Adult Interactive Strategies and the Spontaneous Comments of Preschoolers During Joint Storybook Readings

Abstract

Previous work on story readings has focused on the interaction between children and their parents or teachers. Adult interactive strategies while adults read to children serve to draw the child's attention to the story. However, the impact of specific adult interactive strategies on the complexity and types of comments by children has not been studied extensively. This study was designed to investigate whether the specific strategies of commenting or questioning by the adult would influence the complexity as well the types of spontaneous comments to story details made by children when listening to stories. Twenty four subjects, ranging in age from 3 years, 10 months to 6 years, 5 months, listened to a series of five different stories over a three week period in their preschool classrooms. The preschoolers were assigned to two experimental and one control group. Familiar adults employed commenting, questioning, or general reading, with each group respectively. Children in the comment group produced spontaneous utterances with greater complexity than those children in the question group. The type of interactive strategy employed by the adults also influenced significantly the types of comments made about different aspects of the stories by the children. Commenting by the adults contributed to a greater percentage of child utterances regarding the story meaning while questioning by the adults contributed to a greater percentage of child utterances about the story structure and print.