Monique Sénéchal

Parental Involvement in the Development of Children's Reading Skill: A Five-Year Longitudinal Study

This article presents the findings of the final phase of a 5-year longitudinal study with 168 middle- and upper middle-class children in which the complex relations among early home literacy experiences, subsequent receptive language and emergent literacy skills, and reading achievement were examined. Results showed that childrens exposure to books was related to the development of vocabulary and listening comprehension skills, and that these language skills were directly related to childrens reading in grade 3. In contrast, parent involvement in teaching children about reading and writing words was related to the development of early literacy skills. Early literacy skills directly predicted word reading at the end of grade 1 and indirectly predicted reading in grade 3. Word reading at the end of grade 1 predicted reading comprehension in grade 3. Thus, the various pathways that lead to fluent reading have their roots in different aspects of childrens early experiences.

A Book Reading Intervention with Preschool Children Who Have Limited Vocabularies: The Benefits of Regular Reading and Dialogic Reading.

Abstract The authors examined the effects of storybook reading on the acquisition of vocabulary of 36 preschool children who had poor expressive vocabulary skills, averaging 13 months behind chronological age. The authors tested whether the beneficial effects of storybook reading would be greater when children were active participants as compared to children who participated in a regular shared book-reading situation. Book reading occurred in groups of eight children, and all children were exposed to the same books, read twice. The results of this study revealed that children with limited vocabularies learned new vocabulary from shared book-reading episodes. Children in the dialogic-reading condition made significantly larger gains in vocabulary introduced in the books, as well as gains on a standardized expressive vocabulary test, than did the children in a regular book-reading situation.

Testing the Home Literacy Model: Parent Involvement in Kindergarten Is Differentially Related to Grade 4 Reading Comprehension, Fluency, Spelling, and Reading for Pleasure.

This study examines the longitudinal relations among early literacy experiences at home and childrens kindergarten literacy skills, Grade 1 word reading and spelling skills, and Grade 4 reading comprehension, fluency, spelling, and reading for pleasure. Ninety French-speaking children were tested at the end of kindergarten and Grade 1, and 65 were followed until the end of Grade 4. Parents reported in kindergarten that storybook reading occurred frequently and that they sometimes taught their child to read words. The results of hierarchical regression analyses that controlled for parent education as well as concurrent and longitudinal relations among literacy behaviors reveal that parent teaching about literacy in kindergarten directly predicted kindergarten alphabet knowledge and Grade 4 reading fluency, whereas storybook exposure directly predicted kindergarten vocabulary and the frequency with which children reported reading for pleasure in Grade 4. Moreover, storybook exposure predicted Grade 4 reading comprehension indirectly. These findings extend the Home Literacy Model proposed by Senechal and LeFevre (2002).

Individual Differences in 4-Year-Old Children's Acquisition of Vocabulary during Storybook Reading.

Two experiments were conducted to assess how children who differ in vocabulary knowledge learn new vocabulary incidentally from listening to stories read aloud. In both experiments, 4-year-old children were classified as having either high or low word knowledge on the basis of a median split of their Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) standard scores. In Experiment 1, children either listened passively or labeled pictures using novel words during the book readings. We found that children with larger vocabularies produced more novel words than did children with smaller vocabularies, and children who answered questions during the book readings comprehended and produced more words than did children who passively listened to the story. In Experiment 2, children either listened to readings of a book, pointed to pictures during the readings, or labeled pictures during the readings. Children with larger vocabularies comprehended more novel words than did children with smaller vocabularies. Children who actively participated by labeling or pointing learned more words than did children who listened passively to book readings. The findings clarify the role of active responding by demonstrating that verbal and nonverbal responding are effective means of enhancing vocabulary acquisition

The Effect of Family Literacy Interventions on Children's Acquisition of Reading From Kindergarten to Grade 3: A Meta-Analytic Review

This review focuses on intervention studies that tested whether parent–child reading activities would enhance children’s reading acquisition. The combined results for the 16 intervention studies, representing 1,340 families, were clear: Parent involvement has a positive effect on children’s reading acquisition. Further analyses revealed that interventions in which parents tutored their children using specific literacy activities produced larger effects than those in which parents listened to their children read books. The three studies in which parents read to their children did not result in significant reading gains. When deciding which type of intervention to implement, educators will have to weigh a variety of factors such as the differences in effectiveness across the different types of intervention, the amount of resources needed to implement the interventions, and the reading level of the children.

On Refining Theoretical Models of Emergent Literacy The Role of Empirical Evidence

Abstract Childrens emergent literacy has received considerable attention in the last decade. The modal view of emergent literacy is that it encompasses all aspects of childrens oral and written language skills. The present article proposes an alternative view whereby emergent literacy is a separate construct from oral language and metalinguistic skills. It is also proposed that emergent literacy is composed of two distinct components; childrens conceptual knowledge (e.g., knowledge of the functions of print) and childrens early procedural knowledge of writing and reading (e.g., invented spelling). Evidence is presented that supports this differentiated view of language and emergent literacy by showing that distinct patterns of relations exist among emergent literacy, oral language, and metalinguistic skills. It is concluded that separating the constructs of language and emergent literacy is an interesting alternative to current conceptions of emergent literacy. In time, such theoretical fine tuning will serve as better guides for policy and practice.

Discussing stories: On how a dialogic reading intervention improves kindergartners’ oral narrative construction

Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge, however, has not been clearly established. The current research tested whether an 8-week shared reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize elements of story knowledge. Participants were 40 English-speaking 5- and 6-year-olds who were assigned to either the dialogic reading group or an alternative treatment group. Analysis of covariance results found that the dialogic reading childrens posttest narratives were significantly better on structure and context measures than those for the alternative treatment children, but results differed for produced or retold narratives. The dialogic reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains. Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.

Pathways to Literacy: A Study of Invented Spelling and Its Role in Learning to Read

This intervention study tested whether invented spelling plays a causal role in learning to read. Three groups of kindergarten children (mean age = 5 years 7 months) participated in a 4-week intervention. Children in the invented-spelling group spelled words as best they could and received developmentally appropriate feedback. Children in the 2 comparison groups were trained in phonological awareness or drew pictures. Invented-spelling training benefited phonological and orthographic awareness and reading of words used in the intervention. Importantly, the invented-spelling group learned to read more words in a learn-to-read task than the other groups. The finding are in accord with the view that invented spelling coupled with feedback encourages an analytical approach and facilitates the integration of phonological and orthographic knowledge, hence facilitating the acquisition of reading.

A Window Into Early Literacy: Exploring the Cognitive and Linguistic Underpinnings of Invented Spelling

Childrens early spelling attempts (invented spellings) and underlying component skills were evaluated in a sample (N = 115) of 5-year-old children. Letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness were shown to be important predictors of invented spelling performance in this age group. The results also showed associations between invented spelling and measures of orthographic awareness and morphological processing. The findings support the view that invented spelling is a developmentally complex and important early literacy skill that involves phonemic awareness, letter sound knowledge, and other oral language skills and orthographic knowledge.

Orthographic and phonological processing skills in reading and spelling in Persian/English bilinguals

The concurrent development of reading and spelling in English and Persian were examined in a sample of bilingual children. The objective was to compare how phonological and orthographic processing skills contribute to reading and spelling for two alphabetic languages that differ drastically. English orthography is characterised by both polyphony (i.e., a grapheme representing more than one phoneme) and polygraphy (i.e., a phoneme represented by more than one grapheme) which results in a complex script to read and write. In contrast, vowelised-Persian orthography is characterised by polygraphy only, which results in a simple script to read but more complex to write. Fifty-five Iranian children in grades 2 and 3, who had lived in English-speaking Canada for an average of 4 years, were tested on word reading and spelling in English and Persian. We found that the predictors of reading performance were similar across languages: Phonological and orthographic processing skills each predicted unique variance in word reading in English and in Persian once we had controlled for grade level, vocabulary, and reading experience. As expected, the predictors of spelling performance differed across language: Spelling in English was predicted similarly by phonological and orthographic processing skills, whereas spelling in Persian was predicted by orthographic processing skills only. It is possible that the nature of the Persian orthography encourages children to adopt different strategies when reading and spelling words. Spelling Persian words might be particularly conducive to using an analytic strategy which, in turn, promotes the development of and reliance on orthographic skills.