Mother–child dyads were invited via Instagram to read 10 children's short stories together over the course of 10 weeks. Stories were read to/with the child on a self‐paced, once‐weekly basis in the ...mother's presence, on WhatsApp and Skype. Children were elementary school age, that is, 7–11 years. Analysis of interview transcriptions with mothers indicated three major themes: empathy, improved filial relations and emotion regulation of parent. Mothers emerged more empathic and aware of their emotions 3–4 weeks into the intervention, with a better understanding of and grip on themselves. They also experienced better regulation of emotion and a closer filial connection with their child over this period. Limitations of the study and guidelines for future research are also discussed.
The American Association of Pediatrics recommends reading to young children from birth as a method of exposing children to language and literacy as early as possible. This article describes the known ...neurobiological support for this recommendation—also addressing the differential effects of parental versus stranger reading as well as other factors, that is, pathological conditions, that may influence the contributions of the recommended early reading interactions. Finally, the possible effects of screen exposure on parent–child interaction around the book will be discussed to inform new possible policies.
Background
Although a large body of research has investigated teachers' reading‐related knowledge and associated pedagogical practices, comparatively little is known about these factors in parents. ...Therefore, the present study examined the association between parental reading‐related knowledge and feedback during child‐to‐parent reading.
Methods
Seventy parents completed a reading‐related knowledge questionnaire (phonological segmentation, knowledge of written syllable patterns, identification of regular and irregular word spellings) while their 6 and 7‐year‐old children were administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test–Fourth Edition. Based on children's Wide Range Achievement Test–Fourth Edition reading performances, they were assigned one of five adapted passages from the Gray Oral Reading Test–Fifth Edition to read aloud to their parents; parents were asked to help as they normally would. Reading sessions were videotaped; the content was transcribed and coded for evidence of verbal and nonverbal parental feedback (evaluative feedback: praise and criticism; miscue feedback: graphophonemic, context cues, try again, terminal and ignoring miscues).
Results
Consistent with the teacher and parent literature, reading‐related knowledge was positively associated with children's reading scores. Parents' reading‐related knowledge additionally accounted for unique variance in praise and graphophonemic feedback during child‐to‐parent reading beyond the variance already explained by children's reading scores.
Conclusions
These findings suggest that even after accounting for children's reading abilities, reading‐related knowledge contributes to a positive affective atmosphere for teaching key literacy skills to young readers. Implications are discussed in terms of enhancing parents' reading‐related knowledge and associated practices in hopes of positively contributing to children's literacy outcomes.
Highlights
What is already known about this topic
Teachers' reading‐related knowledge significantly predicts the instruction they provide and students' reading development.
Consistent with the teacher research, parents' reading‐related knowledge is associated with children's reading performances.
Parents tend to be quite positive and not critical when jointly reading with their children (Martin‐Chang & Gould, 2012).
What this paper adds
Here, we see the contribution of parents' feedback practices and their associations with parents' reading‐related knowledge and children's reading scores.
Parents' reading‐related knowledge contributes to the affective atmosphere of joint reading.
Parents' reading‐related knowledge accounts for more attempts at making explicit grapheme–phoneme connections (reading instruction) when jointly reading with their emergent readers.
Implications for theory, policy or practice
To direct parents towards available websites to improve their reading‐related knowledge.
To develop parents' and teachers' reading‐related knowledge through joint parent/teacher learning evenings and other such efforts.
Much of the initiatives to date have spoken to the importance of reading to children; however, the contributions of children reading to their parents need further attention.
There exists an abundance of literature on the use of wordless picturebooks in literacy development, yet very little research exists on their use in the South African context. South Africa is facing ...what researchers have referred to as a ‘national crisis of reading’. Only 5 per cent of parents read with their children, as a result, many children are not exposed to books or book‐sharing activities prior to entering formal school. Despite the acknowledgement and acceptance of the importance of mother tongue education, especially in Foundation Phase, there still exists a lack of indigenous language picturebooks for young readers. The article reports on the findings of an exploratory study in which wordless picturebooks were used in parent–child joint reading. By moving the reading environment from a community centre or daycare to participant homes, the main aim was to determine the perceptions of the parents or primary caregivers and children that participated in the programme regarding the value of utilising wordless picturebooks in their homes. The research sought to gain an understanding of how wordless picturebooks could assist in ensuring that literacy‐poor families are supported as a child's first educator. We argue that wordless picturebooks warrant further investigation in the South African context, as key findings indicated that they can be viewed as a valuable tool in fostering a culture of reading in the South African context.
Purpose:
To assess prevalence and significance of extra cardiac findings (ECF) in clinical routine cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) studies reported by cardiologists alone versus cardiologist ...and radiologist working together.
Methods:
One-thousand-seventy-four consecutive patients presenting at our institution for CMR work-up of multiple cardiovascular disease entities were enrolled retrospectively in two groups (cardiologists reading alone vs. cardiologists and radiologist reading together).
Results:
In 1,074 routine CMR studies a total of 357 ECF’s were identified in 235 patients yielding a prevalence of 21.9 %. Of these 357 ECF’s more than one-third were previously known. In the remaining 223 previously unknown findings 118 (52.9 %) were considered as major ECF’s (92 patients), and 105 (47.1 %) were considered as minor ECF’s (69 patients). Cardiologists reading alone reported 23 previously unknown ECF’s in 23 patients, versus 200 previously unknown ECF in 138 patients by cardiologists and radiologists working together,
p
< 0.0001. Nevertheless, highly significant ECF’s with major prognostic implications, such as the initial diagnosis of malignancy in an individual with no history of cancer, are extremely rare (n = 3, 0.3 %). Cardiologists alone, as well as cardiologists and radiologists working together seem to do well with reporting of such extremely important ECF’s.
Conclusions:
The prevalence of all ECF’s was 21.9 %, and 14.9 % of previously unknown ECF’s, respectively. However, the prevalence of highly significant ECF’s was low. Joint reading with cardiologists and radiologists may increase the number of ECF’s detected in CMR studies, but it remains unclear if this could result in an improved long-term outcome of patients undergoing routine CMR.
Joint book reading is a highly routinized activity that is nearly universal among families. Conversational agents (CAs) can potentially act as joint-reading partners by engaging children in ...story-related, scaffolded conversations. In this project, we develop a CA reading partner that incorporates components of effective conversational guidance (i.e., questions to stimulate thinking, specific feedback, and adaptive scaffolding) and examine children's interactions with this CA. We identify patterns in children's language production, flow maintenance, and affect when responding to the CA. We then lay out a set of affordances and challenges for developing CAs as conversation partners. We propose that, rather than attempting to develop CAs as an exact replicate of human conversational partners, we should treat child-agent interaction as a new genre of conversation and calibrate CAs based on children's actual communicative practices and needs.
Storytelling represents an aspect of children's general language competence. The characteristics of the home literacy environment, especially joint reading between parents and children, have a ...significant effect on children's storytelling. The purpose of this study was to explore the age differences in the storytelling of three- to six-year-old children. In addition, the goal was also to determine the effect of parental education, parents' knowledge of children's books, as an indirect measure of joint reading in the home environment, and child's gender on children's storytelling ability. The sample included 156 children aged three- to six-years-old and their parents. The children's storytelling competence was assessed using the Little Glove Storytelling Test. The stories that the children told using a standard picture book were analyzed in terms of several criteria connected with the words in the story and the structure of the story (grammatical structure and contents). Parents' knowledge of children's book was assessed using a Checklist of children's books. The results showed that the period between the ages of three and six is important for the development of children's storytelling; parental education and parents' knowledge of children's books have a significant effect on children's storytelling. In addition, specific important differences were established between boys' and girls' stories: the girls told stories using a greater number of words, whereas no major gender-related differences were determined with regard to the structure of the stories told. The results obtained were interpreted from the viewpoint of both developmental psychology and selected environmental factors.
Joint reading is a key activity for early learners, with caregiver-child interactions such as questioning and feedback playing an essential role in children’s cognitive and linguistic development. ...However, for some parents, actively engaging children in storytelling can be challenging. To address this, we introduce TaleMate—a platform designed to enhance shared reading by leveraging conversational agents that have been shown to support children’s engagement and learning. TaleMate enables a dynamic, participatory reading experience where parents and children can choose which characters they wish to embody. Moreover, the system navigates the challenges posed by digital reading tools, such as decreased parent-child interaction, and builds upon the benefits of traditional and digital reading techniques. TaleMate offers an innovative approach to fostering early reading habits, bridging the gap between traditional joint reading practices and the digital reading landscape.
En esta tesis se han estudiado los efectos de dos intervenciones y sus interacciones en variables relacionadas con la comprensión lectora. La primera intervención está basada en la noción de lectura ...conjunta, en la que, por medio de distintas mediaciones, se intenta facilitar la participación progresiva de los alumnos en las tareas y procesos asociados a la comprensión. Se trata de ofrecer a los alumnos, durante su lectura, ayudas que destacan la estructura del texto y sus contenidos principales. La segunda intervención consiste en invitar a los lectores, al final de cada frase, a pensar en voz alta en lo que han leído. Los 69 sujetos de 8º de la muestra han sido distribuidos por 4 condiciones, una de control, una para cada una de las intervenciones y otra en la que los alumnos recibían ambos tratamientos simultáneamente.Los datos han mostrado que las ayudas han sido eficaces en las medidas asociadas a la memoria (organización de los resúmenes y número de ideas centrales presentes en ellos) y la comprensión literal (respuestas a preguntas de tipo literal) del texto, pero no en las medidas de compresnión inferencial. El pensamiento en voz alta, a pesar de no haber sido eficaz en la mejora de la memoria del texto, sí lo ha sido en la calidad de las respuestas a preguntas literales y, de una forma marginalmente significativa, en las respuestas a preguntas de tipo inferencial. Se han encontrado algunas interacciones entre los dos tratamientos.Se han analizado también los protocolos de pensamiento en voz alta, que han revelado la opción por la utilización de paráfrasis como la más habitual. Sin embargo, los tipos de pensamiento en voz alta cuya utilización parece haber sido más estratégica han sido las autoexplicaciones y las recuperaciones de información. El hecho de que los alumnos recibieran ayudas ha aumentado la cantidad de recuperaciones que han producido.En los apartados finales, se presentan reflexiones respecto de las implicaciones de los datos para la teoría y la práctica educativas y se apuntan algunas limitaciones del estudio y sugerencias para futuras investigaciones.
In this thesis, the effects of two kinds of intervention and their interactions in the reading comprehension process were studied. The former intervention is based on the concept of "joint reading", in which, by means of different kinds of mediations, an attempt is made in order to facilitate the gradual participation of learners in comprehension tasks and processes. This is done by offering readers aids that enlighten both the text structure and its main content. The latter intervention consists in inviting students to think out aloud at the end of each sentence.Sixty nine students from eight grade of two different schools were distributed by four different conditions, a control condition, two groups that received each one of the interventions and another group that received them both. Data has shown tha aids were effective in terms of memory of text and answers to literal questions, but were not in terms of answers to inferential questions. Thinking aloud was not effective in terms of tex memory measurements, but it did have effects in the results studentes achieved in answering literal and inferential questions (in the latter case, tha values found were only close to statistical significance). The interaction between both treatments was significant in the case of some dependent variables.The think aloud protocols were analyzed, revealing that, generally, students produced mostly paraphrases. Nevertheless, the kind of thinking alud that seemed to be more strategically used were self-explanations and reinstatements of information. Furthermore, whenever students were given aids, the amount of reinstatement they produced increased.In the final chapters, the relevance of findings to educational theory and practice is discussed and explored. Some limitations of the study are identified and suggestions for future investigation are made.
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