Enhancing Low-Income Children's Emergent Literacy

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term goal of this research is to contribute to a comprehensive parent intervention for promoting the meaning-based components of children's early literacy: vocabulary knowledge, oral language skills, and story skills. Language skills are a strong predictor of children's later reading success. Adult interactional style during book reading and during conversation is linked to children's language and literacy outcomes by the end of preschool, but no other study to date has separated out experimentally the relative benefits of these different candidates for promoting children's literacy. In dialogic reading, the adult reader asks open-ended questions, praises, and expands upon the child's utterances during book reading in an attempt to get the child to eventually tell the story. In elaborative conversations, the adult engages the child in a conversation about a past event as together they narrate a story. In explanatory conversations, the adult introduces new vocabulary and general knowledge into everyday conversations with the child. Over a two-year period, 160 3- and 4-year-old children will be recruited from daycare centers and preschools serving low-income families in Worcester, MA. Families will be randomly assigned to either a dialogic reading group, an elaborative conversation group, an explanatory conversation group, a combined reading/conversation group, or a no-treatment control group. Pretest measures will assess children's receptive and expressive vocabulary, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, narrative skill, interest in literacy, and their parents' language, book-reading, and conversational style. Reading and conversational skills training for parents will be conducted through videotapes, workshops, and role playing techniques once a month during the preschool year. The intervention year will occur at age 3 for 80 children and at age 4 for the remaining 80 children. At the end of the intervention and again at the end of kindergarten, children will be post-tested on all pretest measures. A measure of word decoding ability will be added at the kindergarten post-testing. Both dialogic reading and extended conversations (elaborative and explanatory) are expected to enhance children's meaning-based literacy skills, but from past research it is predicted that dialogic reading will be more effective for expressive vocabulary and extended conversations for receptive vocabulary. Dialogic reading and elaborative conversations are both predicted to enhance children's narrative skills. Pulling these three contexts together in one study will allow us to determine the critical elements of a comprehensive parent intervention for promoting children's language and literacy skills in the preschool period.