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TWO PRE-LITERACY PROJECTS PROMOTE PARENT-CHILD READING

November 19, 2000

WASHINGTON -- Teaching children to read no longer starts with identifying letters and their related sounds. To improve America's sagging reading performance, pre-literacy is now the foundation on which later teaching strategies rest, literacy experts say. Two programs outlined at the American Speech-Language Hearing Association's annual conference last week focus specifically on how speech-language pathologists can help low-income parents promote the basic love of books at home.

LEAP! to Language in Chicago and the Partnerships for Literacy project at Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Department of Special Education and Clinical Services are redefining story time to ensure parents build pre-literacy skills while demonstrating to their children that reading is fun. Both programs focus on involving children in the reading process, rather than treating them as passive listeners, while recognizing that parents have a major influence on the child's early appreciation of books.

WITH ASHA'S HELP, SLPs ASSERTING ROLE IN LITERACY EFFORTS November 19, 2000

LEAP! and Partnerships for Literacy get children actively involved in the storybooks they read, by encouraging teachers and parents to ask questions, prompt the children to repeat key phrases and help them predict what might happen next in the story. The questions, Indiana University education professor Shari Robertson says, should be open-ended and should not demand a specific correct answer. Using phrases such as "what do you think…?" and "how would you feel if…?" the reader can encourage children to examine the story's characters and action and help them develop critical thinking skills, Robertson says. Teachers and parents must, however, be sure to accept all kinds of answers and respond with praise.

"Reading should be fun and stress-free," Robertson says. "We're not aiming to get kids to remember everything we say. We want them to think reading is fun."

LEAP! instructor Kristin Evans agrees. "We're not teaching them to read," she says, "We're trying to get them ready to read."

The two programs also encourage teachers and parents to use the storybooks as the basis for imaginative activities, such as dramatic enactments or puppet plays. As the children begin to understand that story time in their class provides the basis for a variety of activities, Evans explained, they suddenly find it much easier to sit still and pay attention to the book.

Partnerships for Literacy explains to parents how to use six different reading strategies with their children. The project started last year with three-hour training sessions one day per week for three weeks at seven Western Pennsylvania sites. Robertson and a handful of SLP graduate students developed the program and specific plans for each workshop, based on the "Reading Together" program developed by Holmen, Wis., Public Schools Family Literacy Director Helen Davig.

Robertson predicted that about 50 parents would participate, but by the end of the three-week workshop series more than 260 parents had attended at least one session. The parents, who all joined the program voluntarily, received free storybooks for completing all three workshops. The program also included snacks for attendees, babysitting services and transportation, as needed, to make it easier for parents to participate.

Robertson, who paid for the program through a federal grant designed to increase community outreach efforts by special ed graduate programs, plans to continue offering the workshop series and conduct quantitative research to demonstrate the benefits she and her students have seen anecdotally.

Parents learn "echo reading" and "shared reading" techniques, in which they help their children pick up on repetitive or rhyming phrases and say them aloud when the parent pauses before each key phrase. This strategy works best with books that have a simple story sequence and one main idea on each page, Indiana University grad student Denise Smith said. Patience is also a must. "It's not uncommon to have to read a book with a child five times before they catch on to the echo reading," she noted.

Open-ended questions in the program's "questioning" and "predicting" reading techniques help children develop imagination and the ability to think beyond the action on the pages. "Teaching the parents to ask questions without pinpointing it and making the child feel uncomfortable is the most important part of this strategy," Indiana grad student Jaime Bantz said. Finally, the Partnerships program encourages parents to use "wordless" books to increase thinking skills and help children make the connection between reading and writing, while books with and without words can be employed for "reader's theater," dramatic re-enactments and reading-related activities to expand on the original story lines.

The most important factor in the Partnerships program is helping parents understand what a good book is, Robertson says. The six strategies can be used with children ages 18 months to 9 years, if parents choose books that are geared for fun. Too often, she says, parents assume that as their children get older the books they read should have more text on each page. The type of book selected is also critical in the LEAP! for Language approach, Executive Director John Lybolt says. "It's not just enough to pick a book and read it, but the book has to be appropriate developmentally," he said.

Partnerships for Literacy's Reading List

LEAP! for Language, which stands for Language Empowers All People, takes a more academic approach than Partnerships, but it still emphasizes the fun books offer. In low-income communities such as Chicago's Cabrini Green public housing community, where LEAP! originated, children are often exposed to less vocabulary, fewer literary experiences and fewer language-based activities before they get to elementary school, according to Lybolt. Children from "low resource" families typically have about 25 face-to-face reading experiences with skilled readers by the time they reach kindergarten, compared to about 1,000 such experiences for children in wealthier communities, he said.

Therefore, the need for "high-quality, language intensive preschools" with predictable learning experiences and constant language-based instruction in these communities is acute, Lybolt says. The LEAP! program combines such language-intensive preschool instruction with support and materials to help parents reinforce the lessons at home. During the school day, LEAP! helps students develop expressive communication skills, phonemic awareness and social readiness that will form the basis of their more academic learning in kindergarten.

Working with classroom pre-K teachers, speech-language pathologists formulate activities to support daily and weekly lesson themes, with specific vocabulary lists for each lesson. The activities also address specific conceptual goals, including language comprehension, problem solving, inferencing and academic skills such as letter recognition, shapes and colors, according to LEAP! instructor Jennifer Armstrong. LEAP's lesson plans and teaching guide stress the children's understanding of event sequences, memory and drawing meaning from a text.

LEAP! students have shown noticeable improvements in both the language they use and how they use it. In addition to using more complex and appropriate speech, "Children have the ability to express themselves and negotiate as opposed to using physical force," LEAP Development Director Audries Blake says.8