Learning at home and at school

The two papers that comprise this dissertation represent a unique endeavor to provide a comprehensive account of home and classroom factors that influence the developmental trajectories of low-income children's emerging Hindi language and literacy skills in India. Findings indicate that Indian children from low-income backgrounds have little access to rich and diverse print resources at home or in the kindergarten classroom. The first paper demonstrates that children's home literacy environments are multi-dimensional with book reading, teaching by family members, child interest in language and literacy and adult literacy practices emerging as four distinct dimensions that differentially impact children's language and emergent literacy skills. Although the specificities of these findings converge with and diverge from findings in other contexts, they support the view that early experiences with print at home have consequences for children's early language and emergent literacy skills. The second paper describes the curriculum of an early education program, evaluates the classroom practices that support language, decoding, and writing, and examines the role of classroom practices in children's language and emergent literacy skills. My findings revealed that the richness of literacy resources positively influenced children's vocabulary knowledge and quality of the instructional support for decoding and writing positively influenced children's emergent literacy skills. This supports the view that developmentally appropriate informal and structured literacy activities are necessary to foster emergent literacy skills. Importantly, teachers with no formal training in early childhood education are successful in positively influencing learning via enhancements in quality of instructional support that are at best minor relative to the quality of early learning environments provided in the industrialized, minority world. The specificities of the home and classroom literacy environments on children's emerging language and literacy skills underscore the importance of locally situated understandings of home literacy environments to develop more accurate models of early literacy environments and to better inform the design of early intervention programs. As contexts such as India are home to the majority of the world's children, studies such as this have important implications for improving early childhood outcomes in India and other low-literacy resource contexts.