Abstract
While much is known about the benefits of shared reading activity for children, and the role of the home in cultivating shared reading practices far less is known about the factors that can influence parents’ shared reading practices with their children. Given that many young people leave school with poor relationships with reading, this study explores the links between parents’ own relationships with reading and the shared reading they practice with their own children in the home. Drawing on deep-level interview data, this paper presents data from six parents of pre-school children, who reported that they have had a poor personal relationship with reading. These parents all developed positive shared reading relationships with their children, however the importance of this study lies in understanding the interplay between these reading relationships. The data strongly suggested that the construct of ‘reading’ was very different from the ways in which reading had previously been defined for these participants. Reading, within a shared reading context, was seen as a very flexible construct which included activities such as talking and telling stories. In some cases, parents’ own relationships with reading seemed to improve. Implications for intervention with other families are discussed.
Highlights
While much is known about the benefits of shared reading activity for children, and the role of the home in cultivating shared reading practices far less is known about the factors that can influence parents’ shared reading practices with their children
It is certainly encouraging that within this sample, all of the participants who reported that they did not have a strong relationship with reading when they were children, and in many cases this continued into adulthood, went on to develop positive shared reading relationships with their own children
This paper has reported the encouraging, yet somewhat unexpected finding, that the parents in this study who had identified themselves as having a poor personal relationship with reading, went on to develop positive shared reading relationships with their children
Summary
While much is known about the benefits of shared reading activity for children, and the role of the home in cultivating shared reading practices far less is known about the factors that can influence parents’ shared reading practices with their children. In 1995 Bus et al examined data from a number of studies on the frequency of book-reading to pre-school children and found that shared book reading had a moderate to strong relationship with measures such as emergent literacy, children’s language growth and reading achievement. This analysis revealed that even when children were living in areas of disadvantage, where levels of home literacy tended to be lower, frequent shared book reading had a positive impact on children’s literacy skills. 126 Levy, Hall & Preece– Parents’ Relationships with Reading children’s vocabulary development and found that the benefits of different reading styles on children’s emergent literacy varied according to children’s pre-intervention skill level
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