MAKING PARENTS PARTNERS TO INCREASE YOUNG
CHIDREN’S EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS
Diana Brannon and Linda Dauksas
o one can question the importance of
parents to their children‘s education. One of the most
important ways that parents and caregivers can
become involved in their young children‘s education
is through reading aloud. Reading aloud to children
provides many benefits including positive effects on
their oral language, print concept knowledge, and
comprehension (Crook, 2010). Reading aloud to
children is clearly beneficial; however, reading with
children, such as done in dialogic reading, provides
benefits beyond those seen when just reading aloud.
Dialogic reading is a form of shared reading that
encourages interactions between parents and their
children going beyond the written text. The strategy
encourages children to become active participants in
the story being shared by commenting, asking
questions, and answering questions about the
illustrations and text. It also encourages children to
make connections between the story and their lives,
experiences, and interests. Dialogic reading facilitates
children‘s participation through parents‘ responses
during verbal interactions being adjusted according to
their children‘s ability (Arnold & Whitehurst, 1994).
Some of the benefits of dialogic reading include
increasing young children‘s vocabulary (Hargrave &
Sénéchal, 2000), expressive language (Hargrave &
Sénéchal, 2000), sound and letter identification,
emergent writing skills, and knowledge of print
concepts (Bus, van IJzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995).
PARTNERS Program
The Parents as Reading Teachers Nightly
Encouraging Reading Success (PARTNERS) Program
is designed to help educate parents about how they
can use dialogic reading to share a book with their
young children. The program can be implemented at
any school or library, reaching out to all families
regardless of home language, parental education level,
or socioeconomic status. The current paper shares the
findings of the PARTNERS Program pilot study. It
also provides instructions for implementing the
program for schools, libraries, and parent programs
that would like to provide dialogic reading training