Shared Book Reading in Families: Exploring Engagement Between Children and Parents

Abstract

Shared book reading is considered an early literacy activity that can facilitate language and literacy skills in children. A shared book reading session consists of three agents namely the parent/adult, the child, and the reading material. The interactive nature of shared book reading is critical to a quality shared book reading session.

Previous research studies on shared book reading have focused on monolingual families mostly compared to bilingual families. This is the first study that focused on parent-child engagement during shared book reading in Sinhala and English languages in both print and digital texts. This study consisted of 7 parent-child dyads including children aged 4-7 years old. This study used a case study mixed methods to explore how parent-child engagement occurred in relation to language presentation and text representation.

The findings of the study revealed that parents focused more on language comprehension than word recognition skills in children regardless of the language and type of text. Moreover, the passion for reading in both parents and children, language competency in parents and children, parental knowledge, and skills in relation to children’s early literacy skills had a significant influence on parent-child engagement during shared book reading.

Overall, there were no major discrepancies in parent-child engagement during shared book reading in print and digital texts. The findings of the study could be used to guide the design of community-based parental training programmes on how to develop early literacy skills in children and to design reading materials in various text types which could facilitate the interactive nature of shared book reading.