Abstract
Dialogic reading (DR), first described in Whitehurst et al. (1988), is a specific reading technique that encourages parents to involve the child actively in verbal and nonverbal interactions during shared book reading. The well-known acronyms for DR techniques include CROWD (completion, recall, open-ended questions, wh-questions and distancing) and PEER (prompt, evaluate, expand and repeat). As DR was originally designed for children aged 2 to 5 years, it is less known about what the DR practices of parents would look like during shared book reading with 12 month-old infants. The current study analyzed observational data from 29 parent-infant dyads to address this issue during shared book reading. The results indicated that parents interacted with their 12 month-old infants by spontaneously applying most DR strategies during shared book reading, with some strategies used more frequently and commonly than others. The usage frequency of each DR strategy did not change as a function of infants’ background characteristics. Parents with infants who had better abilities in communicative gestures tended to use information from the book cover to prompt the children to talk about the story more frequently during shared book reading. These results make a unique contribution in providing both quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate what the DR practices of parents look like while reading with preverbal infants.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Rose Lee for providing administrative assistance and all participating families for their time. We also thank Jun Ren Lee for commenting on the first draft of this manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant MOST 106–2511-S-003–052-MY3; and by the “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan. This work was also partially supported by Lotung Poh-Ai Hospital.
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Appendix
Appendix
Dialogic reading strategies | Original DR definitions for 4 to 5 years old (i.e., Cooper et al., 2014; Vally et al., 2015; Zevenbergen & Whitehurst, 2003) | Revised DR definitions forinfants | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
PEER | |||
Prompt | Prompt the child to label objects in the book and talk about the story | Prompt the child to label objects from the book cover and talk about the story before reading the story | Parents: “What is it? Is this a bear?” |
Evaluate | Evaluate the child’s responses. Praise the child’s correct responses and offer alternative labels or answers for clearly incorrectresponses | Evaluate the child’s verbal responses, nonword vocalization and nonverbal behaviors. Praise the child’s correct responses and offer alternative labels or answers for clearly incorrect responses | Nonword vocalization: Child: “Ah!” Parents: “Horse.” Nonverbal behaviors: Child: (Touch the horse) Parents: Horse |
Expand | Expand the child’s verbalization by adding information to it | Expand-Infant Expand the book content, and the child’s nonverbal behaviors Expand-Original NR | Book content: Child: (Touch the bear’s fur) Parents: “The bear’s fur is different from the horse’s fur Nonverbal behaviors: Child: (Touch the bear’s fur) Parents: “The fur is comfortable.” Verbalization: Child: “Bear.” Parents: “Big bear.” |
Repeat | Encourage the child to repeat the expanded utterances | NR | Parents: “Say horse.” |
CROWD | |||
Completion | Fill in the blank questions to let the child complete the sentence | NR | Parents: “This is a____.” |
Recall | Questions that require the child to remember aspects of the book | NR | Parents: “Is this the same bear that we saw on the book cover?” |
Open-ended | Statements that encourage the child to respond to the book in his or her own way | NR | Parents: “What will happen on the next page?” |
Wh-prompts | To ask the child Wh-questions | NR | Parents: “What is this?” |
Distancing | Questions that require the child to relate the content of the book aspects of life outside the book | NR | Real-life experiences: Parents: “Have you taken the train before?” Things in real life: Parents: “(Point to the curtains on the book). Curtains. We also have curtains in our house.” |
YES-NO QUESTIONS | / | Questions that require the child to answer yes or no | You’re acting cute to the bear, right? Do you like the bear? |
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Chang, C.S., Hsieh, FJ., Chen, Ty. et al. Revisiting Dialogic Reading Strategies with 12-Month-Old Infants. Early Childhood Educ J 51, 1413–1426 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-022-01385-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-022-01385-4