Reading in two languages: Parents’ strategy and language use across book formats during bilingual shared reading

Abstract

This pre-print presents a study of 24 French-English bilingual parents reading books of different formats (single-language in the parent's dominant language, single-language in the parent's non-dominant language or bilingual) to their pre-school-aged children. We analyzed parents' reading interactions in terms of quantity (number of words) and quality (production of dialogic and bilingual reading strategies), considering both languages separately and together. We present the results of these analyses and discuss potential implications for bilingual families' efforts to support their children's language and literacy development in two languages.

Exploring the influence of the home literacy environment on early literacy and vocabulary skills in Korean–English bilingual children

“…Parents tended to use more Korean interactive utterances when reading a Korean book compared to English, indicating an increase in the use of English for interaction during English book reading. These results suggest that bilingual parents adapt their language use based on the specific language context the book they are reading (Gonzalez-Barrero et al, 2021;Quirk et al, 2022).…”

The balance of Spanish and English child-directed text in bilingual picture books

“…Caregivers and children often engage in conversation during reading (see Read et al, in press), and for bilingual families, that extra-textual talk can occur in either or both languages (Bauer, 2000;García and Kleifgen, 2020). Recent studies suggest that parents' and children's preferences, goals, and proficiency influence bilingual families' language choices in reading (Quirk et al, 2022;Read et al 2021a), but to our knowledge, no study has directly tested how language use within the text affects switching in extra-textual talk. Future research can determine how different types of books influence children's exposure to, or production of, language switches.…”

“…While Codeswitching books are becoming popular (Chaudhri and Torres, 2022), Translation books, which contain the full text in each language (Gonzalez-Barrero et al, 2021), are more common. Thus far, most studies examining children's learning from bilingual book reading have focused on Translation books across a variety of language pairs (e.g., Naqvi, 2013;Quirk et al, 2022). While it may be assumed that Translation books provide equivalent input across languages, translations can be imperfect, and it may be especially challenging to capture cultural references or wordplay, which can be central to children's literature (Lathey, 2015;Netley, 1992).…”