Parents’ Book-Reading Practices Relate to Latino Kindergarteners’ Narrative Skills

• In Event: Strengths-Based Approaches for Examining and Supporting Narrative Development in Young Children

Abstract

There is a strong oral tradition in Latino communities; narratives serve important social and religious purposes in the Latino community (Hammer et al., 2020) and Latino children are expected from very early on to understand and use them effectively (Eisenberg, 2002). Because telling stories is a unique practice that is already established in the ecocultural context of Latino family, narrative skills might be an eco-cultural asset that Latino children bring to school (Hammer & Sawyer, 2016). Narrative skills are important for academic development, as they involve the integration of important cognitive (e.g., planning and monitoring discourse for coherence) and language skills (e.g., vocabulary, syntax, grammar; McCabe & Rollins, 1994). Furthermore, children’s narratives at kindergarten entry positively predict subsequent language and literacy abilities including reading comprehension (Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2008). Here we explore the relation between Latino parental language and literacy practices at home and kindergarteners’ narrative skills. Participants were 130 Latino parents and their kindergarten children (M age = 67.34 months; 53% female) recruited from 13 Title I schools in a Southeast school district. On average, 22% of parents had a GED diploma or higher and 92% were born in Latin America. Data were collected at the beginning of the kindergarten year. Parents completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire reporting how often they engaged in four common language and literacy practices at home during a typical week (book reading, reminiscing, mealtime conversations, and teaching letters) using a 7-point scale (from never to every day; Duran et al., 2011; Davies et al., 2007). Children’s narrative skills were assessed using a personal narrative task (i.e., the child tells a story about a positive and a negative experience; Laible, 2011). Children’s narratives were transcribed and coded at the utterance level for five narrative features: narrative coherence (context, temporal and theme coherence; using a 4-point scale; Reese et al., 2011), elaborations (number of unique pieces of information provided by the child; Peterson et al., 1999), literacy language features (e.g., adjectives, adverbs, subordinating conjunctions; Curenton & Justice, 2004), NDW (number of diverse words) and TNW (total number of words). Ordinary-Least-Squares (OLS) regressions with robust cluster-correction errors (to account for clustering of children within schools) and controlling for relevant covariates (e.g., child age and sex, parent’s education) yielded positive associations between frequency of book reading and children’s narrative skills (see Table 1). The standardized coefficients of these associations were small (βs ranged from 0.13 to 0.19). Frequency of reminiscing, mealtime conversations, and teaching letters bore no relation to children’s narrative skills. Findings suggest that book reading is one way in which Latino parents might be providing opportunities for children to develop narrative skills. Future research should use alternative methods (e.g., observational) to better understand whether and how parental practices such as reminiscing and mealtime conversations relate to Latino children’s narrative skills.

Authors

• Diana Leyva, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Gloria Yeomans-Maldonado, Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

• Christina J Weiland, University of Michigan

• Anna Shapiro, University of Virginia