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dialogic reading
Adopting the dialogic approach to reading with a child will help parents, and practitioners,
to advance the child’s oral language. Joan Kiely explains the method and its importance
Photographs at The Harlequin Day Nursery, Scarborough, By Guzelian
Y
oung children who can up for a few minutes and focus- Children who are read and phonological awareness (ability
express themselves well ing on a story together, parents and to will mimic reading to differentiate between sounds) in
and have a good store early years practitioners are not only behaviours and see emergent readers and between oral
of oral vocabulary are improving child-adult relationships reading as important vocabulary and comprehension in
stepping into the world but familiarising the child with a type (Campbell, 1999) older readers (Whitehurst and Loni-
of learning with a great of language that is not heard in eve- gan, 2002). This means that good
advantage. They can better under- ryday conversation. This is referred to oral language ability puts a child on
stand themselves and others, they as decontextualised language and is the path to being a good reader.
can better make their needs known, important for a child’s development. Unfortunately, not all children are
they can better interpret what is going ‘The limits of in a position to benefit from rich early
on around them and they can better RESEARCH FINDINGS: language experiences. Research indi-
my language
share their experience of the world. ORAL LANGUAGE AND cates that children from disadvan-
One way to develop children’s oral HOME READING
mean the taged socio-economical backgrounds
language is to read stories to them Good oral language skills limits of are behind their more advantaged
and chat about the story as you read develop good readers my world’ peers in verbal and other cognitive
it. By simply sitting together in a Research shows that there is a rela- (Wittgenstein, abilities by the time they enter school
quiet space with a child, cuddling tionship between oral vocabulary size 1915) (Hart and Risley, 1995; Ramey ➤
Introducing
decontextualised language
is important to a child’s
development
Decontextualised language is a
form of language that is regularly
employed in the learning environ-
ment of school and is important for
children’s academic development. It
is described as language that is not
DIALOGIC READING:
STEP BY STEP
Use PEER and CROWD
Dr Grover Whitehurst is an Ameri-
can developmental psychologist who
originally created the dialogic reading
programme in the early 1990s. White-
hurst proposes a reading technique
called the PEER sequence, which is a
way of interacting between the adult
and the child. The PEER sequence is
an acronym for the following.
l Prompts the child to say
something about the book
l Evaluates the child’s response
l Expands the child’s response
by rephrasing and adding
information to it
l Repeats the prompt to make sure
the child has learned from the
expansion.
An example of an interaction
between an adult and a two-year-old
child might go something like this.
The parent points to a cat in the
book and says, ‘What is this?’ (visual
prompt). The child answers ‘A cat’.
The adult says, ‘That’s right, (the
evaluation); a black cat (expansion).
What is it again? It’s a _____ ___
(repetition)’ (Whitehurst, 2002).
The adult might go on to enquire,
‘Who do we know that has a cat?’ The
child might respond by talking about
a relative or neighbour. This impor-
tant strategy supports the child in
relating the story to their life experi-
ence. Dr Whitehurst calls it a distanc-
ing prompt. ➤