This study was purposed to identify the most efficient adults´ book reading-to-children pattern in improvement of children´s emergent literacy. In this study, the emergent literacy defined as the composite of vocabulary, print conception, and story...
This study was purposed to identify the most efficient adults´ book reading-to-children pattern in improvement of children´s emergent literacy. In this study, the emergent literacy defined as the composite of vocabulary, print conception, and story comprehension and the reading patterns include describer style, comprehender style, and performance-oriented style.
For this purpose, the study addressed the following questions:
1) What effects does each of the adults´ reading-to-children patterns (describer style, comprehender style, performance-oriented style) have on children´s vocabulary?
2) What effects does each of the adults´ reading-to-children patterns (describer style, comprehender style, performance-oriented style) have on children´s print conception?
3) What effects does each of the adults´ reading-to-children patterns (describer style, comprehender style, performance-oriented style) have on children´s story comprehension?
The children participating in the study were a total of 52 children sampled from the children in two kindergarten programs in Pusan, Korea. Their age ranged from 36 months to 54 months (mean age: 47 months).
The children were divided into three homogeneous groups based on their vocabulary measured by PPVT-R L model(1991). Each of the three groups of children had one of the three intervention procedures, which include adult´s reading a story in describer style, comprehender style, or performance-oriented style.
To measure the effects of the different intervention on children´s emergent literacy, the following tools were used: PPVT-R M model(1991) to measure the children´s vocabulary, Logo to measure the children´ print conception, Reading I to measure the children´s letter and word identification, Clay´s print(1979) to examine the children´s print concept, and published questions about 2 Grimm stories(Park, 1991) to measure the children´ story comprehension.
The results of this study are summarized into three major findings.
First, the group intervened by the adult reading in comprehender style showed 5% higher mean vocabulary scores than the group intervened by the adult reading in performance-oriented style in children´. It means that the adult reading in comprehender style has greater effects of the improvement of children´s vocabulary than the adult reading in the performance-oriented style.
Second, the group intervened by the adult reading in describer style had 5% higher mean scores in print conception than the group intervened by the adult style has greater effects on the improvement of children´s print conception than the comprehender style does.
Finally, the group intervened by the adult reading in the describer style had 5% higher mean score in story comprehension than the group intervened by the adult reading in comprehender style. It means that the adult reading in describer style has greater effects on the improvement of children´ story comprehension than the adult reading in comprehender style.