Enhancing Young Children's Language Acquisition through Parent-Child Book-Sharing
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World Bank, Washington, DC
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Worldwide, 250 million children under
five (43 percent) are not meeting their developmental
potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive
stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support
programs have shown significant benefits for children's
development, but the programs are often expensive and
resource intensive. The objective of this study was to test
several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective
intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents
and improve emergent literacy skills in children. The
intervention was a modified dialogic reading training
program that used culturally and linguistically appropriate
books adapted for a low-literacy population. The study used
a cluster randomized controlled trial with four intervention
arms and one control arm in a sample of caregivers (n = 357)
and their 24- to 83- month-old children ages 24 to 83 months
(n = 510) in rural Kenya. The first treatment group received
storybooks, while the other treatment arms received
storybooks paired with varying quantities of modified
dialogic reading training for parents. The main effects of
each arm of the trial were examined, and tests of
heterogeneity were conducted to examine differential effects
among children of illiterate versus literate caregivers.
Parent training paired with the provision of culturally
appropriate children’s books increased reading frequency and
improved the quality of caregiver-child reading interactions
among preschool-age children. Treatments involving training
improved storybook-specific expressive vocabulary. The
children of illiterate caregivers benefited at least as much
as the children of literate caregivers. For some outcomes,
the effects were comparable; for other outcomes, there were
differentially larger effects for children of illiterate caregivers.
Palabras clave
EARLY CHILD EDUCATION, LOCAL-LANGUAGE STORYBOOKS, PRIMARY EDUCATION, WORD GAP, DIALOGIC READING, SCHOOL READINESS, COGNITIVE STIMULATION, PARENT TRAINING