The effect of book format and parent language dominance on shared book reading in bilingual families
Shared book reading - an adult reading to a child - supports children’s language development (e.g. Sénéchal, Pagan, & Leve, 2008). Most of what we know about shared book reading comes from studies of monolingual families, but shared book reading in bilingual families is different than in monolingual families. First, bilingual families must divide their book-reading time and resources between two languages. Second, bilingual parents may not be equally comfortable reading in both of their languages, which may influence how much and how well they read in each language. One recent study found that in bilingual families, parents own more books and read to their children more often in their stronger language (Gonzalez-Barrero et al., 2021). This could further disadvantage children’s oral language development in their weaker language. Bilingual books - books that tell a story in two languages - could be a useful tool to address this problem as they may provide additional support for reading in a weaker language. Yet little is known about how bilingual families engage with this format. This project addresses this gap by directly observing French-English bilingual parents and their preschool-aged children during shared reading with traditional single-language books and bilingual books. Shared reading interactions will be transcribed, coded and analyzed to assess the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions when reading 1) a bilingual or traditional single-language book and 2) in a stronger or weaker language.