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Embodied Action Scaffolds Dialogic Reading

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Abstract

Might dialogic reading require previous or concurrent embodied activities to be effective? Twenty-nine preschool children, ages 3–5 years, were randomly assigned to the control condition (children listened to a story eight times), the dialogic-then-embodied condition (children engaged in dialogic reading for four readings and then embodied action was added), or the embodied-then-dialogic condition. The embodied action required the child to act out components of the story using toys. Adding embodied action increased story recall, vocabulary acquisition, and positive affect (with generally large effect sizes). Thus, embodied action in conjunction with dialogic reading provides an effective model for promoting early literacy skills. We discuss the possibility that all benefits of dialogic reading come about through embodied processes.

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Notes

  1. Asking comprehension questions before the initial reading of the text serves two purposes. First, it provides a measure of baseline knowledge. Second, it allows us to demonstrate that correctly answering the questions requires information obtained from the text (see the Pre-test data in Table 3).

  2. Not all parents and cultures naturally engage in question-asking. Mesa and Restrepo (2019) report that Latino parents with primary or secondary educations rarely ask questions during shared reading. Similarly, Gómez et al. (in press) document that college-educated Latino immigrant parents (in the USA) rarely ask questions.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the children, parents, and staff of Arizona State University’s Child Study Laboratory. Additional thanks to Ashlie Woodburn whose senior honors project inspired this research and who developed the dialogic script and to the publishers of Swipea Kids for the permission to use images. Arthur Glenberg was partially supported by grants 1324807 and 1917636 from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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All data are available from the corresponding author.

Funding

Arthur Glenberg was partially supported by grants 1324807 and 1917636 from the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Mail Code 1104, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Danielle Wall, Sarah Foltz, Anne Kupfer & Arthur M. Glenberg

  2. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Arthur M. Glenberg

  3. INICO, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Arthur M. Glenberg

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  1. Danielle Wall
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  2. Sarah Foltz
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  4. Arthur M. Glenberg
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Contributions

DW contributed to conceptualization, data collection, data analysis, and writing. SF contributed to conceptualization. AK contributed to conceptualization. AMG contributed data analysis and writing.

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Correspondence to Arthur M. Glenberg.

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All procedures were approved by the Arizona State University IRB for STUDY00006326.

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Wall, D., Foltz, S., Kupfer, A. et al. Embodied Action Scaffolds Dialogic Reading. Educ Psychol Rev 34, 401–419 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09617-6

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