LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF PRESCHOOL TEACHERS BOOK READINGS ON LOW-INCOME CHILDRENS VOCABULARY AND STORY COMPREHENSION

THE AUTHORS examined patterns of talk about books in 25 classrooms serving 4-year-old low-income experiences and studied relationships between these book-reading experiences and children's vocabulary growth and story understanding. Videotapes of teacher-child interactions during book-reading sessions were coded. Cluster analysis revealed three district patterns of reading books: (a) co-constructive, in which teachers and children engage in extended, cognitively challenging conversations; (b) didactic-interactional in which children respond to questions about factual details and produce portions of the text in chorus; and (c) performance in which the text is read with selective, limited discussion and the reading is followed by extended discussion. One year after the book readings children were given tests of vocabulary (PPVT-R) and story understanding skill. Regression analyses using wholistic descriptions of book-reading approach revealed larger gains by children the performance-oriented classrooms than by those in the didactic-interactional rooms. Regression analyses done at the utterance level revealed strong effects of child-involved analytic talk on vocabulary (adjusted R2 = .51) and modest effects on story understanding (adjusted R2 = .25).