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This study examined the relationships of family characteristics (i.e., SES and race), parent–child engagement, and interactive reading behaviors on preschoolers' emergent literacy outcomes. Findings indicated that SES was significantly related to parent-child engagement and emergent literacy skills. This study also found that parent-child engagement is significantly related to the emergent development of literacy skills.
Introduction Introduction
Over the years, various researchers have investigated the effect of DR on early literacy. It appears that the quality of engagement in the home can influence a child's development in early literacy. Previous research has also found that various family characteristics influence the nature of early literacy taught in the home.
In addition to SES, other family factors seem to play a role in children's early literacy development in the home environment. It also appears that more research is needed to assess how different variables affect children's early literacy development in the preschool years. It added more knowledge to the existing literature on early literacy development to better understand what variables contributed to children's emerging literacy skills.
Literature Review Literature Review
Phonological awareness is “the understanding that spoken language is made up of individual and distinct sounds” (National Reading Panel, 2000). Children who received shared reading at home with a focus on print showed greater progress in pre-literacy skills than children in a control group whose parents were not instructed to focus on print in books. Finally, in predicting a child's risks for exhibiting reading disabilities in the future, researchers have found that print proficiency assessed in kindergarten is an excellent predictor (Catts et al., 2002).
For example, some of the skills that contribute to one's concepts of print are book organization (eg the way print is organized in different texts), letters (eg the names of individual letters) and words (eg .g., units of the written language) (Drêtësia and Piasta, 2011). Bilateral children can acquire literacy skills in their homes by learning everyday words presented through different visual images or logos that parents point out in the environment (Kuby et al., 1999). This is an important finding in research on children's literacy development within the home environment.
Two classrooms participated in the intervention while two other classrooms served as the control group. It is possible that "the association between early home literacy experiences and later reading achievement is mediated by oral and written language skills" (Bus, 2001, p. 186). Dialogic reading is designed according to the following three main principles: a) the use of evocative techniques by the parent who encourages the child to talk about photographic material; (b) informative feedback by including extensions, corrective modeling and other forms that highlight differences between what the child said and what he might have said; and (c) an adaptive parent who is sensitive to the child's developing abilities.
Specifically, the children in the video group performed better than the control group on posttests of expressive language and receptive language. Positive engagement and conversations about the story between parents and children during interactive shared book reading help increase early literacy development (e.g., Bennett, Weigel, & Martin, 2002; Overall, the above research has supported the importance of positive parent-child involvement at home in the development of children's early literacy skills.
Therefore, both past research and more current studies are reviewed below to examine the role that SES, race, and other variables play in the development of early children's literacy skills. Teachers and parents of children who participated in the intervention were trained in dialogic reading techniques (via videotape and role play) and were given books for the program. Researchers have found that home-based HLE with preschool children appears to play an important role in the development of oral language and reading-related skills.
Method Method
However, an exact reason for the difference in numbers was not given in Psychometric Report from Preschool-Kindergarten (Najarian et al., 2010). The SES and race variables of participants in the preschool wave were used for the current study. The race dummy variable was used in the model, and the minority dummy variable was the reference category.
The parent-child engagement variable was included in the ECLS-B study as a direct measure of one aspect of children's social-emotional development. Therefore, the Two-Bag Task was identified as a socioemotional tool for use in ECLS-B data collection. Administration of the two-bag task was standardized to ensure that all interviewers completed the task in the same way.
The two-year wave was used to help predict the level of common reading behaviors in the preschool wave. RAPT data were used to examine the joint book-reading behaviors of parents and children while they participated in the two-bag task. The reading items used in the ECLS-B were analyzed with Item Response Theory (IRT) procedures.
The weight used in this study is W3R0, which was developed for the analysis of information collected in the waves before and during the toddler wave. Endogenous variables are influenced by other variables in the model and there are arrows pointing in one direction (i.e. parent-child involvement, shared reading behavior, emergent literacy scores). Engagement between parents and children is measured quantitatively through the use of the Two-Bag Task data.
The common reading behavior variable, measured by two scales in the RAPT data, was created to observe specific parent and child behaviors during storybook reading.
Results
The indirect effect of SES through parent–child engagement on shared reading behaviors was .06 and the total effect was .15, which was also not significant. In summary, it can be concluded that SES is statistically significant at the 0.001 level and has a moderate relationship with parent-child engagement. SES was also related to emergent literacy outcomes at the 0.01 level with a moderate relationship, but had no relationship with shared reading behaviors.
It was hypothesized that White families experience more positive parent-child involvement and engage in more productive shared reading behaviors than minority race families (Black non-Hispanic, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander non-Hispanic and other, non-Hispanic) families. causing white children to achieve higher emergent literacy scores. Overall, the direct effect of race (β = 0.12) on parent and child involvement is found to be statistically significant at the .05 level. Similarly, the indirect effect of race through parent and child involvement on shared reading behavior was 0.02 and the total effect was 0.17, which was not significant.
It can be concluded that race is significantly related to parent-child engagement at the .05 level with a weak relationship. It was hypothesized that families that have more positive parent-child engagements have more productive shared reading behaviors, which increases a child's emerging literacy score. The indirect effect of parent-child engagement through the variable of shared reading behavior on emerging reading skills is 0.01, and the total effect of 0.19 is significant.
Therefore, it can be concluded that shared reading behaviors are not statistically significantly related to a child's emergent literacy outcome. In summary, SES and parent-child engagement were significantly related to a child's emergent educational outcome. Race was also found to be significantly associated with parent-child engagement at the .05 level.
The total effect of parent-child engagement on joint reading behaviors was found to be significant.
Discussion
Furthermore, SES was found to be significantly related to parent-child involvement, supporting the hypothesis. Therefore, one of the focuses of this study was to understand the extent to which SES might be related to parent–child involvement. This research has shown that there is a significant relationship between SES and parent-child involvement within the home environment.
Race was found to be significantly related to parent-child engagement, but not to shared reading behavior or emergent literacy outcomes. Therefore, it was surprising that race was associated with parent and child engagement, but not with shared reading behavior or emergent literacy outcomes. However, neither their study nor other studies have focused on parent-child cooperation specifically related to race.
As mentioned earlier, SES was significantly related to parent–child engagement and emergent literacy scores, while race was only significantly related to parent–child engagement. Previous research has found that positive parent-child engagement can help increase early literacy development in the home (e.g., Bennett, Weigel, & Martin, 2002; Bus et al., 1995). The current study observed the variable of parent-child engagement in relation to joint reading behavior and emerging literacy scores in preschool age.
The results of the analysis showed that parent and child involvement, as measured by the two-bag task, was significantly related to emergent literacy scores, but not significantly related to shared reading behavior. It is possible that parent-child involvement at age two is related to emergent literacy scores at age four because it is emotional. In this study, the variables of parent-child involvement and shared reading behavior were purposefully separated in the model.
Parent-child engagement was related to emerging reading skills, while shared reading behavior was not. In this study, SES was found to be directly related to parent-child engagement and preschool children's scores on emerging reading skills. These findings support the finding that SES is related to parent–child engagement and literacy skill development.
