Shared Reading and Children’s Oral Language For many children, the process of learning to read starts before school. They en

Shared Reading and Children’s Oral Language
    Learning to read is a difficult process that involves a number of different skills and experiences. It depends on learning to decode individual words as well as having the necessary knowledge of concepts and the world to comprehend the meaning of the text. Children are expected to recognize and understand more than 80,000 words by the end of third grade, i.e. at age 8 or 9. However, the process of learning to read starts before school for many children. It is well documented that children enter school differentially prepared to benefit from formal educational experiences and that these differences often translate into subsequent differences in achievement in reading and in other subject areas.
    When asked about the origins of these initial differences, parents, educators, and researchers most commonly cite some aspects of the home literacy environment (HLE)that parents provide for their preschool children. The presumption that exposing children to a home environment rich in literacy activities is beneficial to literacy and language development has come increasingly to influence contemporary educational theory and practice. In the United States, for example, where educators strive to meet the federal mandate that every child read well by the end of third grade, there is a nationwide call for parents to read to their children along with numerous government initiatives to increase children’s exposure to literacy activities (e.g., the America Reads Challenge proposed by former President Clinton, provisions of the Reading Excellence Act supported by Presidents Clinton and Bush).
    However, despite the almost universal consensus that HLE, especially in the form of shared reading activities, is important in the development of language and literacy skills, evidence suggests that the association between HLE and educational and developmental outcomes is small to modest in size.
    Early studies of the HLE’s influence tended to reduce its complexity to social status measures, parental education, occupation and income, for example. It was generally found that children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) and non-mainstream cultural communities performed less well on reading tests and demonstrated lower levels of interest in literacy. However, social status is a marker variable that represents a number of attitudes, activities, and opportunities and does not identify the specific aspects of the home environment that are important in different stages of literacy and language development. More recently, researchers have sought to identify these specific aspects that relate to literacy and language development. It has been found that certain aspects of the HLE, especially shared reading activities, explain more adequately the relation between home environment and educational and developmental outcomes than do more global social class measures.
    Experts suggested that future researchers attempt to take into account that different aspects of HLE may exert their influence on different outcomes and that the relative importance of HLE may vary by outcome and developmental period. For example, shared reading may influence oral language development, whereas letter knowledge may come from more direct parental instruction. Some scholars found that storybook exposure accounted for a statistically significant amount of unique variance in kindergarten and Grade 1 children’s oral language skills, but not in their written language skills. In contrast, a measure of parental teaching (e.g., number of instances a parent taught a child to read words and to print words in a typical week)explained statistically significant unique variance in children’s written language skills, but not in their oral language skills. Other researchers have also found that different aspects of HLE influence different outcomes.
    The study I’m going to elaborate on later today examined the relations of shared reading to oral language, represented by receptive and expressive vocabulary and phonological sensitivity. These outcomes were selected because of their importance in the development of literacy-related skills during the preschool years; later, more complex literacy skills in alphabetic languages; and eventual success in school. They are well-established precursors of individual differences in word reading and comprehension development.
    Vocabulary knowledge is necessary for reading comprehension. Phonological sensitivity refers to sensitivity to and ability to manipulate the sound structure of oral language. Children who are better at detecting and manipulating syllables, rhymes, or phonemes are quicker to learn to read, and this relation is present even after variability in reading skill due to factors such as intelligence quotient, receptive vocabulary, memory skills, and social class is partialled out. Phonemic awareness (often called phonological awareness) is the ability to manipulate the individual phonemes within words and is considered to be the most complex or most developed stage of phonological sensitivity. Recent studies have demonstrated that individual differences in phonological sensitivity are relatively stable across time from late preschool, and that individual differences in preschool levels of phonological sensitivity are related to subsequent individual differences in literacy development. However, despite the importance of phonological sensitivity to the emergence of literacy skills, little is known about the relation of HLE to its development.
    Questions concerning the HLE and its relation to different educational and developmental outcomes are important for several reasons. First, the call for parents and schools to provide more and better literacy resources for children has become an educational priority, but we have a relatively poor understanding of the factors within the HLE that explain its influence on literacy’s development and maintenance over time or of the specific aspects of the HLE that are important at different developmental stages for a variety of educationally relevant outcomes (e.g., letter knowledge, phonological sensitivity). Therefore, in order to design more effective and long-lasting interventions, more research on the HLE is needed.