Making Early Literacy Interventions Work for Everyone: Exploring a Potential Barrier to Effectively Teaching Dialogic Reading Strategies

Abstract

Opportunity gaps emerge even before children begin learning to read, and early-literacy interventions therefore stand to be of greatest benefit early, before disparities become insurmountable. One of the earliest influences on a child’s language development is input from their parents, and research has identified shared book reading as an especially effective mechanism for scaffolding literacy skills in young children. Parent-directed shared book reading interventions are, therefore, an especially promising avenue through which to bolster early reading skills. Unfortunately, the efficacy of different types of reading interventions has been shown to interact with the socioeconomic status (SES) of participating families. In a series of three studies, I explore possible contributions to these disparities in the effectiveness of dialogic reading interventions. In Study 1, I investigate whether SES-related differences in intervention efficacy, previously demonstrated in terms of child outcomes, are also evident at the earlier point of parent implementation. In Study 2, I investigate whether the conceptual accessibility of intervention training materials might constrain successful learning and implementation of dialogic reading techniques. In Study 3, I attempt to disentangle effects of the specific intervention content from the broader one-on-one reading intervention context by comparing my dialogic reading conditions to an intensity-matched reading intervention focusing on different aspects of parent-child interaction.