The Impact of Variations in Text Presence in Children’s Storybooks on Preschool Teachers’ Discourse

The authors compared the discourse of 100 Israeli preschool teachers with a group of children during three book-sharing contexts: reading, reconstruction, and telling. During telling and reconstruction, the teachers used more utterances and questions and referred more to concept of book and to the illustrations. During reading, they referred more to vocabulary than during the other two contexts. Beyond these differences, the teachers showed a book-sharing style. The results highlight the unique contribution of different book contexts to the nature of teachers’ discourse and the importance of training teachers to present books to children in a variety of ways.