Mother-Child Storytelling Patterns among First-Generation Latino Dyads: Implications for Improving Home-School Engagement in Early Literacy Skills

ABSTRACT

Mother-child storytelling is a universal activity that predicts literacy development and can play a promising role in developing strong parent-school connections among first-generation Latino families. By examining the discourse patterns of 34, 5–7 year old dyads on a fictional storytelling task, our results revealed that maternal elaborative and repetitive utterances positively predicted narrative quality, while the proportion of maternal contributions negatively predicted quality, after controlling for child’s age and gender. All other maternal discourse features, including language used by the mother, were non-significant. Findings are discussed within the context of improving literacy related, home engagement practices and school-home communications.

KEYWORDS:

• Narratives
• first-generation Latina mothers
• early elementary
• home-school engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.