The effects of adult reading style on preschooler's emergent literacy skills

Abstract

Recently, dialogic reading, a highly interactive adult reading style, has been advocated as the best way to read to young children (Whitehurst et al., 1988; 1994). As children's skill level interacts with adult style, however, the quality, rather than quantity, of adult/ child interaction during book reading may be important. This study compared dialogic with performance oriented reading. Interactions in this style are of a higher level than those in the dialogic style. It was therefore hypothesised that highly skilled children would benefit most from performance oriented reading, whereas less skilled children would benefit most from the simpler dialogic reading. Children in the control group were expected to show intermediate gains as they remained in literacy rich environments. Fifty-six 4- year-old children were pre- and post-tested on vocabulary, print and story skills and randomly assigned to either the dialogic, performance oriented or control group for the duration of the six week intervention. The results showed that higher level children had significantly higher book concepts scores than children whose initial skills were lower when they had been in the performance oriented rather than control group. In contrast, lower level children did better on this task when they were in the dialogic group, and also had higher expressive vocabulary scores when they were in the dialogic rather than control group. Overall, children benefited most from an adult style that matched their ability, rather than just the quantity of interaction received.