Beyond the written word: The role of text on preschool teachers’ book sharing styles

Teachers’ sharing of picture books is a quintessential activity in early childhood classrooms, and has been found to be predictive of children’s language and literacy skill development. Although most research, to date, has focused on the manner in which preschool teachers share text-based books with their students, recent work has recommended that teachers include wordless books as part of their classroom book sharing routines. Yet, little is known about how the absence of text might influence teachers’ discourse styles. The present study, thus, explored the discourse styles used by preschool teachers of Latino dual-language learners when sharing both text-based and wordless picture books with their class. Results showed that, while there were common features across both book types, when sharing wordless books teachers tended to adopt a more co-constructive style, by asking questions and supporting children’s participation in the sharing of the story. At the same time, they were more likely to elicit predictions and analyses from the children. The findings highlight the importance of including wordless books in preschool classroom book sharing interactions, especially in classrooms serving dual-language learners.

Narrative dialogic reading with wordless picture books: A cluster-randomized intervention study

Shared reading has the potential to promote a wide range of language skills that are important for reading acquisition. Dialogic reading interventions in preschool facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary and narrative production skills, but it is unclear (a) whether dialogic reading can also foster inferential and literal narrative comprehension and (b) whether intervention effects are maintained until the beginning of formal reading instruction. To close these two gaps, we designed and conducted a low-dose narrative dialogic reading intervention with wordless picture books. On the child care center level, 201 German preschoolers (M age = 5;5 years) were randomly assigned to the dialogic reading group, an alternative treatment group, or a no treatment group. Hierarchical linear models showed positive effects of dialogic reading on inferential and literal narrative comprehension and on vocabulary depth and breadth. The effect on inferential narrative comprehension was maintained five months after posttest. Overall, our findings indicate that even a small amount of narrative dialogic reading has small, albeit mostly short-term effects on narrative comprehension and vocabulary skills. We conclude that narrative dialogic reading is a promising approach for supporting the development of preschoolers’ inferential skills. Long-term intervention studies are needed for the evaluation of long-term effects.