Blog Post #5: Dialogic Reading Process

According to the article, Increasing the Expressive Vocabulary of Young Children Learning English as a Second Language Through Parent Involvement, written by Diana Brannon and Linda Dauksas (2012), parents are children’s first and most important teachers, regardless of culture or socioeconomic status. Parents involvement provides numerous benefits, long-term impact, and a higher achievement rate regardless of income or ethnicity. Parents can engage with their child through reading aloud. According to Brannon and Daukas (2012), parental storybook reading has been found to have positive outcomes on their child’s early literacy skills, which increases their vocabulary, facilitates in their receptive and expressive language, and encourages later reading achievement and an understanding of language.

According to Brannon and Daukas (2012), dialogic reading also known as shared reading increases a child’s vocabulary and expressive language. The dialogic focus is more about parents talking about a book rather than reading the text aloud. This process is a shift that encourages interaction and conversation from parent-led to child-led. It encourages children to come up with open ended questions and expand on their comments.

The Parents as Reading Teachers Nightly Encouraging Reading Success (PARTNERS), did a study on how to assist low-income Hispanic families with training about how and why to read with their children at home. This study took place in a school district in the Midwest. The study provided parents with daily mandatory family involvement, “Family Time”, as part of a preschool program. The study used “Family Time” to provide family training in dialogic reading to families involved in the morning preschool session. In the afternoon preschool session, parents or caregivers were encouraged to spend 10-15 minutes reading aloud with their child at school, not using the dialogic process. According to the study, fourty parents and caregivers participated in the reading training, majority of whom spoke Spanish as their primary language and were classified as low-income (Brannon and Daukas, 2012).

According to Brannon and Daukas (2012), the researchers found that the dialogic reading had positive outcomes, especially with the children’s expressive language skills. The students in the morning dialogic preschool program acquired more words than the afternoon Family Time group. The dialogic process also stimulated imagination and expanded their understanding of the world. It developed language and listening skills and prepared them to understand written words.

One way to help support parents of children in a French Immersion program is by encouraging the parents to use the dialogic reading process. They should be reading with their children and discussing the overall concepts in the book to gain further understanding.

According to Ontario’s parent guide, Supporting Your Child’s Success in French Immersion and Extended French Elementary Schools, articulated that many skills and abilities transfer between different languages. This includes phonetic skills, higher-order thinking skills, and comprehension strategies. The more literate the child is the better the outcome of learning and developing skills in a second language. Parents play a huge role in their child’s success in French (Ontario Ministry of Education).

Below are some of the literacy skills that can be transferred from one language to another that was highlighted in this parent guide:

• Communicating effectively – regardless of the language being used, communication makes us organize our thinking.
• Thinking imaginatively – we use language to wonder about and imagine solutions to everyday problems.
• Accessing, managing, evaluating and creating information – languages serve as tools that allow us to receive information, build knowledge and communicate understanding. When we learn to do this in one language, we can apply it to any language we speak (Ontario Ministry of Education).

The parent guide also included a lot of resources that parents can use at home with their children.

I am so grateful to have found this, now I can share a few online tools with the parents in my class.

A good dialogic reading app that I came across is, ireadwith! Have you ever used this app before?

Check out their video explaining the wonderful resource:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ireadwith

For now, I will continue to provide parents ebook websites and online tutorials on dialogic reading strategies that can help support their child at home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Brannon, D., & Dauksas,, L. (2012). Increasing the Expressive Vocabulary of Young Children Learning English as a Second Language Through Parent Involvement. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 1324 -1331.

Ontario Ministry of Education. In Supporting Your Child’s Success in French Immersion and Extended French Elementary Schools . Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/parentGuideFrench.pdf