A Read-Aloud Storybook Selection System for Prereaders at the Preschool Language Level: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This empirically derived difficulty-level system created for storybooks read aloud to preschoolers represents a step toward filling a gap in the read-aloud literature.

Factors Influencing Parents' Preferences and Parents' Perceptions of Child Preferences of Picturebooks

“…Books that were complex along one dimension (more theory of mind, more words per page, more advanced story structure, greater distance from the child's own experience) were likely to be complex along all of the other dimensions. This result is consistent with the results in Schwarz et al (2015) who similarly found that various dimensions of complexity (linguistic, inferencing, story structure, familiarity of the situations for the child) were predictive of whether experts (speech language pathologists) would classify the book as “easy” or “difficult.” The current results further supported the idea that all the features that contribute to complexity work together coherently across a wide variety of books.…”

“…Thus, more traditional stories were less likely to closely reflect the child's own life. This clustering of features corresponds roughly to the features in Schwarz et al (2015) that led speech language pathologists to classify a book as being comparatively “easy” (shorter sentences, less complex story structure, fewer abstract concepts, and greater similarity to the child's own experience) vs. “hard” (greater complexity in the story structure and language as well as more distance from the child's experience).…”

“…The current work considered six factors that cover a range of picturebook features. These features were chosen because previous work has suggested that they influence the preferences of either children or adults, and in many cases, they have also been suggested as relevant criteria to teachers and clinicians as means of choosing books (Chall et al, 1996; Schwarz et al, 2015). …”

“…Parents may also prefer books that center on the child's life, or they may believe that children will prefer such books, regardless of what they themselves enjoy. This factor may also reflect a dimension of cognitive complexity, as children may have more difficulty with books that are more distal from their own experience (Schwarz et al, 2015). …”

“…This factor was partially inspired by the coding scheme in Nicoloupolou and Sawyer (in preparation) and similar ideas discussed in Schwarz et al (2015). Picturebooks vary in terms of their story structure and indeed, whether they include a story at all.…”