Examining the Role of a Vocabulary-Focused Intervention in Teachers' Book Reading Practices

• In Event: Children's Conceptual Knowledge, Thinking, and Teacher Talk: A Fellowship of Unsung Heroes in Language Comprehension

Abstract

Theoretical Framework & Objective
Book reading is an ideal setting for promoting young children’s language growth due to a prevalence of high-quality language features during this activity (Wasik, Hindman & Snell, 2015). As a result, it is an effective setting for delivering language and literacy interventions in early childhood classrooms (e.g. Marulis & Neuman, 2013). Our research team successfully used book reading to teach sophisticated vocabulary words using soft scripting to guide teachers (Authors, in press). Children in intervention classrooms displayed greater learning of vocabulary. However, we wanted to understand how our intervention affected teachers’ reading practices.

Data Sources & Methods
We will report results from analyses of 10 intervention and 4 control group teachers. Here we present preliminary results from 4 intervention and 4 control group teachers. Intervention teachers read the text four times across four weeks using a semi-scripted book reading protocol designed to help them teach novel words and engage children in conversations designed to support story understanding. Across the four readings, we encouraged greater student participation and included more inferential questioning. Control teachers read the book once operating under business-as-usual conditions. The book reading sessions of the teachers reading the same text were recorded, transcribed, and coded in CLAN (MacWhinney, 2014).

Preliminary analyses compare control teachers’ book reading practices during a single reading versus intervention teachers’ earlier reading (week 1 or 2) and later readings (week 3 or 4). We were interested in how participation in a vocabulary intervention influenced the type, function, and content of teachers’ extratextual utterances. As such, all teacher utterances were coded based on type (comment, question, other), function (type of comment/question), and content (e.g. vocabulary-focused, plot-focused) (see Table 1 for more detail).

Results
Results indicated that there were qualitative differences in the type, function and content of talk utilized by teachers. Control teachers asked more questions and made fewer informative comments than their intervention peers. During earlier readings, intervention teachers’ comments conveyed information and asked questions that required little cognitive press. However, during the later readings, they increased their use of responsive comments and sophisticated questioning, changes that were associated with more student talk. Consistent with the focus of the intervention, across all readings intervention teachers engaged in considerably more talk about vocabulary than control teachers, who focused most of their utterances on the book plot.

Significance
These results suggest that soft-scripting provided a structure for book reading that promoted vocabulary-centered and informative comments. However, this structure may have also have limited the extent to which they engaged children in conversations about the plot, a practice we found was prevalent among control group teachers. This shift of focus could have unintended negative consequences related to supporting children’s story comprehension. These results suggest that those devising interventions need to take care to ensure that prompts and coaching supports encourage attention both to vocabulary and comprehension.

Authors

• Kaitlin Herbert, Vanderbilt University

• Josephine Mark, Vanderbilt University

• David K. Dickinson, Vanderbilt University