Designing, implementing, and evaluating shared book reading interventions with preschoolers with language impairment

The impact of shared book-reading interventions on language and emergent literacy skills is well documented for typically developing children, but shown to be more variable for children with language impairment (LI). Critical issues related to this variability are: (a) the effectiveness of shared reading strategies used with children with LI (e.g., strategies that are effective in facilitating these children’s conversational participation are not equally effective in increasing their vocabulary and MLU), and (b) the effectiveness of parent-based interventions (e.g., because of differences across parents in program implementation, and their difficulties in scaffolding children who provide little verbal input). The symposium addresses these issues through four studies relying on different research paradigms--including longitudinal case study, observational and experimentally controlled designs--, and a contribution for the discussion, all implemented in different countries (Germany, UK, Italy, USA). The first two papers contribute to design shared book-reading interventions with language-impaired children by showing that reading repeatedly a story with new words is a promising strategy for word learning also in children with SLI (paper 1), and by presenting a tool for examining parent-child interactions during picture-book reading (paper 2). The third and fourth papers evaluate the impacts of shared book-reading interventions implemented by parents (paper 3) and by teachers and parents (paper 4) of children with LI on children’s conversational participation and oral language skills, and print-knowledge, respectively. Finally, the last paper contributes to the discussion by raising methodological issues about the recruitment of participants in book sharing interventions. Taken together, these papers provide new evidence of effectiveness of some shared reading strategies on specific skills of language-impaired children. They show that the effectiveness of parent-based interventions varies according to aims and subgroups of children, suggesting the benefit of engaging parents and teachers in shared book-reading interventions complementing speech-language therapy