Identifying the Relationship between Children's Language Skills and Parent's Self-efficacy in Story Reading

Abstract

This study aims to investigate whether there is a relationship between parent's self-efficacy in story reading, the frequency with which they read stories to their children and their children's language skills. The research was carried out with five year old children who go to preschool and their parents. A ‘General Information Form’ was used to get information about the children and their parents. For identifying the competency of the parent's story reading, we used a scale called ‘Parents’ self- efficacy for storybook reading’ developed by Kotaman (2009) . For assessing the children's language skills, we used a sub- dimension of the scale called ‘Brigance early child development inventory II’ developed by Brigance (2004) and adapted into Turkish by Aral et al. (2008) . At the end of the study, a positive relationship was found between the mothers’ and fathers’ self-efficacy in story reading. There was no significant difference between parents’ story reading self-efficacy and their children's language development. However, a difference was obtained between parents’ story reading frequency and their children's language development.