Increasing Children's and Teachers' Abilities to Engage in Inferential Talk in Preschool

• In Event: The Forgotten Giant: Classroom Talk That Supports Language Development Across Grades

Abstract

Recent research shows that inferential thinking is critical to reading comprehension beyond other oral language skills, word recognition, and IQ (Oakhill & Cain, 2012). Preschoolers have such capacities, such as deploying background knowledge, drawing inferences, and identifying causal connections in narratives (Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009; van Kleeck, 2008). Efforts to support early reading have targeted decoding-related skills and more recently language, especially vocabulary, but there have not been systematic efforts to foster development of inferential thinking. Despite the potential of early contexts, such as storybook reading, for developing such capacities, adults engage in more literal than inferential talk (Price, van Kleeck, & Huberty, 2009). Inferential thinking has received little attention in intervention research (Dunst, Williams, Trivette, Simkus, & Hamby, 2012).

Objectives are twofold: (1) to examine the effects of a researcher-delivered intervention to increase preschoolers’ inferential thinking during read-alouds; and (2) to identify whether strategies can be taught to teachers to increase their talk for supporting inferencing.

Two projects were examined to identify relationships between the cognitive demand of teachers’ talk during read-alouds and children’s inferential skills. Children were from low SES backgrounds.

Participants in study one were seven bilingual preschool and kindergarten teachers and 191 Spanish-speaking preschoolers attending a state-funded preschool program in an urban city in the Midwest. Children were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups. From preschool through kindergarten, treatment group children participated in small group read alouds with researchers who read and discussed picture books using a high-cognitive demand style of discussion while controls heard the same books read aloud without discussion. Following the third reading of a book, children took story comprehension tests that measured inferential thinking about the story. At the beginning and end of each year, children took general Spanish and English vocabulary tests.

Participants in study two were three state preK teachers and 50 preschoolers. Teachers attended monthly seminars on topics designed to support higher-level thinking in preschoolers and were videotaped reading to children prior to the intervention and throughout the academic year with project-specific books and narratives of choice. Videos were transcribed and coded by trained staff for the cognitive demand of extra-textual (ET) talk during and after the reading using a new coding system (author) adapted from previous work (van Kleeck, 2008) to identify four types of talk: support for meaning (i.e., comprehension asides), causal inferences, an overarching message, and decontextualized talk (use of background knowledge to aid comprehension). Before and after the intervention, children took story comprehension tests on a project book.

In study one, regression showed effects of high demand discussion on children’s inferential story comprehension in preschool (beta=.27, p<.01) and kindergarten (beta=.23, p < .05). Treatment accounted for 7% and 5% of unique variance beyond vocabulary and home reading practices. In study two, teachers made significant gains in inferential talk (see Figure). Children’s gains paralleled respective teacher mean gains. Implications of this evidence for impacting preschoolers’ abilities through classroom talk will be discussed.

Author

• Molly F. Collins, Vanderbilt University