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Teachers’ language practice during shared book reading may significantly affect the rate and outcome of early language proficiency. The current study has focused on 37 kindergarten teachers and 440 4- to 5-year-old kindergartners during their shared book reading sessions in Singapore, exploring teachers’ variation in instructional strategies and linguistic features, and its relations with children’s language development and teacher’s background. Results demonstrated that teacher’s language strategies and linguistic features varied considerably. Instructional strategies with a medium level of cognitive load were found to be positively related to children’s growth in receptive vocabulary and word reading skills. Teacher’s lexical sophistication was found to be positively associated with children’s vocabulary size. Years of teaching experience was revealed to predict teacher’s variation in medium-level instructions.

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This paper offers a discussion of the knowledge, skills, and awareness involved in digital reading. Reading, in this paper, is used in the broader sense to include deriving meaning from media on a digital screen. This paper synthesises key ideas from existing studies and presents a taxonomy for the teaching of digital reading. The taxonomy includes the development of: 1) the knowledge of linear and deep reading strategies; 2) basic and critical information skills; and 3) a multimodal semiotic awareness. The goal of this paper is to unpack the specific knowledge and skills for digital reading which will support educators, including classroom teachers and librarians, on the aspects to pay attention to as students engage in digital reading. This paper argues that, in addition to equipping students with the knowledge of reading strategies and information skills, an awareness of how the various semiotic modes make meaning is fundamental to effective digital reading.

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With technological advancement, digital play is increasingly popular as digital games appeal to all ages but are particularly attractive to youths and children. It is useful to develop a deeper understanding of digital play and to explore ways in which caregivers can guide young people in their play to recognize and develop different types of learning. This article attempts to address these issues through proposing a metalanguage for digital play. The theoretical orientation adopted in this article is that of social semiotics and critical multiliteracies. Our focus is on harnessing the affordances of digital play for learning by systematizing them into a metalanguage based on social semiotic theory that models the meaning potential of semiotic resources into the representation, engagement, and organization functions. From the metalanguage, the pedagogical implications or a set of principles of using digital play for learning in the classroom context are discussed.

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