Although shared book reading is an extensively studied activity with young children, limited research has focused on typical, holistic patterns of teacher--child interactions during this routine classroom activity. This study sought to describe profiles of teacher talk during shared book reading in 98 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms.…

This study examined the extent to which preschool teachers used different types of questions during classroom-based shared book reading. Our goals were to describe the question wording teachers use to elicit child responses and to consider sequential relations between types of question wording and student responses. Participants included 96…

We examine the effects of a read aloud replication intervention designed to improve the vocabulary, comprehension, and expository and narrative language outcomes of first grade students. Thirty-nine first-grade classrooms from 12 schools were randomly assigned to a treatment (n = 19) or comparison condition (n = 20). Teachers in the treatment…

Child-directed speech (CDS), which can help children learn new words, has been rigorously studied among infants and parents in home settings. Yet, far less is known about the CDS that teachers use in classrooms with toddlers and children's responses, an important question because many toddlers, particularly in high-need communities, attend…

Preschool teachers from a high-poverty, urban school district were trained to implement Story Talk, a book reading intervention designed to increase children's vocabulary and language development using supportive materials and strategic individualized coaching. Thirty-five teachers were randomly assigned by site to the intervention (20) or the…

Expository, or informational, text can be defined as a type of nonfiction that describes a topic categorically by moving from subtopic to subtopic with the intent to teach content or convey information (Maloch & Bomer, 2013). One vehicle for teaching the text structure and language of expository text to preschool-age children is through…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of digital and non-digital storybooks on low-income preschoolers' oral language comprehension. Employing a within-subject design on 38 four-year-olds from a Head Start program, we compared the effect of medium on preschoolers' target words and comprehension of stories. Four digital…