What good is a picturebook? Developing children’s oral language and literacy through shared picturebook reading

Abstract

Benjamin Franklin purportedly countered, “What good is a newborn baby?” when queried about the point of the new technology of hot air ballooning (Chapin 1985). Like a baby (or a hot air balloon), does a picturebook justify its existence simply from being a delight to behold, complete in and of itself? In this chapter, I will present evidence that picturebook reading has a function beyond the aesthetic and hedonic: shared picturebook reading enhances children’s oral language development. Yet I will also present evidence that shared picturebook reading, as it is normally practiced between adults and young children, does not necessarily advance children’s early reading skills. For shared picturebook reading to accelerate early reading skills, particular kinds of interactions need to take place. Yet that does not mean that picturebook reading is unimportant for children’s reading. Children who have better oral language skills at school entry experience greater success in reading by the middle of primary school (Dickinson and Porche 2011; Senechal and LeFevre 2002), when good reading involves comprehension as well as decoding. The components of oral language that appear to be most important for later reading are vocabulary knowledge, comprehension of stories heard aloud, as well as production of stories (narrative skills) and an awareness of the sounds of words (phonological awareness). Vocabulary knowledge and narrative skills both support children’s later reading skill (Reese et al. 2010b), and phonological awareness supports early decoding efforts (Bradley and Bryant 1983; Chow et al. 2008). All of these oral language skills have been developing throughout early childhood via interactions with adults. In this chapter, I will review my own work and that of others on the various ways children’s oral language skills and literacy develop through shared picturebook-reading interactions. I will focus on each of these components of oral language – vocabulary, narrative, phonological awareness – to review the existing evidence for how picturebook interactions can support each skill. Most of the studies I will review are longitudinal, meaning that researchers have followed the same children over time to observe the way that parents and children naturally read picturebooks together, and to track the changes in children’s oral language skills that can be attributed to shared picturebook reading. Somestudies are shorter-term and experimental, in which researchers or parents are trained to use a particular style of book reading with children, and then the differences in children’s skills are measured relative to children who have experienced reading as it naturally occurs. I will evaluate the evidence from these studies for shared picturebook reading as a privileged context for children’s developing oral language and literacy skills. I will close the chapter with some recommendations on how parents and teachers can read picturebooks with young children in ways that matter the most for their development as communicators and as readers.