It Takes Two: Parent and Child Support for Developing Early Reading Skills

Abstract

Learning to read is one of the most important skills that a child will learn in their early years at school. The successful foundation for reading acquisition is thought to begin in the home and increasingly, parents, teachers and policy makers have learnt of the potential impact of parental involvement in their child’s success in school. Virtually no research has asked what specific strategies parents and children spontaneously use to help early readers during child → parent book reading. This thesis aimed to add to the current literature base through observing child→parent reading longitudinally across the first year of reading instruction. The current study was designed to describe the parent-child interactions during assigned home book reading across the new entrant year and to begin learn how these interactions correlate with achievement of early literacy milestones. 22 parent-child dyads from three decile 4 schools in a small urban area in New Zealand took part in this study. Dyads were video-recorded three times across the child’s first year of school, with the child reading a seen and an unseen book that was at their teacher-assigned instructional level to their parent. Parent and child responses to miscues were coded according to levels of responses (Evans, Moretti, Shaw & Fox, 2003), along with multiple other observable elements in the reading interaction. Repeated measures over the first year of school captured the interplay between student performance and parental scaffolding of performance. Results found that there were significant differences between seen and unseen texts in children’s reading performance, as indicated by number of miscues made, percentage of words read correctly, and ratings of reading prosody, as well as observer impressions of engagement and enjoyment. These differences were particularly evident earlier in the year, but diminished over the course of the year. Over the year children were observed to use higher levels of attempts at independent self-corrections in response to a misread word, with level of independent self-correction correlating with overall reading performance. Ratings of parents’ engagement, enjoyment, and level of support provided were not found to statistically differ as a function of text condition or time of year. Correlational analyses found that when children displayed higher levels of independent self-correction, parents provided lower levels of support, especially later in the year. Moreover, children who had poorer reading skills had parents who provided more supportive feedback at the end of year. Finally, when looking within reading interactions, parents were observed to gradually increase the amount of support provided in response to miscues, similar to results of Evans et al. (2003). Consistent with past research, results suggest that parents may be providing more or less support in reading interactions as needed, with time course of the linkage between support and reading skill suggesting that level of parental support may be in response to children’s progress in reading acquisition. Future research is needed to clarify relations of parental support with school practices, and whether and how effective parental support may be enhanced for children struggling with reading acquisition.