Mary Ann Evans

What Children Are Looking at During Shared Storybook Reading Evidence From Eye Movement Monitoring

Two studies were conducted to determine the extent to which young children fixate on the print of storybooks during shared book reading. Childrens books varying in the layout of the print and the richness of the illustrations were displayed on a computer monitor. Each childs mother or preschool teacher read the books while the child sat on the adults lap wearing an EyeLink headband that recorded visual fixations. In both studies, children spent very little time examining the print regardless of the nature of the print and illustrations. Although fixations on the illustrations were highly correlated with the length of the accompanying text and could be altered by altering the content of the text, fixations to the text were uncorrelated with the length of the text. These results indicate that preschool children engage in minimal exploration of the print during shared book reading.

Preschoolers' Attention to Print During Shared Book Reading

Seventy-six children ages 3 to 5 were individually read two storybooks that had been specially formatted to contain salient printed words within the text, and illustrations and text on left or right-facing pages. The reader pointed to each word while reading to half of the children. After each book, children were asked to recognize elements of the illustrations and the specially formatted text elements from among a set of foils. Videotaped sessions were coded for the time children spent looking toward the pages with print versus illustrations. Analyses showed that the percentage of time looking at print was less than 2% in the no-pointing condition but increased with age. Pointing to the words increased print-looking time for all age groups and print target recognition for 4-year-olds. After controlling for receptive vocabulary, visual memory, and maturation associated with these scores, emergent orthography and letter-word identification predicted time looking at print and recognition of the print elements.

Communicating with an autistic boy by gestures

Following unsuccessful attempts to teach a 6-year-old, mute autistic-retarded boy to follow simple verbal instructions, an effort, described in the case study, was made to train the child to comply with gestural commands. It is reported that the latter part of the program worked well, resulting in the boys ability to follow instructions to stand up, sit down, turn around, turn an object over, go to another person, and give an object to someone else. Also, other activities began to come under gestural control, and the child learned to instruct a person to stand up. It is further suggested that the acquired behavior did not require much time or effort to establish (24 one-hour sessions, none of which totally devoted to gestural training). The results and potentialities of the described training procedure are discussed in light of recent findings by other researchers.

Beginning Reading: The Views of Parents and Teachers of Young Children

The authors examined the views of parents and teachers regarding beginning reading instruction using the questionnaire Approaches to Beginning Reading and Reading Instruction (ABRRI). Parents also rated the importance of 9 developmental areas, including literacy, and the extent to which home and school were responsible for each. Two components emerged on the ABRRI reflecting decoding or graphophonemic aspects and broader knowledge or constructivist aspects. Parents more frequently endorsed a bottom-up description of reading than teachers and gave higher ratings to the graphophonemic component than the constructivist component, whereas the reverse was true for teachers. Parents rated literacy development second only to character-moral development but were divided as to the responsibility of the school versus the home in literacy development.

Discourse characteristics of reticent children

This study contrasted the interactions of less talkative children and their teacher with those of their peers during classroom “Sharing Time.” Seven reticent children and seven normal peers were observed and audiotape-recorded during 15 sessions across the school year. In addition to speaking less, reticent children engaged in less complex speech than their peers: They spoke more often about objects in the “here and now,” spoke about one topic at a turn, and spoke in shorter utterances. Questions were more frequently directed to the reticent children, but while peers responded to these questions as invitations to contribute further to the topic, reticent children frequently failed to respond to them in like manner. It is suggested that both anxiety and subtle language delays may contribute to the poorer discourse skills reticent children display.

Letter names and alphabet book reading by senior kindergarteners: an eye movement study.

The study monitored the eye movements of twenty 5-year-old children while reading an alphabet book to examine the manner in which the letters, words, and pictures were fixated and the relation of attention to print to alphabetic knowledge. Children attended little to the print, took longer to first fixate print than illustrations, and labeled fewer letters than when presented with letters in isolation. After controlling for receptive vocabulary, regressions revealed that children knowing more letters were quicker to look at the featured letter on a page and spent more time looking at the featured letter, the word, and its first letter. Thus, alphabet books along with letter knowledge may facilitate entrance into the partial alphabetic stage of word recognition.

Shared Book Reading: Parental Goals Across the Primary Grades and Goal–Behavior Relationships in Junior Kindergarten

Two studies are reported. The first investigated goals for reading with their children held by 294 parents in a cross-sectional sample from junior kindergarten through Grade 3, how these goals are related to parent beliefs about the development of literacy skills, and how these goals may differ across the primary years. The second examined how goals relate to parent behavior. From a different sample of 119 parents completing the same goal survey and observed in shared book reading, a subsample of 42 parents with contrasting goals was selected for analysis. Findings indicated 5 distinct parent goals for shared book reading—Stimulate Development, Foster Reading, Bond With Child, Soothe Child, and Enjoy Books—with the goals of enjoying books and bonding with the child rated the highest and equally highly at each grade. These were followed by fostering reading, stimulating their childs development, and lastly soothing their child. The goal of fostering reading was more highly rated by parents of Grade 1 children than by parents of children in any other grade. Only a modest relationship between goals and beliefs was found. Finally, parents who rated fostering reading high as a goal engaged in more print-referencing behaviors and echoed more reading than did parents with contrasting goal profiles.

Parental responses to miscues during child-to-parent book reading

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways that parents respond to their childrens oral reading errors when reading books together. Twenty-three middle-class parents were audiotaped in their homes listening to their grade one children read. Parental behaviors following all reading miscues were coded. Data analyses revealed that parents ignored only 4% of their childrens miscues. Parents, who indicated in a questionnaire that they held a more bottom-up view of reading, less often supplied the miscued word, more often encouraged the child to try the word again, more often gave graphophonemic help, and tended less often to highlight context clues than parents holding a top-down view. Regardless of parental approach to reading, the more accurately children read, the less parents ignored miscues, the less they offered picture clues, and the more they directed their childrens attention to individual letters and tended to give sound clues to assist word recognition.

Parental explanations of vocabulary during shared book reading: A missed opportunity:

Two studies investigated discussions of the meaning of unusual vocabulary encountered during shared book reading. In Study 1 parent–child dyads were observed longitudinally in senior kindergarten through grade 2 reading short storybooks below, at and just above the child’s reading level. Here children did most of the reading. In Study 2 a second sample of parents of children in grade 1 all read the same book to their child. This book had numerous unfamiliar words, allowing an investigation of the characteristics of the words themselves that might influence whether parents and children discuss their meaning. In both studies a striking percentage of novel words encountered were not explained. Unusual words appearing last on a page’s text were more likely to be discussed than were words appearing earlier on the page.

Parent Scaffolding in Children's Oral Reading

Parent coaching strategies during shared book reading were analysed according to the principles of scaffolding in a sample of 46 parent-child dyads during the latter half of grade one. The ways that parents responded to each of a childs oral reading errors or miscues were coded into levels of assistance that reflected increasing support at each successive level. In addition childrens attempts at rereading miscued words were coded as successful or not. Parents often provided a string of feedback clues and analyses revealed that the level of support parents provided shifted up or increased when their child was unsuccessful in rereading a word after feedback. With increasing level of parental support childrens success in rereading misread words increased. Moreover, children with weaker word recognition skill were offered feedback at higher levels of support by their parents. These results demonstrate how parents and children co-construct the feedback that parents provide when listening to their children read and the sensitivity on the part of parents to childrens reading performance.