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Research by Age Level

Age Two to Three

Background Research: Dialogic Reading for Two- and Three-Year-Olds

Over a third of children in the U.S. enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills that are required to do well in school. Children who start behind generally stay behind--they drop out, they turn off. Their lives are at risk.

Why are so many children deficient in the skills that are critical to school readiness? Children's experience with books plays an important role. Many children enter school with thousands of hours of experience with books. Their homes contain hundreds of picture books. They see their parents and brothers and sisters reading for pleasure. Other children enter school with fewer than 25 hours of shared book reading. There are few, if any, children's books in their homes. Their parents and siblings aren't readers.

Picture book reading provides children with many of the skills that are necessary for school readiness: vocabulary, sound structure, the meaning of print, the structure of stories and language, sustained attention, the pleasure of learning, and on and on. Preschoolers need food, shelter, love; they also need the nourishment of books.

It is important to read frequently with preschoolers. Children who are read to three times per week or more do much better in later development than children who are read to less than three times per week.

How we read to preschoolers is as important as how frequently we read to them. Researchers have developed a method of reading to preschoolers called Dialogic Reading. When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens. In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child. No one can learn to play the piano just by listening to someone else play. Likewise, no one can learn to read just by listening to someone else read. Children learn most from books when they are actively involved.

Dialogic reading for children who are talkers but who are not yet pre-readers (generally two and three-year-olds) is based upon three main techniques - asking "what" questions, asking open-ended questions, and expanding upon what the child says - which are designed to teach vocabulary and encourage children to tell more complete descriptions of what they see.

The goals of the program are: (1) to help parents increase the number of times they ask their child to name objects in the pictures; (2) to help parents to start using more general questions as a way of getting their children to say more than just one word at a time; and (3) to encourage pleasureable interactions around books for both parents and children.

Dialogic reading works. Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading. These effects have been found with hundreds of children in areas as geographically different as New York, Tennessee, and Mexico, in settings as varied as homes, preschools, and daycare centers, and with children from economic backgrounds ranging from poverty to affluence.

Dialogic reading is just children and adults having a conversation about a book. Children will enjoy dialogic reading more than traditional reading as long as parents learn to mix-up questions with straight reading, vary what they do from reading to reading, and follow their child's interest.

List of Relevant Research

Arnold, D.S. & Whitehurst, G.J. (1994). Accelerating language development through picture book reading: A summary of dialogic reading and its effect. In D. Dickinson (Ed.), Bridges to literacy: Approaches to supporting child and family literacy (pp. 103-128). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

Crain-Thoreson, C. & Dale, P.S. (1999). Enhancing linguistic performance: Parents and teachers as book reading partners for children with language delays. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education: Special Issue: 62.19(1): 28-39.

Dale, P.S., Crain-Thoreson, C., Notari-Syverson, A., & Cole, K. (1996). Parent-child book reading as an intervention for young children with language delays. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 16: 213-235.

Hargrave, A.C. & Senechal, M. (2000). A book reading intervention with preschool children who have limited vocabularies: The benefits of regular reading and dialogic reading. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15, 75-90.

Huebner, C.E. (2000). Promoting toddlers' language development: A randomized-controlled trial of a community-based intervention. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 21, 513-535.

Huebner, C.E. (2000). Community-based support for preschool readiness among children in poverty. Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk, 5, 291-314.

Lonigan, C.J., Bloomfield, B.G., Dyer, S.M., & Samwel, C.S. (1999). Effects of two shared-reading interventions on emergent literacy skills of at-risk preschoolers. Journal of Early Intervention, 22, 306-322.

Reese, E. & Cox, A. (1999). Quality of adult book reading affects children's emergent literacy. Developmental Psychology, 35,: 20-28.

Senechal, M. (1997). The differential effect of storybook reading on preschoolers' acquisition of expressive and receptive vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 24, 123-138.

Senechal, M & Cornell, E. (1993). Vocabulary acquisition through shared reading experiences. Reading Research Quarterly, 28, 361-373.

Valdez-Menchaca, M. C., & Whitehurst, G. J. (1992). Accelerating language development through picture book reading: A systematic extension to Mexican daycare. Developmental Psychology, 28, 1106-1114.

Whitehurst, G.J., Falco, F.L., Lonigan, C., Fischel, J.E., Valdez-Menchaca, M.C., DeBaryshe, B.D., & Caulfield, M. (1988). Accelerating language development through picture-book reading. Developmental Psychology, 24, 552-558.

Whitehurst, G.J., Arnold, D.H., Epstein, J.N., Angell, A.L., Smith, M., & Fischel, J.E. (1994). A picture book reading intervention in daycare and home for children from low-income families. Developmental Psychology, 30, 679-689.