The importance of the early years in young children's lives and the rigid inequality in literacy achievement are a stimulating backdrop to current research in young children's language and literacy development. This book reports new data and empirical analyses that advance the theory of language and literacy, with researchers using different methodologies in conducting their study, with both a sound empirical underpinning and a captivating analytical rationalization of the results. The contributors to this volume used several methodological methods (e.g. quantitative, qualitative) to describe the complete concept of the study; the achievement of the study; and the study in an appropriate manner based on the study's methodology.

The contributions to this volume cover a wide range of topics, including dual language learners; Latino immigrant children; children who have hearing disabilities; parents' and teachers' beliefs about language development; early literacy skills of toddlers and preschool children; interventions; multimodalities in early literacies; writing; and family literacy. The studies were conducted in various early childhood settings such as child care, nursery school, Head Start, kindergarten, and primary grades, and the subjects in the studies represent the pluralism of the globe - a pluralism of language, backgrounds, ethnicity, abilities, and disabilities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Early Child Development and Care.

Olivia N. Saracho is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. She is a former bilingual teacher, and has taught Head Start, preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school classes. Her current research and writing is in the field of early childhood education, and she has conducted research on children's play, emergent literacy, and family literacy. She is co-author of Foundations of early childhood education (with Spodek and Davis, 1991), Right from the start: Teaching children ages three to eight (with Spodek, 1994), Dealing with Individual differences in the early childhood classroom (with Spodek, 1994), and An integrated play-based curriculum for young children (2012); and co-editor of the Handbook of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education (2014).