Early parent-child reading: an experimental study for developing Chinese children’s bilingual competence

Preschool period is critical for developing children’s language and forming their characters. Early reading can cultivate young children’s reading habits and develop their linguistic and cognitive competence. However, many children in China receive appropriate reading education neither at home nor in kindergarten. Therefore, the present research proposes a new approach to reading education, Early Synchronous Bilingual Reading (ESBR), which encourages early parent-child reading through choosing sufficient Chinese and English bilingual audio picture books and different modes of audiovisual repeat reading and role-play reading to help young children to develop their bilingual competence. To test the validity of this approach, 40 four- to five-year-old children, who had not learned Chinese and English purposefully, and their parents in Dongguan City, China were chosen as participants through purposive sampling. They were equally divided into four groups for an eight-week comparative experiment of reading. Among them, Groups A, B, and C read three kinds of audio picture books: touch-reading, electronic, and ordinary printed picture books with CDs respectively and carried out parent-child reading in the ESBR approach 30 minutes per day. Group D was a natural comparison group, kept its original mode of reading or none-reading. The experiment results show that all groups did not have a significant difference before the experiment. But Groups A, B, and C cultivated good reading habits and interest and achieved a significant progress in bilingual reading comprehension and expression competence after the experiment. In contrast, Group D did not have significant progress. The reading effects of groups were A>B>C>>D and the difference was significant (p