This study investigated the effects of a shared book reading professional development program on preschool educators’ ability to engage children in book-related conversations and promote word learning. 20 preschool educators were video-recorded reading two books to a small group of children at pre- and posttest eight weeks apart. Educators in the experimental group (n = 10) participated in professional development that included classroom instruction and individualized coaching. The control group remained on the waitlist. All video-recordings were transcribed and coded. Results indicated that educators in the experimental group included significantly more questions, responsive statements, and lexical diversity in their book-related talk compared to the control group. Further, they facilitated longer book-related conversations and had more long conversations (i.e., five turns or longer). Finally, conversations that included inferential talk resulted in the longest conversations. These findings suggest that professional development can enhance educators’ responsiveness during shared book reading.

This study investigated the effects of a shared book reading professional development program on preschool educators’ ability to engage children in book-related conversations and promote word learning. 20 preschool educators were video-recorded reading two books to a small group of children at pre- and posttest eight weeks apart. Educators in the experimental group (n = 10) participated in professional development that included classroom instruction and individualized coaching. The control group remained on the waitlist. All video-recordings were transcribed and coded. Results indicated that educators in the experimental group included significantly more questions, responsive statements, and lexical diversity in their book-related talk compared to the control group. Further, they facilitated longer book-related conversations and had more long conversations (i.e., five turns or longer). Finally, conversations that included inferential talk resulted in the longest conversations. These findings suggest that professional development can enhance educators’ responsiveness during shared book reading.

In this dissertation two studies are reported to explore the relation between parents’ goals for, beliefs about, and behaviour during parent-child shared book reading. In the first study, 92 parents rated the importance of potential reasons for reading with their children using the Parent Goals for Shared Reading Questionnaire (Evans & Williams, 2003). Ratings were completed longitudinally each year from their child’s junior kindergarten to grade 1 year. Factor analysis largely confirmed previous cross-sectional findings that the questionnaire items reflect distinct parent goals for shared book reading, including fostering reading skills, stimulating development, engaging in an enjoyable activity, and experiencing closeness with their child. The second study used data from the senior kindergarten year of this same sample of children to investigate the relation between parents’ beliefs about how to teach reading, how highly they rated fostering reading skills as a goal versus non-reading goal subsets, and their behaviour during shared book reading (i.e., the nature of the extratextual comments and error corrections made). Results demonstrated that, as parent goals to foster children’s reading skills increase, their tendency to provide the correct word in response to their child’s miscues decreases. When goals to foster reading skills were high, parents were more likely to use strategies that help their child to read misread words, regardless of their ratings of goals to engage in a positive experience with their child. However, when goals to foster reading skills were low, increasing ratings of the goal to engage in a positive experience related to decreasing instances of parents helping their child to read misread words. Furthermore, the goal to engage in a positive experience with one’s child was positively related to extratextual conversation not related to teaching reading but only when goals to foster reading skills were also low. Finally, goals to foster reading and constructivist beliefs both made independent contributions to the prediction of parents’ use of context cues to correct reading errors. Implications of these findings for literacy intervention programs targeted at the shared-book reading interaction are discussed.

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The development of children’s language skills during the preschool years plays a crucial role in subsequent reading and school success. Some children may enter kindergarten with oral language skills that lag behind their peers’. Two such groups are children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) families and those who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Study 1 considered parents’ linguistic input during interactions with their Head Start pre-kindergarten children in two conversational contexts. The first, shared storybook reading, has featured prominently in early language interventions but proven less efficacious among low-SES samples. The second, shared reminiscing, offers a theoretically promising setting in which to promote child vocabulary skills but lacks empirical support. This study examined features of parental language known to relate to children’s vocabulary, including parents’ quantity of speech, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and intent to elicit child language. Parents’ and children’s expressive vocabulary knowledge was also considered. Forty parent-child dyads’ conversations during storybook reading and shared reminiscing were audiorecorded, transcribed, analyzed, and coded. Paired t-tests revealed that, while parents talked more during book reading, they used greater levels of syntactic complexity and language-eliciting talk during shared reminiscing. Parents’ own vocabulary knowledge was related to their children’s but not to linguistic input in either context. Study 2 considered the oral narrative skills of DHH preschoolers relative to language-matched hearing children. School-age DHH children often experience delays in the development of narrative skills compared to their hearing peers. Little is known about the narrative abilities of DHH children during the preschool years. This study examined 46 DHH and 58 vocabulary-matched hearing preschoolers’ overall language production, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and narrative comprehension skills. DHH children produced a similar number of words and demonstrated similar levels of narrative understanding compared to their hearing peers. However, DHH children’s narratives contained significantly less complex syntax. Gains in lexical diversity differed by group, with DHH children demonstrating less growth over the course of the school year despite making more gains on a standardized measure of vocabulary. Implications for instruction, assessment, and future research are discussed for both low-SES and DHH children.

Children from a low socioeconomic status (SES) home environment are typically exposed to less vocabulary during the first few years of life and experience higher rates of poor school readiness, particularly in emergent literacy skills, when compared to middle-class peers (Bowey, 1995; Hart & Risley, 2003; Whitehurst, 1997). Early childhood education programs designed to expose this group to cognitively challenging utterances have found that low SES children tend to make greater gains in vocabulary development compared to middle-class peers (Justice, Meier, & Walpole, 2005).

Cette recherche s’inscrit dans une approche dialogique et interactionniste du langage. Dans la suite des travaux soulignant l’importance de la culture (Tomasello, 2004) et des récits (Bruner, 1983, 1996, 2006), ainsi que des interactions qui y ont lieu mais aussi dans ceux analysant les interactions ayant lieu plus particulièrement au cours de lectures conjointes d’histoires, ou encore de ceux de Bakhtine (1984), Brès (1994), François (2004) ou encore Labov (1978) analysant le fonctionnement des discours et plus particulièrement des récits, nous cherchons à comprendre comment adultes et enfants racontent ensemble des histoires en situation familiale et scolaire. Dix enfants âgés de 3 à 5 ans ont été filmés au cours de ces séances de lectures d’albums, sans texte et avec texte, avec un de leur parent à leur domicile et avec des pairs et des enseignants à l’école. Les analyses portent sur la manière dont les adultes s’y prennent pour non seulement faire participer les enfants à la production de récits, mais aussi co-construire avec eux les récits ou encore co-construire avec eux la référence. Les résultats montrent malgré un certain nombre d’invariants une grande diversité des conduites narratives des adultes et des enfants. / This research revolves around both a dialogical and an interactionist approach of language. This study follows at once previous researches highlighting the importance of culture (Tomasello, 2004), interactions and narratives (Bruner, 1983, 1996, 2006), as well as researches studying interactions during joint activities of book-reading, and studies analysing the way discourse, and especially narratives work (Bakhtine, 1984, Brès 1994, François, 2004 ou encore Labov, 1978). We aim at understanding how adults and children tell stories together, at home and at school. Ten children aged from three to five have been recorded during book-reading sessions, with and without text, at home with one parent and at school with teachers and other children. We have carried out analyses on the way adults do not only to make the children participate to the narratives’ production, but also co-construct narratives or reference with the children. Despite a certain amount of invariants, the results show a wide variety of narrative discursive behaviors among adults and children.

This thesis consists of three separate papers broadly examining how different environmental and child variables affect language and literacy acquisition in two or more orthographies. The first paper is a quantitative meta-analysis of studies that have examined the effects of shared book reading on language, emergent literacy skills, and reading achievement with preschool children. The results suggest that shared book reading explained approximately 7% of variance in all the language and literacy measures combined. The mean effect size of shared book reading was slightly larger for the combined language measures (d = 0.77) than for the combined emergent literacy measures (d = 0.57), or the combined reading achievement measures (d = 0.63). An examination of the effects of shared book reading on specific language, emergent literacy, and reading skills revealed that shared book reading is more related to some skills than others. The second paper examines the effects of home literacy (shared book reading, teaching activities, and number of books), children’s task-focused behaviour, and parents’ beliefs and expectations about their child’s reading and academic ability on Kindergarten children’s (N = 61) phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge and on Grade 1 word reading. The results showed that after controlling for nonverbal IQ and vocabulary, parent teaching activities prior to Kindergarten predicted significantly letter knowledge; parents’ beliefs about their children’s reading ability predicted significantly phonological sensitivity and Kindergarten word reading; and children’s task-focused behaviour predicted significantly letter knowledge and Kindergarten and Grade 1 word reading The third paper reports on a cross-linguistic longitudinal study that examines the environmental, behavioural, and cognitive predictors of Grade 3 word reading fluency, passage comprehension, and spelling in children learning to read in an orthographically inconsistent language (English) and in an orthographically consistent language (Greek). Results indicated that home literacy factors did not directly predict Grade 3 reading or spelling skills for either the English- or Greek-speaking samples. Task-focused behaviour directly predicted spelling for the Greek-speaking sample. Vocabulary was more important for reading and spelling in English than in Greek. Letter knowledge was more important for spelling in Greek and for passage comprehension in English. / Special Education

<p>Joint attention is critical for social learning activities such as parent-child shared book reading. However, there is a potential disassociation of attention when the adult reads texts while the child looks at pictures. I hypothesize that the lack of joint attention limits children's opportunity to learn print-related skills. The current study tests the hypothesis with interventions that enhance real-time joint attention. Eye movements of parents and children were simultaneously tracked when they read books together on computer screens. I also provided real-time feedback to the parent regarding where the child was looking, and vice versa. Changes of dyads' reading behaviors before and after the joint attention intervention were measured from both eye movements and video records. Baseline data showed little joint attention in parent-child shared book reading. The real-time attention feedback significantly increased the joint attention and children's print-related learning. These findings supported my hypothesis that engaging in effective joint attention is critical for children to acquire knowledge and skills during shared reading and other collaborative learning activities.</p> / Dissertation

The literacy skills that students develop in preschool are an imperative aspect of school readiness and later academic success. Research has established that some students begin their educational experience at a disadvantage due to the low socioeconomic status (SES) of their family and, as a result, low levels of conversation between parents and children, restricted access to books, and low values placed on literacy. Past research supports that shared book reading is one of the most beneficial activities in which teachers can partake in order to optimize their students’ language development. The Head Start program is intended to alleviate the SES gap by providing a high quality education to preschool students. However, as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), Head Start teachers are failing nationally in the area of Instructional Support, or implementing curriculum effectively in order to promote language and cognitive development. This study was designed to provide a book reading training to Head Start teachers in order to increase their level and frequency of Cognitively Challenging Talk with their students. Results found that Cognitively Challenging Talk increased as a result of the training as well as the amount of words the teacher utilized; Less Cognitively Demanding Talk and Managing Interaction variables, or classroom management aspects, were not significantly changed