Effects of Commenting During Joint Book Reading by Mothers with Low SES

Abstract

This study investigated whether teaching mothers with low socioeconomic status (SES) to comment while reading to their children would increase communicative interaction in mother-child dyads and improve the children's emerging literacy skills. Three children with developmental disabilities and four at-risk children participated. Mothers were taught to comment on the literary content in books in a way that related events and characters in the story to the child's own experiences. A multiple baseline across participants with an embedded withdrawal design was used to evaluate the effects of intervention on parent-child interactions. All mothers increased their use of specific comments. Most mothers also increased other conversational acts that set the occasion for positive verbal interactions and increased their responsiveness to their children. All children demonstrated more assertive and responsive utterances during the commenting intervention. Four of the children showed improved emerging literacy skills on a standardized measure. These changes in interaction patterns during book reading seemed to provide improved opportunities for language learning and language use by low-SES children with and without developmental disabilities, as well as increased exposure to early literacy experiences.