One shared-reading practice is called dialogic reading. In dialogic reading, the adult prompts the children by asking questions about the story or the pictures in the book, and provides feedback in the form of repetitions, expansions, and modeling of answers (National Early Literacy Panel, 2009).
Research
Shared-reading is often recommended as the single most important thing adults can do to promote the emergent literacy skills of young children. Shared-reading interventions can have a significant, substantial, and positive impact both on young children’s oral language skills and on young children’s print knowledge (National Early Literacy Panel,2009). Typically, story book reading is a passive activity in preschool classrooms, where the teacher reads and children listen, but it can also provide the context for rich conversations. During shared-reading, interactions frequently go beyond the text of the story and invite dialogue between the teacher and children (Wasik & Bond, 2001).
Application
One shared-reading practice is called dialogic reading. In dialogic reading, the adult prompts the children by asking questions about the story or the pictures in the book, and provides feedback in the form of repetitions, expansions, and modeling of answers (National Early Literacy Panel, 2009). Creating prompts for dialogic reading involves pre- planning the prompts to be used at specific points in the book. The selected prompts can be written on sticky notes and attached to the pages in the book where they will be used.
Remember the prompts for dialogic reading by using the CROWD acronym.
Completion: Pause while reading and children fill in the blank.
Recall: Remember aspects of the book when prompted by teacher questions.
Open–ended: Describe in their own words what is happening in the story.
Wh– questions : Talk about the what, where, who, and why aspects of the story.
Distancing : Make connections to personal experiences outside of the story.
Resources
- CROWD strategy planning sheet and more examples.
- CONNECT, the Center to Mobilize Early Childhood Knowledge, has developed a free online module on dialogic reading practices.
- Videos and sample lesson plans using interactive and dialogic reading techniques from Doing What Works.
Available in the T–TAC ODU Library
- Shared Storybook Reading: Building Young Children’s Language and Emergent Literacy Skills by Helen Ezell andLaura Justice
- Story Stretchers for Infants, Toddlers, and Twos by Shirley Raines, Karen Miller, and Leah Curry-Rood
- Let’s Read Together: Improving Literacy Outcomes with the Adult-Child Interactive Reading Inventory (ACIRI) byAndrea DeBruin-Parecki
References
National Early Literacy Panel. (2009). Developing early literacy: Report of the national early literacy panel, executive summary. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.
Wasik, B. A., & Bond, M. A. (2001). Beyond the pages of a book: Interactive book reading in preschool classrooms.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 43-50.
