Abstracts

Allison, D.T. & Watson, J.A. (1994) The significance of adult storybook reading styles on the development of young children's emergent literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 57-72

This study investigated whether parent/ teacher interactions and reading style during storybook readings have the potential to predict emergent reading level.
Thirty kindergarten students and their parents from a southwest town, volunteered to participate in the study in response to a letter sent home to families who regularly read to their children. All the children attended one school and were enrolled in one of 10 different kindergarten classes, which identified the teachers who would to participate. An informal questionnaire was completed by teachers and parents about their storybook reading histories. Then, the children or their parent selected a narrative story that they had not read before. Parents were asked to audio- tape the reading of this book 5 times and teachers were asked to audio- tape the reading one time. After these 6 readings, children were asked to attempt the storybook reading independently to an experimenter while being audiotaped. After this reading the children were rated on Sulzby's Emergent Reading Levels Scale that has a range of levels which rate the child's emergent reading attempts. The levels range from a rating 1 which signifies that the attempted reading is not story-like and relies on pictures to a rating 7 were the child is observed to be using balanced strategies in their attempts to read
The parent and teacher recordings were independently judged as to the number of high and low cognitive demands made during the readings. High cognitive demands were requests to sequence, infer, describe or transform while low cognitive demands were requests to simply label, observe or demonstrate.
Results based on the Emergent Reading Levels Scale found 66% of the children attained a level 3; the story is formed and written language like but governed by pictures. Elicited responses during the readings resulted in a mean frequency of 6.83 among the parents with a potential range of 1-75 and a mean frequency of 11.67 among the teachers with a potential range of 0-48. Surprisingly, two teachers read the story verbatim with no attempts to elicit responses. Using a regression analysis (an analysis of variables as potential predictors) a preferred predictor model was selected. Using 2 independent variables, the percentage of high cognitive demands made by teachers and the age at which a parent began reading to their child, allowed the researchers to account for the variance in emergent reading levels.
The authors of this study concluded that many of the 10 teachers adjusted their cognitive demands among the children in their classes with low cognitive demands occurring among the children with upper emergent levels and high cognitive demands made on children with low emergent reading levels. The researchers concluded that experienced teachers matched their interaction style to the needs of the child. They also found that the parent's interaction style did not have a predictive value on their child's emergent reading level Instead, it seemed that the age at which time the parent began reading to the child, and the consistency of the reading provided better predictive value. The researchers concluded that parents should begin to read early to their children, and teachers should encourage parents to continue to read. Future studies may need to compare groups of children who were not regularly read to as well as to look into individual family literacy history for further insight into the effects of storybook reading.