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.…

Theory and research have demonstrated the importance of teacher scaffolding to facilitate effective classroom conversations during shared book reading. When teachers scaffold conversations, young students can develop language skills more quickly. The authors describe a scaffolding framework and findings from research on how open-ended questions…

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…

Measuring the quality of classroom-based interactive shared book reading within the early childhood classroom represents a specific dimension of teacher-child interactions that is of great interest to researchers. This interest reflects decades of research demonstrating the benefit of reading to young children in both the home and the classroom.…

Research Findings: This study examined the association between interactive book reading quality and prekindergarten children's gains in language and literacy skills over the course of an academic year for 96 teachers and 417 children across multiple locations in the United States. Two moderators were examined, namely, children's initial skill…

Purpose: In this study, the authors used sequential analysis to explore bidirectional and dynamic dependencies between mothers' question use and children's verbal participation during shared reading. Method: The sample was composed of mothers and their preschool-age children with specific language impairment (SLI; n = 14). Each mother and child…

Participation in shared-reading experiences is associated with children's language and literacy outcomes, yet few standardized assessments of shared-reading quality exist. The purpose of this study was to describe the psychometric characteristics of the Systematic Assessment of Book Reading (SABR), an observational tool designed to characterize…

In this study, we examined the longitudinal relations between frequency and features of reading experiences within the preschool classroom to children's language and literacy outcomes in kindergarten and 1st grade. "Frequency" refers to the number of shared reading sessions conducted each week as measured by teachers' written reading…

The purpose of the present study was to conduct a comprehensive study of book genres used in preschool classrooms. Text titles gathered from the reading logs of 84 preschool teachers were analyzed and coded for genre (narrative, expository, or mixed). Expository or mixed texts were then further examined according to topics covered. Analyses…

The present study describes preschool read-alouds in terms of the types of texts to which children are exposed. The methods involved analyzing the genre and instructional foci of 426 titles read by 13 teachers throughout an entire academic year. Additionally, associations between teacher characteristics and texts teachers read in their classrooms…

Purpose: The frequency with which adults reference print when reading with preschool-age children is associated with growth in children's print knowledge (e.g., L.M. Justice & H.K. Ezell, 2000, 2002). This study examined whether prekindergarten (pre-K) teachers naturally reference print during classroom shared reading and if verbal print…

This article describes how educators can readily increase emergent readers' print knowledge by using an evidence-based technique called print referencing to ensure that classroom read-alouds include not only a comprehension focus, but also a complementary focus on print. Print referencing was recently described in "The Reading Teacher" as an…