Accelerating language development through picture book reading.

Abstract

We experimentally assessed a 1-month, home-based intervention, designed to optimize parental reading of picture books to young children. Parents in the experimental group received instructions to increase their rates of open-ended questions, function/attribute questions, and expansions; to respond appropriately to children's attempts to answer these questions; and to decrease their frequency of straight reading and questions that could be answered by pointing. Control-group parents were instructed to read in their customary fashion. All families audiotaped their reading sessions at home. Analysis of these tapes demonstrated that the experimental-group parents complied with the intervention instructions. Children in the experimental group scored significantly higher than children in the control group on standardized posttests of expressive language ability. On the basis of analysis of audiotapes, children in the experimental group also had a higher mean length of utterance (MLU), a higher frequency of phrases, and a lower frequency of single words. Follow-up 9 months after the completion of treatment disclosed continued, although statistically diminished, differences between the two groups.Picture book story time offers a potentially rich opportunity for young children to learn language. Wells (1985a) found that approximately 5% of the daily speech of a sample of 24-montholds occurred in story-time settings. In addition to being a setting in which children are prone to talk, story time also appears to evoke tutorial behavior from mothers that varies across dimensions such as social class. Ninio and Bruner (1978) studied a single middle-class mother-child pair over a 10-month period, with no special instructions given with regard to book reading. The mother labeled objects most frequently during picture book reading, with 75.6% of all instances of labeling occurring in that context. In addition, the mother provided consistent and informative feedback for the child's attempts at labeling (all incorrect labels were corrected, and 81% of the child's correct labels were reinforced). Similar effects have been found in case studies by Snow and Goldfield (1983) and Moerk and Moerk (1979). Ninio (1980) examined social class differences and found that lower-class mothers were less likely than middle-class mothers to engage in a number of potentially instructive behaviors during story time. Correspondingly, lowerclass children had smaller productive vocabularies than middle-class children.As one might expect, the focus of the speech that parents direct to their children (child-directed speech) during picture book reading changes with the age and linguistic sophistication

Quality of language and literacy instruction in preschool classrooms serving at-risk pupils

“…Likewise, few teachers provided literacy instruction that was explicit, systematic, and purposeful. This finding is of concern as children's exposure to instruction characterized by high quality ratings -including abstract vocabulary (van Kleeck, Gillam, Hamilton, & McGrath, 1997;van Kleeck, Vander Woude, & Hammett, 2006), open-ended questions (Girolametto & Weitzman, 2002;Whitehurst et al, 1988), and explicit description of phonological structures and print concepts Justice & Ezell, 2002;van Kleeck et al, 1998) -have been linked to accelerated performance on measures of language comprehension and expression, alphabet knowledge, and phonological awareness. Although this study did not use experimental methods and consequently cannot study the linkages between teachers' participation in professional development in the fall of the year and instructional quality, it is disturbing that quality was low even after workshop training.…”

“…An additional feature of high-quality literacy instruction is its purposefulness, or functionality, which refers to teachers' efforts to attach decontextualized code-based aspects of literacy instruction to meaning and comprehension (Ukrainetz, 2005). Applied studies of preschool literacy intervention have shown that increases in children's participation in classroom-based literacy experiences characterized by systematic, explicit, and purposeful experiences with print and sound can accelerate emergent literacy development (e.g., van Kleeck et al, 1998;Whitehurst et al, 1988).…”

“…Numerous descriptive and experimental studies have shown the positive developmental impacts of adult use of welltuned (also called responsive) conversational input to children, particularly the use of openended questions, expansions, advanced linguistic models, and recasts (e.g., Baker & Nelson, 1984;Nelson, 1977;Vasilyeva, Huttenlocher, & Waterfall, 2006;Wasik, Bond, & Hindman, 2006;Yoder, Spruytenburg, Edwards, & Davies, 1995). Social-interactionist theories of language development have informed the design of classroom interventions to accelerate language growth in typical and at-risk children (e.g., Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998;Vasilyeva et al, 2006;Wasik et al, 2006;Whitehurst et al, 1988). In these interventions, preschool educators are trained to utilize specific language-facilitation techniques in their formal and informal interactions with children to provide frequent exemplars of language forms and functions that are slightly advanced of (and thus responsive to) children's linguistic abilities.…”

“…An additional feature of high-quality literacy instruction is its purposefulness, or functionality, which refers to teachers' efforts to attach decontextualized code-based aspects of literacy instruction to meaning and comprehension (Ukrainetz, 2005). Applied studies of preschool literacy intervention have shown that increases in children's participation in classroom-based literacy experiences characterized by systematic, explicit, and purposeful experiences with print and sound can accelerate emergent literacy development (e.g., van Kleeck et al, 1998;Whitehurst et al, 1988).In this study, we drew from the available literature that characterizes high-quality language and literacy instruction in preschool classrooms to develop two rating scales by which to quantify the quality of instruction in 135 publicly-funded preschool classrooms serving atrisk pupils. Our first aim was to determine the quality of language and literacy instruction in at-risk preschool classrooms.…”

Improving the General Language Skills of Second-Language Learners in Kindergarten: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…In addition to structured language tasks, an important component of the program was based on dialogic storybook reading (developed by Whitehurst et al, 1988). Dialogic reading involves specific questioning techniques used by teachers that are directed to the child to get him or her to develop more context-independent language and to expand his or her vocabulary while jointly attending to a book.…”