Published: February 1, 1995

Table Talk

As Catherine Snow, a Harvard education professor and one of the study's principal investigators, points out, these skills require practice. "It's not that these skills are so hard or so inaccessible,'' she says, "but [children] have to develop fluency with them.''

Most research on children's literacy up until now has focused on how children learn to decode words phonetically or on emergent literacy skills, such as knowing that print is read from left to right. Little attention has been given to oral-language development and how it contributes to the complex interplay of skills that reading requires. Similarly, much of the growing body of research on the factors that predict educational success has tended to focus on either the home or the school--not on both.

The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, led by Snow and David Dickinson, an associate education professor at Clark, is attempting to fill in those gaps. Launched seven years ago, the project thus far has received more than $1.2 million in funding from the Ford Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the...