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At London Early Years Foundation we strongly believe language and literacy and the exposure to reading and books are significant to children’s longer-term success.
As a social enterprise, we are intent on giving all children, especially those from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, access to high-quality services. We know that children become readers by being surrounded by language, both print and oral, along with being taught how to use and enjoy books.
One of the factors that drives quality is to have a strong curriculum. However, as we acquired more nurseries, we felt that we could do more to co-ordinate our approach to teaching reading and refresh our strategy. This led us to examine and ultimately implement the dialogic reading approach, which involves reading interactively with young children in order to develop their language and comprehension skills.
EMERGING READERS
LEYF nurseries use a play-based child-interest approach to teaching, balanced with planned and responsive adult-led activities and home learning. We operate the Vygotskian notion of the child as an apprentice learner, with the adult using the ‘zone of proximal development’ to scaffold and extend the child’s learning.
Our nurseries have lovely book areas and we have always aimed to introduce children to the joys of books and the range of elements that support children to become emerging readers. We had a reading scheme (the Oxford Reading Tree Reading Scheme) but, while it was popular at some nurseries, we were questioning its use:
Nurseries joining the group found it difficult to use as they got to grips with the LEYF pedagogy.
- It was expensive and required staff to have all the resources.
- Contextually it was not fully representative of our children and their families.
- Parents were asking us to use the reading scheme favoured by their child’s prospective primary schools and there were far too many.
We wanted to find a means of balancing our current approach with a consistent system that could be used by staff and parents. Our action research led us to the work of Dr Grover Whitehurst, an American developmental psychologist who created the dialogic reading programme. It appealed to us because it is simple and cost-effective – it doesn’t involve buying special books and resources or expensive training courses. The approach is all about changing how you read to children.
THE BENEFITS
Dialogic reading aims for the adult to help the child become the teller of the story. This makes the child a more active and engaged participant in the reading process. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child. It is found to be more effective in developing oral language than when adults just read the book to the child with little or no interaction (Trivette and Dunst 2007, Hargrave and Sénéchal 2000).
The approach also provides opportunities for children to learn about language features, decode the text and, most importantly, learn to understand the context of a whole story.
Evidence shows that children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally and with particular and measurable benefits to children from poor families. Dialogic reading helps children to:
- use more words
- speak in longer sentences, form an argument and elaborate (NELP 2008)
- score higher on vocabulary tests
- develop grammar and listening comprehension
- demonstrate overall improvement in expressive language skills
(Doyle and Bramwell 2006, Huebner and Meltzoff 2005, Hargrave and Sénéchal 2000, Huebner 2000).
SHARING BOOKS
Effective dialogic reading is a technique that changes the way you read a story by using five types of prompts to initiate a PEER sequence. The prompts, known as CROWD, include:
Completion prompts, which allow the child to finish your sentence. The child understands what to do by the upward inflection of your voice towards the end of the sentence and the pause. For example, ‘I think I’d be a glossy cat. A little plump but not too __’, letting the child fill in the blank with the word ‘fat’. Completion prompts provide children with information about the structure of language that is critical to later reading.
Recall promptsabout what happened in a book a child has read. For example, ‘Can you tell me what happened to the little blue engine in this story?’ These help children understand story plot and describe sequences of events.
Open-ended prompts work best for books with rich illustrations because they focus on the pictures. For example, while looking at a page that the child is familiar with, you might say, ‘Tell me what’s happening in this picture.’ Open-ended prompts help children to increase their expressive fluency and attend to detail. Just like with the recall prompt, it is better to speculate with the child than to ask a direct question (Powell and Snow 2007). Instead of saying, ‘What do you see here?’, it might be more beneficial to say, ‘Mm, I wonder what is going on here?’ and then leave a pause with the hope that the child will fill the gap.
Wh- prompts usually begin with what, where, when, why and how questions. Like open-ended prompts, wh- prompts focus on the pictures. For example, asking ‘What’s the name of this?’ while pointing to an object in the book. Wh- questions teach children new vocabulary.
Distancing prompts ask children to relate pictures or words in a book to real experiences. For example, while looking at a picture of farm animals, you might say, ‘Remember when we went to the animal park last week? Which of these animals did we see there?’ Distancing prompts help children to form a bridge between books and the real world, as well as helping with verbal fluency, conversational abilities and narrative skills.
Of course, staff need to judge which prompts they use and when so they do not ruin the story’s flow. Frequent use of distancing and recall prompts should be limited to four- and five-year-olds because they are more difficult for children than completion, open-ended and wh- prompts. These prompts kick off the PEER sequence:
- Prompts the child to say something about the book
- Evaluates the child’s response
- Expands the child’s response by rephrasing and adding information to it
- Repeats the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion.
For example, in a story about a fire engine, ask ‘What is this?’ (the prompt) while pointing to the fire engine. The child says, ‘engine’, and the carer follows with, ‘That’s right [the evaluation]; it’s a red fire engine [the expansion]; can you say fire engine? [the repetition.]’
NEW SKILLS
To embed dialogic reading at LEYF, we trained a member of staff at each of our nurseries in the approach and they became our reading champions. We then used peer-to-peer learning to share the knowledge across the nurseries. This is continuing as we welcome new staff and we also run sessions for parents.
It’s not a complicated process but it got staff to think about the impact they could have by changing the way that they read a story. For some, it was just a little nudge, but for others it was a deeper learning experience. It was interesting to discover how few staff are taught to read a story at college. The assumption appears that everyone can do it, which is certainly not correct.
Dialogic reading continues to be embedded in LEYF and we need to continue to get it right. However, we feel we made the right choice. It’s not another task but a change to the way we read with the children, and it’s having a great impact.
IN PRACTICE: The Billy Goats Gruff
1. Find a quiet space for you and your child.
2. Begin by looking at the book cover and wondering aloud what the story is about.
3. Read the story, pausing at times to look at the pictures and talk about them.
4. As you read the story, discuss questions like: What will the Billy Goat do when he goes in the meadow?
MORE INFORMATION
‘All about…dialogic reading’ by Joan Kiely
NURSERY WORLD CONFERENCE
June O’Sullivan will be talking about the LEYF curriculum and pedagogy at our Ofsted inspection conference in London on 9 July.
Under the new framework, settings will be expected to focus on ‘Quality of education’, comprising Intent (curriculum), Implementation (pedagogy) and Impact (assessment).
The programme combines general guidance, subject-specific advice and case studies to help practitioners from across the sector deliver a curriculum that is:
- broad, balanced and aspirational
- planned coherently to provide ‘progression’ and ‘stretch’
- delivered to the highest standards
- evaluated effectively – so ensuring the best possible outcomes for all children.
To see the full programme and book a place, visit:
