Enhancing Question-Asking during Shared Reading in Immigrant Latino Families

ABSTRACT

Asking questions about a text enhances comprehension whether the questions are self-generated by the reader or asked by another. Previous parent training studies have focused on Latino parents with low-income and low-levels of formal education and have noted that during shared reading, immigrant Latino parents ask few questions. In contrast, we examine shared reading for Latino immigrant parents who are relatively highly educated, specifically in relation to their question-asking behavior with their older children. The parents in our study spoke Spanish at home and their 3^rd and 4^th graders had at least 2 years of formal schooling in English. We conducted two studies. In Study 1, without training, no parent asked any conceptual questions. Study 2 showed an increase in question-asking after parents were given a 45-minute training. For the most part, this increase was maintained at the 5-week delayed follow-up (in the second study) with numerically large positive effects. These findings help us understand question-asking practices among immigrant families with school-age children.

KEYWORDS:

• Latino parents
• question-asking
• shared reading

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Partial eta-squared is the variance accounted for by the independent variable divided by the sum of this variance and the error variance when contributions by other independent variables are removed. A small effect is about .01, a medium effect is about .09, and a large effect is about .25.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a National Science Foundation award [1324807] to Glenberg, Restrepo, and Walker. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency.