Tender Shoots: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Two Shared-reading Approaches for Enhancing Parent-child Interactions and Children’s Oral Language and Literacy Skills

ABSTRACT

Tender Shoots compared two book-reading and conversation approaches for parents and preschoolers to an activity-based control group. The Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) condition taught parents to converse about the storyline; the Strengthening Sound Sensitivity (SSS) condition taught parents to converse about word sounds. A total of 69 families with preschool children (M = 50 months) were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions for a 6-week training period. At pretest and posttest, parent-child book-reading and reminiscing were observed and children’s story comprehension, letter recognition, and phonological awareness assessed. RRR increased parents’ and children’s meaning-focused talk during book-reading and elaborative talk during reminiscing; SSS increased parents’ and children’s sound- and print-focused talk during book-reading. Moderator analyses revealed significant benefits of SSS for older children’s letter recognition and phonological awareness skills. Tender Shoots is a promising tool for enhancing the quality of parent-child conversations and children’s early literacy skills.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Amanda Clifford, Casey Fisher, and Sarah Timperley for their help with transcription and coding, and to the rest of the Tender Shoots team for help with data collection and data entry. Our sincere thanks go out to all participating early childhood centres, children, and their families.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1. We also trialed a vocabulary measure of children’s acquisition of new words from the intervention books (adapted from Blewitt et al., 2009), not included here, with a subset of the children. Please contact the authors for details.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Division of Sciences at the University of Otago.