Bilingual parent-child shared book reading mediates the impact of socioeconomic status on children’s emergent literacy

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

The importance of parent-child shared book reading has been underscored in a plethora of studies examining its effect on children’s first language and literacy development (Debaryshe, 1993; Zivan & Horowitz-Kraus, 2020). Yet, little is known about the impact of bilingual parent-child book reading practices on children’s language and literacy. To date, a small number of studies have investigated bilingual parent-child shared book reading. The few studies that have examined this link between bilingual parent-child book reading and bilingual children’s literacy development have reported mixed results (e.g., Kalia & Reese, 2009; Uchikoshi, 2006). Moreover, it has been well-established that children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds have lower literacy (Chatterji, 2006; Snow et al., 1998), fewer books (Bradley et al., 2001) and book choices (Neuman & Celano, 2001), and engage in parent-child shared book reading with less frequency (De Temple & Snow, 1996). While evidence does not support a moderating role of parent-child shared book reading on the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy in monolingual families (e.g. Bus et al., 1995), there is some evidence that SES impacts this relation in bilingual families(e.g., Farver et al., 2013; Kalia & Reese, 2009). To date, no investigation has explicitly focused on the effect of childhood SES on the relation between bilingual parent-child book reading and early literacy skills. Therefore, in the current study, we examined the benefits of bilingual parent-child shared book reading by investigating (1) its influence on bilingual children’s emergent literacy and (2) its mediating or moderating role on the relation between SES and children’s emergent literacy.

The present study includes participants from the Early Childhood Program Participation(ECPP) survey from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2016 (NHES;NCES, 2017). This included over 900 bilingual children 2-to-6 years old, whose parents spoke a language other than English at home. A Latent Variable Path Analysis (LVPA) was used to examine the influence of bilingual parent-child shared book reading on children’s emergent literacy. This included bilingual parent-child book reading as a latent construct predicting children’s letter recognition. The latent variable included five observed variables: time spent reading to child, minutes spent each time reading to child, books child owned, monthly visits to the library and bookstore. Two additional LVPAs were constructed to determine if parent-child book reading served as either a mediator or moderator of the relation between SES and children’s emergent literacy.

As predicted, the results of our study indicated that bilingual parent-child shared book reading positively influenced bilingual children’s ability to recognize letters. This demonstrated the benefit and importance of bilingual parent-child shared book reading for children’s literacy development. Moreover, the results showed that bilingual parent-child book reading mediated, (but did not moderate) the relation between SES and bilingual children’s emergent literacy. This indicates that bilingual parent-child shared book reading is an underlying variable explaining the relation between SES and bilingual children’s emergent literacy. By dissociating socioeconomic disadvantage from bilingual literacy development, this paper provides a first step towards moving from a deficit model to an asset model of bilingualism.

Authors

• Ye Shen, Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie Del Tufo, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author