Parental responses to miscues during child-to-parent book reading

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways that parents respond to their children's oral reading errors when reading books together. Twenty-three middle-class parents were audiotaped in their homes listening to their grade one children read. Parental behaviors following all reading miscues were coded. Data analyses revealed that parents ignored only 4% of their children's miscues. Parents, who indicated in a questionnaire that they held a more bottom-up view of reading, less often supplied the miscued word, more often encouraged the child to try the word again, more often gave graphophonemic help, and tended less often to highlight context clues than parents holding a top-down view. Regardless of parental approach to reading, the more accurately children read, the less parents ignored miscues, the less they offered picture clues, and the more they directed their children's attention to individual letters and tended to give sound clues to assist word recognition.