The Home Literacy Environment as a Mediator Between Parental Attitudes Toward Shared Reading and Children's Linguistic Competencies.

Frank Niklas,Simone C Ehmig,Astrid Wirth,Nadja Drescher,Sabrina Guffler

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01628

Frank Niklas, Simone C Ehmig + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01628

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Abstract

The home learning environment plays an important role for children’s early competencies development. In particular, the early home literacy environment (HLE) that consists of all literacy resources and interactions in a family that support children’s linguistic and literacy learning is closely associated with children’s language comprehension and production. A key aspect of the HLE is shared reading that should start early in children’s life and should be part of a regular routine in the family. However, parental attitudes toward (shared) reading have hardly been analyzed.In this longitudinal study, we analyzed the associations between parental attitudes toward shared reading and children’s linguistic competencies and whether these associations may be mediated by the HLE. Further, we were interested in changes of parental attitudes over time and their association with child and family background characteristics. The sample consisted of N = 133 children with an average age of about 3 years at t1. Children were tested two more times with a 6-month period in-between each assessment. Parental attitudes toward shared reading, socioeconomic status (SES), and the HLE were assessed via parental survey. Children’s sentence comprehension, productive language, and grammar were measured with a standardized test battery. Children whose parents had a more positive attitude toward shared reading not only lived in a greater quality HLE but also performed better in the linguistic tests. In a structural equation model, an indirect effect was found showing that the HLE mediated the effect of parental attitudes on children’s linguistic competencies. Further, parental attitudes toward shared reading did not change significantly across t1 to t3, and a lower score in the SES scale was associated with a less positive attitude toward shared reading. Consequently, parental attitudes toward shared reading seem to be an important basis for individual differences in the quality of the HLE and also for children’s linguistic competencies. As these attitudes vary in the context of different family SES backgrounds, they may be a good target for interventions to support the quality of the HLE and young children’s linguistic learning.

Highlights

Attitudes are of great interest for psychologists and educators as attitudes influence our perception and may have an impact on our behavior
Significant medium effect size correlations were observed between the home literacy environment (HLE) with its subscales cultural praxis and cultural capital and children’s linguistic abilities at all three measurement points (r = 0.37–0.55) as well as large effect size correlations of the HLE with parental attitudes toward shared reading (r = 0.49–0.65)
Not much is known about the association of parental attitudes toward shared reading with the HLE, whether these attitudes should be integrated into a broader construct of the HLE or whether they should be treated as an independent variable, and about the association among attitudes, HLE, and children’s linguistic outcomes

Summary

Introduction

Attitudes are of great interest for psychologists and educators as attitudes influence our perception and may have an impact on our behavior (cf. Eysenck, 2004; Schwarz, 2007). Parental attitudes play a major role for young children as parents are very attractive role models for their children (cf Niklas, 2015). Parents create the environment their children experience, and parental attitudes are most likely to influence the home learning environment and children’s learning within this context (e.g., Bingham, 2007; Park, 2008; Skibbe et al, 2008). Shared reading with children is a key aspect of the home literacy environment (HLE) that supports children’s development of linguistic and literacy competencies (Niklas et al, 2016b). Shared reading is deemed important by most parents in Germany, some children, and in particular, children from families with a low socioeconomic status (SES), are rarely read to (German Reading Foundation, 2010). As maternal literacy beliefs are closely associated with the HLE and child outcomes (Weigel et al, 2006), such attitudes may be a good target for interventions

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