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Studies suggest that different approaches to common parent-child activities, like storybook reading, conversation, and problem solving, affect pre-school cognitive and language development in ways that predict children's readiness to succeed at school. In fact, the language parents use in the home and their strategies as "first teachers" could account for 25-60 percent of the readiness gap prevalent among kids from low-income families, according to some estimates.
To gain a better understanding of factors affecting school readiness, Pia Rebello Britto, Yale University, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Columbia University, and Terri M. Griffin, Manhattanville College, analyzed 126 low-income, largely single and undereducated teenage mothers as they read and problem-solved with their young children. The results of their study, published as "Maternal reading and teaching patterns: Associations with school readiness in low-income African American families," (Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1), divides mothers into story-tellers and story-readers and suggests that instruction and support really matter.
While story-readers were the dominant group (at 90), the story-tellers had more positive child outcomes. Story-tellers approach reading as an opportunity to have a conversation with their children. Compared to story-readers, who didn't talk much to children during the reading, story-tellers are interactive, interspersing their discussion around the book, before, during, and after reading the text. Story-tellers use more decontextualized language--"the ability to talk about things not present in the here and now--that is strongly associated with the development of literacy skills. These mothers also made more requests for information that requires the child to name, label, or point to something in the story. In short, story-readers read the story; story-tellers discuss a book.
A puzzle provided more information about how mothers interact with their children. This part of the study found three patterns: about 35 mothers offered little assistance, support, or direct teaching; 51 mothers did not teach or guide, but did offer encouragement and support; and 30 mothers offered support, encouragement, and instruction, providing verbal clues and other guided assistance as the children solved the problem. Mothers in the second and third group were more likely to be story-tellers than mothers in the first group, the majority of whom were story-readers.
"Children gained better vocabularies when mothers read books interactively and offer support and guidance as a teaching strategy," Pia Rebello Britto notes. "Merely providing support with little teaching does not appear to be linked with child outcomes. A parent who is interested in language development and school readiness should provide high levels of guided assistance, flexibility in giving instruction to match a child's need, clear verbal cues that a child can understand, and information to help a child learn and understand."
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