Enriching parent-child discourse during book sharing: The impact on children’s story comprehension and narrative skills

The chapter describes a study that assessed the efficacy of an intervention designed to enrich the discourse between parents and preschool children during shared reading, and thereby enhance children’s story comprehension and narrative skills. Participants were Parent-child dyads from low socio-economic backgrounds. During the study, parents in both the intervention and the control groups were given one new book weekly for six weeks, and were instructed to read each book four times per week to their children. Parents in the intervention group were instructed to read the books interactively according to a structured model, which was based on Bruner’s (1986) “dual landscape” model. The first “landscape” is the action level, which refers to the plot and focuses on characters’ behaviors. The second “landscape” is the consciousness level, which refers to the mental states that underlie characters’ behaviors. Results show that children in the intervention group referred more often to both levels compared to children in the control group. When retelling the story, they referred to characters’ mental states significantly more than their counterparts did, and were better able to answer open-ended questions regarding the plot and the vocabulary used. They also showed a better understanding of the characters’ emotions and thoughts, as well as the reasons that led to those mental states. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the direct guidance of parents in effective shared bookreading.