Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, and Hemphill (1991) at Harvard University conducted a two year ethnographic study of the effects of home and school experiences on literacy achievement of low-income children living in one of three neighborhoods in a small city in the northwestern region of the United States. They used the following three models to explain home-school influences on literacy achievement: (a) the family as educator model which focuses on parental expectation and engagement in literate activities, (b) the resilient family model which includes the effects of emotional, sociological, interactive and psychological variables on the family's ability to cope with life and still have resources to promote the child's well-being, and (c) the parent-school partnership model which includes parental involvement with the school.

Snow et al (1991) conclude that both home and school have separate and unique responsibilities in preparing children for literacy. They show that children raised in stressful homes, with poor emotional environments and limited resources do not perform as well as those from resilient homes. One interesting finding is that "the teachers" practices, not education, marital status, or work place of the parents…made the difference in whether parents were productive partners with schools"(p. 139) and also that excellent classrooms could compensate for poor home conditions. Some of the teachers' practices they endorse include acknowledging the importance of decontextualized language for success in reading, listening to children read for a minimum of 10 to 20 minutes each day for stimulating vocabulary development and facilitating reading comprehension, encouraging children to play with both verbal and written language, engaging in discussion with children about what they have read, and making a print-rich classroom. They describe excellent classrooms as ones in which there are varied materials and activities available at a variety of levels. There is also integrated reading, writing and content area instruction.

D. Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (1988) conducted an ethnographic study with six poor black inner-city families who had children perceived by the parents as successfully learning to read. Their results lead them to question the assumption that low-income families are disadvantaged by being linguistically deprived. They found that these families show many varied early literacy experiences in their everyday lives. In fact, they stated that social class could not explain their findings; much literate behaviour was an integral part of these homes and support for literacy efforts was clearly present.