What’s inside: You may thing that the answer is an obvious one, but in this episode, Dr. Marina Puglisi, a Speech-Language Pathologist and researcher in the area of child language and child developmental language disorders at the Universidade Federal de Sao Paolo, Brazil, explains why it’s not. We will discuss her study named, "The Home Literacy Environment Is a Correlate, but Perhaps Not a Cause, of Variations in Children’s Language and Literacy Development".

Classroom implications: Researchers investigated whether the home literacy environment predicts children’s reading and language skills once maternal language abilities are taken into account. They found that storybook exposure was no longer a significant predictor of children’s language and literacy skills.

On the other hand, direct literacy instruction (explicit teaching of those basic literacy elements like phonological awareness, phonics, and sight words) remained a predictor of children’s reading/spelling skills. The researchers argue that the relationship between early informal home literacy activities and children’s language and reading skills is complex and largely explained by maternal skills.

Learn more about our guest: To learn more about upcoming research from Dr. Marina Puglisi, you can follow her on researchgate.net/profile/Marina_Puglisi.

Below are some links to research and published works referenced in this episode (full text included where possible):

• Marina L. Puglisi, Charles Hulme, Lorna G. Hamilton & Margaret J. Snowling (2017) The Home Literacy Environment Is a Correlate, but Perhaps Not a Cause, of Variations in Children’s Language and Literacy Development, Scientific Studies of Reading, 21:6, 498-514, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2017.1346660