Association Between Shared Book Reading Strategies and Children's Vocabulary Development in Rural China Preschools

• In Event: Understanding the Dynamics of Low-Resource Early Childhood Education Settings in Rural China

Abstract

Purposes
Shared book reading (SBR) is a common routine in preschools and found to be a key teaching practice to improve children's language and literacy skills. Despite the extensive research interest in SBR strategies, few studies focus on a non-western context. The purpose of this research is to investigate the association between shared book reading strategies and preschoolers' language skills in rural China. Two specific foci are: 1) What SBR strategies are used in rural China’s preschool classrooms? 2) How are these strategies associated with children’s language development?
Methods
Based on the level of cognitive demand, information complexity and the extent of abstraction, we categorized SBR into two categories: textual and extratextual strategies. Textual strategies involve the use of language related to the existing text in the books with lower level of abstraction while extratextual strategies involve inferencing, reasoning or analyzing information not directly provided in the books with higher level of abstraction (Zucker et al., 2010). Blank et al. (1978a) recommended that teachers maintain 30% of extratextual talk to facilitate children’s growth in higher-order language skills.
We coded 10 classrooms videos (10 teachers and 94 children) containing SBR activities from preschools at Xichou County in China following a coding scheme adapted from The Systematic Assessment of Book Reading (Justice, Zucker, and Sofka, 2010) to identify the choice and frequency of 14 SBR strategies within which 12 of them were categorized into textual or extratextual strategies.
In this study, we adopted The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and The Expressive Vocabulary Test as the predictors of children’s skills in receptive and expressive vocabulary. We conducted Paired t-test to examine the frequency differences between textual and extratextual strategies. We analyzed the correlation between the two types of strategies and children's language skills using a simple linear regression analysis.
Results
We found that teachers in rural China preschools have used all 14 strategies with a significantly higher frequency of textual strategies than extratextual strategies. 60% to 90% of teachers’ utterances were involved with textual strategies, while 40% to 10% of the utterances were using extratextual strategies.
Contrary to many previous findings asserting that textual strategies were negatively related to language development, we found that textual strategies are strong predictors of both receptive and expressive vocabulary outcomes. Meanwhile, our analysis showed a negative but nonsignificant association between extratextual strategies and children’s receptive/expressive vocabulary. This result does not align with existing research which shows a strong preference for extratextual strategies in promoting children’s language development.
Significance
This study contributed to the scarce literature in preschool SBR strategies outside of a western context. The analysis provided guidance for schools and policy makers on professional development for preschool teachers in rural China to promote children’s language development. The results provoked further discussion on the association between SBR strategies and children’s own vocabulary proficiency as well as home language environment.

Authors

• Yiran Bowman, Harvard University

• Kunlei He