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?