Parents’ vocabulary instruction with preschoolers during shared book reading

Dialogic reading during shared book reading between adults and children is an effective way to promote vocabulary acquisition. However, there is limited research on what strategies parents are spontaneously using during book reading sessions, which are important to understand for optimizing parent training in dialogic reading. The current study investigates what strategies parents are currently using to teach vocabulary to their children and what parts of speech and tier of vocabulary they choose to discuss. The current study recruited low-income parents and their preschool-age (42–65 months), typically developing children from Head Start classrooms in the United States. Twenty-seven adults filmed themselves at home reading Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees to their child, given the instruction to read as they normally would. The videos were coded looking at a dialogic reading framework: CROWD and PEER. Child behaviors and the vocabulary discussed were included in the coding. Results show that although there is a large amount of variability between parents in their use of strategies during shared book reading, in general, parents are using very few dialogic reading strategies to explicitly teach vocabulary. However, parents’ use of dialogic reading strategies was significantly correlated with child extratextual talk. When they did provide instruction, parents discussed mostly tier 1 nouns and verbs, rather than tier 2 words which are necessary for academic success. These results reinforce the need for parent training on interactive reading strategies.