Parent-Child Book-Sharing Practices in Immigrant Families in Norway

• In Event: 2-204 - Variations in Parent-Child Book-Sharing Practices at Home and their Relations to Child Outcomes

Integrative Statement

Despite the extensive research base supporting the benefits of stimulating parent–child book-sharing interactions for the development of vocabulary and narrative skills during early childhood (Aram, et al., 2013; Vadasy, et al., 2015), there is scant research on how immigrant parents support their children’s vocabulary and narrative skills in their home (first) language, particularly in book-sharing contexts. Children of immigrants who are extensively exposed to the societal language outside the home (e.g., in preschool) face the challenging task of maintaining command of their first language. The present study investigated book-sharing practices in a diverse sample of preschool dual-language-learners and their parents in Norway, examining whether parental book-sharing strategies may facilitate children’s first-language vocabulary and narrative skills over time.

In the study, 75 dual language learners speaking different first languages at home (e.g., Polish, Somali, Turkish, and Urdu) and aged between 3 and 5 years were audiotaped when sharing the same wordless picture book (Frog, Where Are You? Mayer, 1969) with one of their parents at the beginning of the fall semester. Bilingual research assistants assessed the children’s first-language receptive vocabulary and narrative skills. This assessment was repeated in the spring semester (the children’s fall and spring scores are provided in Table 1).

The audiotapes of the book sharing collected during the fall were transcribed, translated, and verified by bilingual research assistants using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000). The transcripts were coded with a narrative coding scheme (see Kuchirko et al., 2015) that identifies 48 story elements altogether, differentiating between parental attempts to elicit child narrative production with questions (e.g., “why is the dog running away?” and “what does the boy feel now?”) and parental narrative statements (e.g., “the boy falls into the water” and “now the frog had found his family”). Cohen’s kappa for the coding of the parental strategies was .89. First-language skills were assessed using translated versions of the 43-item Receptive Vocabulary Assessment (described in Grøver, et al., under review) and the 10-item assessment of narrative comprehension (the “Baby Birds” story) in the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Gagarina, et al., 2016).
To assess the relation of children’s vocabulary and narrative skills to parental book-sharing practices, we conducted mixed models analyses, accounting for the nesting by language groups. Models were fitted using the spring scores as the outcome, with the corresponding fall scores, the children’s age in months, and the level of parental education as control variables. Analyses were conducted for those children whose fall and spring vocabulary (N = 75) and narrative (N = 71) skills we were able to assess. The main predictors were parental narrative questions and statements. As seen in Table 2, parental narrative questions—but not statements—related to children’s spring receptive vocabulary skills and narrative comprehension. These relationships were maintained when controlled for parental education. The findings of the present study support the growing research base that emphasizes the importance of eliciting child reasoning and verbal responses during shared reading.

Authors

• Veslemøy Rydland, University of Oslo
  Presenting Author

• Vibeke Grøver, University of Oslo
  Non-Presenting Author