Person: Snow, Catherine
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Snow
First Name
Catherine
Name
Snow, Catherine
17 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
Publication The Challenge of Academic Language(Cambridge University Press, 2009) Snow, Catherine; Uccelli, PaolaPublication A Research Agenda for Educational Linguistics(Wiley Blackwell, 2008) Uccelli, Paola; Snow, CatherinePublication Maternal Correlates of Growth in Toddler Vocabulary Production in Low-Income Families(Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) Pan, Barbara; Rowe, Meredith; Singer, Judith; Snow, CatherineThis study investigated predictors of growth in toddlers’ vocabulary production between the ages of 1 and 3 years by analyzing mother – child communication in 108 low-income families. Individual growth modeling was used to describe patterns of growth in children’s observed vocabulary production and predictors of initial status and between-person change. Results indicate large variation in growth across children. Observed variation was positively related to diversity of maternal lexical input and maternal language and literacy skills, and negatively related to maternal depression. Maternal talkativeness was not related to growth in children’s vocabulary production in this sample. Implications of the examination of longitudinal data from this relatively large sample of low-income families are discussed.Publication Evaluating the impact of different early literacy interventions on low-income Costa Rican kindergarteners(Elsevier BV, 2006) San Francisco, Andrea; Arias, Melissa; Villers, Renata; Snow, CatherineGrade retention has been the de facto policy for children with academic difficulties in many Latin American countries [Schiefelbein, E., & Wolff, L. (1992). Repetition and inadequate achievement in Latin America’s primary schools: a review of magnitudes, causes, relationships, and strategies. Washington, DC: World Bank.]. In Costa Rica, 14.9% of public school children were retained in first grade in 2002. In a study of first grade classrooms in Costa Rica, children identified as in need of repeating first grade were found to have lower levels of reading ability [Rolla San Francisco, A., Arias, M., Villers, R., & Snow, C. (in press). The importance of reading skills, prereading skills, and family in teachers’ decisions to retain children: a case study in costa rica. Aula Abierta]. There has been a greater focus in recent years on the importance of prevention of educational difficulties, versus repetition, as the most cost-effective and efficient way of providing educational opportunities to low-income children. There is little rigorous research evaluating the impact of different interventions on the early literacy skills of low-income children in developing countries as a way to prevent posterior academic difficulties. This experimental study evaluated the differential impact of three early literacy interventions—tutoring, classroom activities, and work with families—on the emergent literacy skills of low-income Costa Rican kindergarteners. Tutoring or a combination of all three interventions were the most effective, while providing high-quality materials to teachers without training had no impact, but more intensive interventions of longer duration will probably be needed to ensure long-term impact on first grade repetition and eventual school dropout. Continuing research will assess the impact of these interventions on student outcomes and repetition rates in first grade, as well as exploring the impact of the more intensive intervention of professional developmenPublication Early literacy development and instruction: An overview(Routledge, 2017) Snow, CatherineThe goal of this chapter is to give an overview of what we know about literacy development in children up to age eight, as well as to introduce some topics for which more research is needed. We know that good readers have developed familiarity and automaticity with symbols used in their writing system and how those symbols represent sounds, as well as oral language skills strong enough to enable them to make sense of the words they are decoding. This full array of skills develops optimally when children have access to rich language and literacy experiences at home and in early education settings. Controversies persist about how early it is useful to introduce explicit literacy instruction, and the optimal balance in early literacy education between form-based and meaning-based instruction. The variety of approaches to literacy instruction implemented across different national education systems and different languages reveals both that a variety of approaches can work but also that some approaches, in particular those relying on rote memorization, generate a high risk of failure.Publication Communicative Intents Expressed by Parents in Interaction with Young Children.(1996) Pan, Barbara; Imbens-Bailey, Alison; Winner, Kendra; Snow, CatherineAlthough much attention has been devoted to lexical, grammatical, and semantic aspects of child-directed speech, less is known about its pragmatics. This paper describes a longitudinal study of the communicative intents used by parents in interaction with their 14-, 20-, and 32-month-olds (n = 52). With 14-month-olds, parents used a small core set of communicative intents. This set grew in size and sophistication with increasing child age. Comparison with children's intents showed that some commonly used parental communicative intents were rare in children's language at all three ages. As children grew older, parental use of directive intents declined and child-centered acts increased. These findings suggest that child-directed parental speech is simplified pragmatically as well as grammatically and semantically.Publication Professional Development for Reading Achievement: Results from the Collaborative Language and Literacy Instruction Project (CLLIP)(University of Chicago Press, 2012) Porche, Michelle V.; Pallante, Daniel H.; Snow, CatherineThe Collaborative Language and Literacy Instruction Project (CLLIP) is a model of professional development designed to help teachers incorporate research-based practices of literacy instruction, support mastery, and sustained use of these practices through coaching, and serve as a foundation for whole-school reform efforts. We describe the model, intervention, implementation, and subsequent results from an exploratory study in which we tested student literacy outcomes for kindergartners and fourth graders in the classrooms of CLLIP teachers against a matched comparison group. Exploratory results from a rural cohort of elementary school teachers suggest support for skill building in the alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness, fluency, and vocabulary. We discuss outcomes by reflecting on central program features: CLLIP strengthens teachers’ content knowledge and ties that knowledge to subject-specific content for students, has extended duration and support, is tied to state standards, and involves collective participation across a district to advance reform efforts.Publication Assessment in Early Literacy Research(Guilford Press, 2011) Snow, Catherine; Oh, Soojin S.Much of what we know about children’s language and literacy development derives from efforts to assess those skills. In fact, language and literacy development might be taken as a case study in the history of assessment—a local domain which displays the full range of tensions, challenges, and approaches that have characterized the field of behavioral assessment, and in particular, the assessment of young children. In this chapter, we discuss language and literacy assessment in young children as an illustrative special case of issues that extend far beyond the language/literacy domain. In that larger domain, as in this specific one, three key questions organize the information: For what purposes should we assess young children? What aspects of their functioning should be assessed? And how do we carry out assessments so as to get good, reliable information with only modest burden on the adult assessor or the child?Publication Teen Culture, Technology and Literacy Instruction: Urban Adolescent Students’ Perspectives(University of Alberta, 2015) Li, Jia; Snow, Catherine; White, ClaireModern teens have pervasively integrated new technologies into their lives, and technology has become an important component of teen popular culture. Educators have pointed out the promise of exploiting technology to enhance students’ language and literacy skills and general academic success. However, there is no consensus on the effect of technology on teens, and scant literature is available that incorporates the perspective of urban and linguistically diverse students on the feasibility of applying new technologies in teaching and learning literacy in intact classrooms. This paper reports urban adolescents’ perspectives on the use of technology within teen culture, for learning in general and for literacy instruction in particular. Focus group interviews were conducted among linguistically diverse urban students in grades 6, 7 and 8 in a lower income neighborhood in the Northeastern region of the United States. The major findings of the study were that 1) urban teens primarily and almost exclusively used social media and technology devices for peer socializing, 2) they were interested in using technology to improve their literacy skills, but did not appear to voluntarily or independently integrate technology into learning, and 3) 8th graders were considerably more sophisticated in their use of technology and their suggestions for application of technology to literacy learning than 6th and 7th graders. These findings lead to suggestions for developing effective literacy instruction using new technologies.Publication Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century: Introducing the Issue(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) Murnane, Richard; Sawhill, Isabel; Snow, CatherineAdvanced literacy is a prerequisite to adult success in the twenty-first century, By advanced literacy we do not mean simply the ability to decode words or read a text, as necessary as these elementary skills are, Instead we mean the ability to use reading to gain access to the world of knowledge, to synthesize information from different sources, to evaluate arguments, and to learn totally new subjects, These higher-level skills are now essential to young Americans who wish to explore fields as disparate as history, science, and mathematics; to succeed in postsecondary education, whether vocational or academic; to earn a decent living in the knowledge-based globalized labor market; and to participate in a democracy facing complex problems, The literacy challenge confronting children, their families, and schools in the United States has two parts. The first is the universal need to better prepare students for twenty-first-century literacy demands. The second is the specific need to reduce the disparities in literacy outcomes between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from more privileged homes. This issue of the Future of Children explores the literacy of America's children and how to improve it. We begin this introductory essay by reviewing briefly why literacy is so important in today's world and why the concept of literacy needs to be broadened to include a set of competencies that go well beyond the ability to recognize words and decode text. We end with a summary of the other articles in the issue and briefly consider what steps policy makers might take to respond to the urgent needs we cite