Reading Beyond the Book: Incorporating Dialogic Reading Strategies into your Storybook Reading

Shared storybook reading is an excellent activity to engage in with your young child. Simply reading books with children exposes them to many emergent literacy skills, including print awareness (knowing top to bottom, right to left progression; front of book, back of book) (Mol, Bus & De Jong, 2009). Making the book reading experience interactive has added benefits for children’s oral language skills, key precursors to developing a strong foundation for later literacy skills (WWC, 2015).

Shared interactive book reading (SIBR) is an evidence-based practice that includes the intentional use of strategies such as child-centeredness, elaborations of children’s utterances, active responding, wait time, and evaluation of children’s response all while directing the child to the text, illustrations or concepts within a storybook (Hemmeter & Kaiser, 1994). There is also promising evidence for children with disabilities when implemented by researchers, parents, paraprofessionals and childcare providers (e.g., Fleury & Schwartz, 2017; Towson, Fettig, Fleury, & Abarca, 2017; Towson, Gallagher, & Bingham, 2016; Towson, Green, & Abarca, 2019). By engaging your child in dialogue around a storybook, you can guide your child’s learning of specific words or concepts.

Dialogic reading provides a framework with easy to remember acronyms, PEER and CROWD.

1. Prompt, Evaluate, Expand, Repeat (PEER)

2. Completion, Recall, Open-ended, Wh-questions, Distance (CROWD) Prompts

CROWD stands for the types of  prompts  you can provide for your child.

• Completion  prompts are ones that allow you child to fill in information at the end of a phrase; repetitive text within a storybook are great places to try completion prompts (And the caterpillar was still…..).
• Recall  prompts are where you can ask questions related to things that already happened in the book. Usually staying close to the page you just finished is helpful for your child.
• Open-ended  prompts are those that don’t require a specific response, such as  tell me what happened on this page or  what do you see here?
• The next type of prompts are  wh-questions. Here you can use any form of  what, where, who, why or  when. Remember that some of these questions are harder than others.
• Finally,  distancing  prompts are those that connect what is happening in the storybook to your child’s life. This is a great way to connect your child to the book’s theme. For instance, in the Very Hungry Caterpillar, you might say,  The caterpillar eats strawberries when he gets hungry. What do you like to eat?

Using the Dialogic Reading framework, adults can make adaptations as needed for young children with disabilities. As children may vary in their understanding of prompts as well as their ability to respond, making small (or large) modifications can reduce frustration for both the child and adult while providing a comfortable space to encourage growth in language and emergent literacy skills. When presenting a CROWD prompt, adults may want to provide visual support by pointing to the pictures in the book. They can also present a dichotomous choice for the child, either verbally or by providing two pictures for the child to point to. When providing choices, adults can vary the transparency of the incorrect response by making the incorrect choice more or less obvious. It is always appropriate to model the correct response if the child is unable to either produce the response verbally or by pointing. While asking yes/no questions has less evidence for building language skills, this is another adaptation that may be helpful in earlier stages of language development. As with any adaptation, adults should gradually reduce the amount of support they provide to encourage more verbal participation in the shared storybook.