects of home language and literacy on later school achievement,reported in a number of studies cited in the introduction of this article. The proposedmechanism, namely the acquisition and use of the so called academic register of the lan-guage in comprehending and producing discourse, was tested implicitly by relating chil-dren’s story comprehension to patterns of talking and reading at home, under the as-sumption that in order to be able to comprehend a narrative text command of the lexical,grammatical and textual features of written (academic) language to some degree is pre-requisite. In addition to this, also the relation of school language vocabulary with talkingand reading at home was determined. The proposed mechanism was tested explicitly byexamining the relation of talking and reading at home with the use of features of aca-demic language in the production of narratives. The results generally supported the hy-pothesis that home literacy in a broad sense, including oral and literate activities withingenres that afford the use of academic language, indeed promotes the emergence of aca-demic language in children’s receptive and productive narrative text processing.

The family’s socioeconomic status (SES), measured by parents’ education level, wasweakly to moderately related to emergent academic language, compatible with the pre-supposition that differences in language socialisation at home are a major cause of socialclass differences in school success (cf. BERNSTEIN 1977; BOURDIEU/PASSERON 1977;HEATH 1983). In addition to the older sociological and ethnographic work in this area,the present study revealed more in detail how particular practices in the family may berelated to developmental outcomes. Moreover, the use of a functional linguistic frame-work added to the interpretation and evaluation of differences in language socialisation.In contrast to the older work, we believe that the use of particular linguistic structures isnot arbitrary, or just a sign of social class consciousness, a mere matter of cultural taste,or whatsoever. Particular forms of language use, under the constraint of communicativeefficiency, are functional for and, therefore, afforded by the particular goals and contextsof language use (SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004).

The results of the present study also confirmed the presupposition that the effects ofSES, seen as a distal family background characteristic, on emergent academic languagewere largely mediated by proximal family processes, namely the particular language andliteracy activities that parents and children were regularly engaged in. In agreement withthe findings of SYLVA et al. (2004) and RAVIV/KESSENICH/MORRISON (2004), and otherprevious work, the effects of the proximal home activities were much stronger than theeffects of SES. However, the fact that no additional explained variance was found forSES in the multiple regression analyses, should not be taken to imply that home languageand literacy mediates all influences of SES, and related distal factors, on language andliteracy development and later school achievement.

Academic language was defined here as a particular form of language that is charac-terised by relatively high information density, relatively frequent use of explicit refer-ences to time and place at the lexical level, of elaborate tense and aspect, the declarativemood and clause combining at the sentence level, and of cohesiveness and distancingstrategies, and narrative structuring at the text level. As was expected, the narrative textproduction of the four-year-old children in this study indeed revealed indications ofemergent academic language as a function of home language and literacy. Emergent aca-

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demic language appeared to be a rather homogeneous construct, with all different aspectsbeing moderately to strongly intercorrelated. From the pattern of correlations and the re-sults of the multiple regression analyses, it can be tentatively deduced that oral forms ofhome literacy, such as talking about personal experiences and topics of general interest,contribute in particular to the lexical level (vocabulary, understanding text, lexical den-sity), whereas written forms of home literacy, e.g. reading narratives and informationbooks to the child, contribute in particular to the morpho-syntactic and textual levels ofemergent academic language. A possible explanation is that the language in children’sbooks that is read aloud to children in sessions of shared book reading, provides com-paratively more tokens and types of complex syntactic and textual structures, which is es-sential input for emergent academic language (HOFF 2006; HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002;SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). We suspect that oral literacy is simpler in this regard as it still ispredominantly a form of interactive-interpersonal language use.

It should be noted that the present evidence is suggestive at best. Both longitudinal andexperimental designs are needed to establish more firmly the causal interpretation of thecorrelations found. Well-established in language acquisition research is that adults fine-tune their language use to children’s language proficiency. Therefore, the correlationsfound in this study may reflect a reverse relationship: children’s academic language pro-ficiency determines what adults provide to them. However, a number of recent studiesthat examined the relationships between the input and acquisition of specific linguisticstructures (e.g., rare words, word order, verb tense markers, clause combining) by using amicrogenetic design with many measurement points, demonstrated that parents’ fine-tuned input is mostly a number of days to a few weeks ahead of children’s use of thestructures concerned, which provides strong support for a causal interpretation (MATTHEWSet al. 2005; THEAKSTON/LIEVEN/TOMASELLO 2003; TOMASELLO 2003; see for relatedfindings with different research designs HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002; WEIZMAN/SNOW2001).

Correlations and multivariate regression analyses indicated that children’s domain-general ability, represented in this study by a composite of verbal and visuo-spatialworking memory tests, is an important source of inter-individual differences in emergentacademic language as well. Working memory may play two distinct roles. First, the actualachievement in the test situation – remembering and integrating the story that is told, re-spectively planning the story that is going to be told – may have been directly influencedby children’s working memory capacity. The capacity to represent verbal and visuo-spatial information temporarily in order to be available for higher order cognitive oper-ations is crucial to the process of understanding text (BADDELEY 2003; KINTSCH 2004).Second, working memory may have indirectly influenced the results because of its role inlanguage learning (ADAMS/GATHERCOLE 2000; VLAARDINGERBROEK et al. 2007). Thestrong effect of the working memory composite on children’s receptive vocabulary, testedby asking children to choose the right picture out of four, which as such does not requireextensive processing at test taking, probably reflects most directly the fundamental role ofworking memory as moderator of learning language from language input. However, theexpected interaction effect of working memory and language input on emergent academiclanguage did not conclusively support the moderation hypothesis. Thus, perhaps the ef-fect of working memory in more complex language tasks (text comprehension, text pro-duction) is mainly direct and situated, while concealing the cumulative indirect effects onlanguage learning. Finally, the study revealed that children with both low academic lan-

352 P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

guage input at home and low working memory capacity had the lowest scores on the aca-demic language tasks, and, therefore, can be considered most at risk for failure in school,especially in subjects that rely heavily upon understanding (written) academic texts. Fol-low-up research with the current sample is planned and will enable us to test this predic-tion.

The present study was conducted in a sample of four-year-olds who spoke Dutch astheir first language. Despite the considerable variation in socioeconomic status and re-lated language and literacy activities at home, we suspect that including bilingual immi-grant children who often come from low-literate homes (BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005;LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006), will further increase the correlations of home talking andreading with emergent academic language, demonstrating even more convincingly theimportance of broadly conceived home literacy. Despite its narrow focus on only one as-pect of the home learning environment and its selective sample, the present study con-tributes to a growing body of knowledge about the foundational role of the home learningenvironment for child development in several domains that foreruns school learning(BRADLEY/CORWYN 2002; BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005; LANDRY/SMITH/SWANK2003; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006; SYLVA et al. 2004). The findings reported in this articleconfirm what has been found in previous studies that families differ strongly in the waysthey, intentionally or unintentionally, prepare their children for school, with probablylong lasting consequences. In this perspective, interest in preschool intervention programsto prevent early educational disadvantages is highly justified. However, the mixed resultsof current programs, and particularly the comparatively low effectiveness of family-focused programs (BLOK et al. 2005), underscore that improvement of approach and con-tent is needed. Based on the present results, a stronger emphasis on – that is, a higherdose of – linguistically more complex and sophisticated talking and reading activities,guided by adults and supported by appropriate materials, such as picture books and inter-esting objects, is recommendable. Parents and teachers (cf. HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002)who are stimulated to use more complex language in interacting with children, help chil-dren to acquire more complex language.

Limitations and conclusion

The present study was conducted with a small sample of Dutch speaking children. Homeliteracy was measured by a self-report questionnaire and, therefore, vulnerable to measure-ment error and social-desirability response tendencies. Measurements were taken onone occasion only. Longitudinal and experimental studies with larger samples, includingbilingual immigrant children, using also observation measures of home language and lit-eracy, are needed to strengthen the present tentative conclusions regarding the effects ofthe home environment on emergent academic language. Moreover, longitudinal researchis needed to test the core assumption underlying the present study, namely that the acqui-sition of the academic language register indeed is important for learning in several schoolsubjects. Finally, the central construct of academic language was measured with respectto narrative texts only in this study. Although the choice of narrative texts was age-appropriate, the hypothesis that acquisition of academic language is a mediating mechan-ism that can explain the well-established effects of home literacy on school achievement,

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needs to be tested with other genres as well. These limitations notwithstanding, the pres-ent study contributes some valuable insights in the way particular language and literacyactivities in the family create a linguistic context for acquiring a powerful general skill,academic language, with probably broad-ranging effects on later school learning.

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Kontaktanschrift der Verfasser: Paul Leseman, Langeveld Institute, Utrecht University,P.O. Box 80140, NL-3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands, Phone: +31 30 2534931, E-Mail: p.p.m.leseman@uu.nl