Reading to Children and Listening to Children Read: Mother–Child Interactions as a Function of Principal Reader

Abstract

Research Findings: Although storybook reading has received considerable research attention, listening to children read has been the source of much less inquiry. In this study, 40 mother–child dyads were videotaped during adult-to-child and child-to-adult reading. Relations between book-related themes (e.g., types of talk), maternal evaluative feedback (e.g., praise, criticism), maternal miscue feedback (e.g., graphophonemic clues, terminal feedback), and child engagement (e.g., laughter, questions) were analyzed. The results suggest that the development of literacy appreciation and literacy skill can occur during the same storybook-reading session. Specifically, when mothers read to their children, communication about the illustrations was associated with increased child engagement, yet a positive correlation was also observed between text-related productions and child engagement. When children read to their mothers, text-related productions were featured more prominently. After children made reading errors (miscues), graphophonemic and terminal feedback were the 2 most frequent responses by mothers. In addition, graphophonemic cues were positively associated with child engagement. Practice or Policy: In sum, the results demonstrate that adult-to-child and child-to-adult reading serve the goals of both literacy acquisition training and literacy appreciation; furthermore, orienting children toward the text during either session did not hamper child engagement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank Jill Fraser and Jessica Chapman for their help in data scoring and Dr. Nina Howe, Megan Ladd, and Kyle Levesque for their careful reading of the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the McCain Fellowship Foundation to Sandra Martin-Chang and from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to Odette N. Gould.

Notes

^a The total number of times each production category occurred across the entire sample (i.e., 40 mother–child dyads).

^b The percentage of occurrences in each grouping coded into the corresponding variable (e.g., the percentage of book-related theme productions coded as being text related).

^c The mean number of occurrences for each type of production within each dyad.

^d The standard deviation for the mean number of occurrences for each type of production within each dyad.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

^a The total number of times each production category occurred across the entire sample (i.e., 40 mother–child dyads).

^b The percentage of occurrences in each grouping coded into the corresponding variable (e.g., the percentage of book-related theme productions coded as being text related).

^c The mean number of occurrences for each type of production within each dyad.

^d The standard deviation for the mean number of occurrences for each type of production within each dyad.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Note. The correlation between the difficulty of the book and the reading score was r = −.23, p = .16; the correlation between the difficulty of the book and the comprehension score was r = −.16, p = .31.

^a Mean scores of the children whose mothers read each book.

Note. The correlation between the difficulty of the book and the reading score was r = .37, p = .02; the correlation between the difficulty of the book and the comprehension score was r = .40, p = .01.

^a Mean reading scores for the children who read each book.

^a Each time the mother's finger was lifted off the page and set back down it was counted as one instance of orienting either to the illustrations or to the text. Therefore, orienting to the text may have been underestimated in cases in which a mother tracked every word on the page without ever raising their finger (which would have only been counted once). Most often, mothers who tracked all of the text lifted their fingers after each sentence.