Example Programs

In the subsequent presentations at this conference you will hear about several programs that have been shown to enhance children's pre-reading skills. Let me briefly describe three programs I've been involved in that illustrate the developmental goals I've outlined.

Bonding with Baby intervention

Focusing on the youngest preschoolers, my colleagues and I have recently completed an evaluation of a program to enhance the frequency of shared book reading in low-income parents, and in particular the pleasure associated with shared book reading. We know from a variety of research that the earlier the better when it comes to parent-child shared book reading, and that establishing a positive emotional bond around shared reading can provide a lifetime of motivation for children to read.

The program was for infants from 6 to 12 months of age. The intervention was very simple, consisting of a 15-minute video that extolled the virtues of sharing books and a series of picture books designed to be attractive to infants. We sent the materials through the mail to 50 families in the intervention condition. Another 50 families, randomly assigned, did not receive the materials. All families completed daily logs of the frequency and pleasure of a variety of infant activities such as bathing, feeding, shared play, and reading books with infant.

Here you see some of the differences between families in the two conditions. Mothers in the intervention condition reported spending much more time in shared book reading with their infants than mothers in the control group.

They reported that they enjoyed shared book reading more than mothers in the comparison condition.

They reported that their baby enjoyed shared book reading more than mothers in the comparison condition.

Dialogic reading intervention

Focusing on two- and three-year-olds, my colleagues and I have been working for 15 years on a technique of sharing picture books with children called dialogic reading. The intent of dialogic reading is to use book sharing as an opportunity to enhance children's vocabulary and cognitive growth. This is a very important developmental goal for two- and three-year-olds.

The essence of dialogic reading is a shift in roles. Instead of the adult being the person who tells the story while the child listens, the child becomes the person who talks about the book, with the adult asking questions, expanding the child's answers, and in general serving as an audience and conversational partner for the child.

We help parents and teachers learn how to engage in dialogic reading through brief tutorial videos. The videos model how adults can ask questions. An example of an open-ended question, one of the question types we teach parents, is "What's going on this page?" OR "I read the last page. Now it's your turn; you tell me about this page."

Dialogic reading is one of the best-validated interventions in the whole arena of preschool cognitive development. It has been used with gifted children, with children who have disabilities, with children from low-income families, with children in homes, in preschools, and all over the United States and other countries.

It also works with Spanish speaking children, as well as those from English speaking homes. Here are some results from a study we did a number of years ago in Mexico. Two- and three-year-old children in the intervention condition got a couple of weeks of daily sessions of dialogic reading in their daycare center. Children in the control condition, randomly assigned, received an equal amount of one-on-one time in toy play with an adult. The posttest results for expressive language, e.g., being shown a ball and asked to describe it, showed an 11-month language advantage for children in the intervention group. Remember that this was a result of only a few weeks of interactive reading.

Classroom activities and dynamic assessment intervention

Focusing now on the oldest preschoolers, four- and five-year-olds, my colleagues and I have been working on an intervention to develop inside-out skills for four-year-olds in the pre-K year. This does not mean that the emotional bonding outcomes that are targets for infants, or the vocabulary and conceptual skills that are targets for two- and three-year-olds cease to be important. Children should continue to have experiences that affect these outcomes. At the same time they need to begin to learn about print, and letters, and sounds.

We recently completed a year-long intervention in Head Start centers that involved introducing 20 simple classroom exercises that focused on inside-out skills and asking teachers to keep track of how individual children in the class were doing in mastering the skills that were the focus of each exercise.

For instance, a rhyming exercise had children sit in a circle. The teacher said a word, such as zip, then rolled the ball to a child in the circle. That child's task was to say a word that rhymed with zip (dip) then roll the ball to another child, who produced another rhyming word (lip). The teacher would note on a record form each child's success in accomplishing this task.

Classrooms were randomly assigned to engage in the intervention or to continue with the regular Head Start curriculum. At the end of the year, we assessed children on a variety of inside-out pre-reading skills.

Here are the results for one of those skills, rhyming. In general, we saw large and significant differences between the intervention and control classrooms in children's acquisition of pre-reading skills. The intervention program was not particularly intrusive and did not require extensive training and support of teachers. The local Head Start agency was enthusiastic and has asked to extend the program to all of their classrooms this next year.

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