Breakfast Club and books!

We received this email from our research partners

"We posted the following text on our socials with the attached photos."

Breakfast Club and books!  

Our young mob were given the opportunity to read, choose and take books home to read for keeps as a thank you from our CSU Research Project team (who visited Breakfast Club and exchanged opinions on books late last year). Marang Gunya will soon have it's own Little Library for the kids to access every week.

Accepted - Parent-reported speech and language in early childhood is an early indicator of Indigenous Australian children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes

The following paper has been accepted for publication:

McLeod, S., Harrison, L. J., McMahon, C., Wang, C., & Evans, J. R. (2025, in press March 2025). Parent-reported speech and language in early childhood is an early indicator of Indigenous Australian children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.

Here is a short summary:

This longitudinal study of 1,534 Indigenous Australian children demonstrated that parent report of speech and language concern in early childhood is an important early indicator of education outcomes at school. Families are important knowledge holders throughout a child’s trajectory of learning and development.

Here is the abstract

Purpose: To longitudinally investigate parent-reported children’s speech and language in early childhood as an early indicator of Indigenous Australians’ school-age educational outcomes.
Method: Participants were 1,534 children from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) whose parents reported on expressive and receptive speech and language concern (SLC) at 3–5 years using the Parents’ Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS). A total of 467 children (30.4%) were identified as having SLC, of whom 308 had only expressive SLC, 65 had only receptive SLC, and 81 had both expressive and receptive SLC. Educational outcomes included (a) National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests (grade 3; 8–9 years), (b) teacher-reported literacy and numeracy on the Academic Rating Scale (ARS) (8–9, 9–10 years), (c) research officer-administered Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT)-Reading (6–7, 7–8, 8–9, 9–10 years) and PAT-Maths (8–9, 9–10 years).
Results: After controlling for covariates (child age, sex, having hearing problems, having a disability, speaking an Indigenous language, parent education, family life events, community socio-economic status, and remoteness), SLC was associated with significantly lower scores on all NAPLAN subtests (reading, writing, spelling, grammar, numeracy); teacher-rated ARS: Language and Literacy (9–10 years); and PAT: Reading (6–7 years) and Maths (9–10 years). Sub-group comparisons indicated that children with both expressive and receptive SLC had the poorest outcomes on NAPLAN and ARS subtests.
Conclusion: Parental reporting of Indigenous Australian children’s speech and language concern in early childhood is an important early indicator of education outcomes at school, indicating the importance of families throughout a child’s trajectory of learning and development.

Indigenous Literacy Foundation

UNESCO has declared 2022-2032 the Decade of Indigenous Languages. The Indigenous Literacy Foundation publishes children's books in Indigenous Australian languages https://shop.ilf.org.au/collections/all. The Charles Sturt University Libraries held a fundraising campaign earlier this month to support this important cause: https://library-blog.csu.edu.au/2023/09/14/great-book-swap-2023/

Sydney bookstores that focus on bilingual books

Here are three Sydney bookstores that have a large supply of multilingual children's books

• Lost in Books https://www.lostinbooks.com.au 
• Kinokuniya https://kinokuniya.com.au/ 
• Abbey’s Bookstore https://www.abbeys.com.au/

Welcome Michelle Brown - our new postdoc

Today we received the news that Michelle Brown will officially join our team as a postdoctoral scholar, commencing on 1st August 2018. She will be with us part-time for two years. Michelle's postdoc will be funded by my CSU Senior Research Fellowship and she will be supporting the research of our team as well as continuing her PhD research into early literacy:

• Brown, M. I., Westerveld, M. F., & Gillon, G. T. (2017). Early storybook reading with babies and young children: Parents’ opinions and home reading practices. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 42(2), 69-77. doi:10.23965/AJEC.42.2.09 
• Brown, M. I., Westerveld, M. F., Trembath, D., & Gillon, G. T. (2017). Promoting language and social communication development in babies through an early storybook reading intervention. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Advance online publication doi:10.1080/17549507.2017.1406988 

Michelle had the opportunity to meet with our team at the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference in Adelaide in May. We are delighted she will be working with us over the next two years. 

A video of Michelle discussing her work is here: "Improving language and social skill outcomes for very young children through early storybook reading". Evidence Bites recordings from the 2017 Speech Pathology Australia National conference. 

Michelle Brown (on the left) with our team after the SPA conference

Literacy and citizenship: Learning to be literate in adulthood

The Island is a literary magazine that has teemed up with Rosie Martin (finalist for the 2017 Australian of the Year) to publish stories written by adults who have learned to read and write in adulthood (and many while in prison).
The link to The Island is here
The January 2017 issue containing the adults' stories is here.
Rosie's powerful opening article describes the importance of literacy for citizenship.

Children's books in languages other than English

As part of my Future Fellowship research I have collected many children's books written in languages other than English. I have been considering the vocabulary, illustrations, and conventions used by authors, illustrators and publishers in different cultures. This weekend I found a wonderful bookshop in Sydney that specializes in Japanese and Chinese books (including extensive children's book sections). It is called Kinokuniya, and think I will be visiting it again.

Japanese books are traditionally opened from right to left and written from top to bottom. However, many contemporary Japanese children's books are opened from left to right, and are written horizontally to mirror English conventions.

Children’s home environment and the impact on literacy in Africa

At the ISSBD conference (see earlier post) Damaris Ngorosho, from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania presented an invited paper titled “Phonological awareness and reading and writing ability: The importance of home environment factors in a rural community in Tanzania”.
She assessed the phonological awareness and reading skills (in Kiswahili) of 75 grade 2 children (aged 8-10 years old) in rural Tanzania and collected information on their home learning environment. Here are some of the findings that I found to be very interesting (and representative of what I saw in the villages in Zambia):

• Books in the home: 64.0% had no books, 30.7% had 1-2 books, 5.3% had 3+ books
• Pens in the home: 43.5% had no pens, 34.7% had one pen, 20.0% had 2+ pens
• Homes: most had poles/mud walls, grass/coconut roofs, and sand floors
• Water: 77% used a neighbourhood tap
• Lighting: 55% used a locally made lamp, 13% used electricity
• Fuel: 76% used firewood
• Furniture: 78% of homes had not enough beds for the number of people living there.

She also found that parental education level was a strong predictor of children’s reading and writing ability.