TALK DURING BOOK SHARING BETWEEN

PARENTS AND PRESCHOOL CHILDREN: A

COMPARISON BETWEEN STORYBOOK AND

EXPOSITORY BOOK CONDITIONS

By Lisa Hammett Price, Anne van Kleeck, and Carl J. Huberty.

Presented by Erica Webster

SUMMARY

This article is about a study on book sharing

between parents and their preschoolers. As a parent

and a preschool teacher this article really hit home

for me. The study notes both book choice and level

of interactions during the book sharing. The results

showed that expository text lead to a more rich

discussion during reading. The higher level of

discussion results in children thinking using higher

order processing.

REFLECTION ON TEACHING LITERACY

After reading this article I learned many things

that will guide my literacy instruction in my class as

well as with my children.

During book sharing parents, often unknowingly,

scaffold their child’s comprehension through

interactions about the content and the illustrations.

During a book sharing the book, the child and the

parent all interact and have potential to effect the

discussion that occurs during that time.

Fictional story books are most common when reading to

preschoolers. Expository or non-fiction texts include elements

that make them unique from story books such as, text

structure, visual features, linguistics, vocabulary and abstract

concepts.

When reading expository texts parent talk differs than when

they read fiction. Parents seem to talk more, use diverse

language and syntactic complexity. Overall the content of talk is

richer when discussing a expository text.

Children who experience book talk are better at responding to

completion and recall prompts, open-ended prompts, questions

and distancing prompts that are related to the content of the

text. In general, they show better text comprehension.

Children who grow up with parents who talk

during routine task at home are better at learning

language than those who do not.

When reading expository text the discussion during

book sharing showed more vocabulary diversity,

greater number in different words, multiclause

sentences, past and future tenses, declaratives, and

questions.

TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

Seeing how many struggling readers often lack the necessary exposure

to literacy during early childhood, it only makes sense to help struggling

readers make up in the areas they missed out on.

Talk during book sharing is important at any stage of literacy

development.

Teachers and parents of struggling readers may feel compelled to use

fictional texts to get them excited about reading and exclude expository

texts. This article shows that expository texts are especially important

when building comprehension skills because they result in a higher level

of conversation during reading.

QUESTIONS

In what ways does your discussion differ when reading story

books or expository texts?

Do you feel that expository texts are appropriately used in the

classroom? If not in what ways should we be using these texts in

our classes?

Do you feel that storybooks have the potential to foster as

meaningful conversation as expository text when used correctly?

If so in what ways can we create more significant discussions

when reading fiction?