Charming the Next Generation

You know how it goes. Typically, when a parent and a toddler share a picture book, the adult reads and the child listens. But practitioners of a special, research-based technique called dialogic reading are turning that age-old model upside down. Dialogic reading transforms youngsters into storytellers and adults into active listeners, increasing the likelihood that the members of the Goodnight Moon set will become successful, lifelong readers. As a librarian, you can play a key role in teaching this powerful technique to parents and child-care providers.

What exactly is dialogic reading? “It’s just children and adults having a conversation about a book,” says Russ Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Whitehurst should know. While professor of psychology and pediatrics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook during the ’90s, he and his colleagues at the Stony Brook Reading and Language Project invented dialogic reading.

But thinking of this shared-reading technique as a mere conversation is a little misleading. Dialogic-reading-inspired conversations make the verbal exchanges that occur at most read-alouds seem sluggish. That’s because adults who practice dialogic reading are trained to ask youngsters certain types of questions and build skillfully on what kids have to say. As a result, dialogic readers have richer and more frequent verbal exchanges than their peers do. One payoff, the experts say, is that toddlers who have engaged in dialogic reading are less likely than their peers to have difficulty learning to read in school.

And that’s not the only benefit. “On tests of language development, children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally,” says Whitehurst. “Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading. These effects have been found with hundreds of children in areas as geographically different as New York, Tennessee, and Mexico; in settings as varied as homes, preschools, and child-care centers; and with children from economic backgrounds ranging from poverty to affluence.” Simply put, how we read to children is every bit as important as how often we read to them.

It’s not just Whitehurst who feels that dialogic reading is the greatest invention since the paid vacation. The Public Library Association (PLA) and the Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC, a division of the American Library Association) have made it a cornerstone of the “Every Child Ready to Read @ your library” program, a nationwide literacy-promotion initiative. PLA and ALSC offer workshops on this potent, easy-to-learn method to librarians and parents. (For more information, see “More! More!” below.)

Dialogic reading involves three relatively simple strategies: asking children “what” questions that have specific answers, posing open-ended questions, and expanding on what children answer. The overall goal is to teach vocabulary and encourage children to offer more complete descriptions of what they see. As research has shown, children whose parents engage them in conversation tend to have larger vocabularies and thus better reading skills than playmates who lack similar exposure.

Almost any book can be shared dialogically. But for teaching parents how to do dialogic reading, books with few words are especially effective. The reason? With no written words to rely on, dialogic readers must discuss the pictures to reach an agreement on what is happening. In our workshops, we often hand out copies of Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann to help parents practice the technique with each other.

We begin our workshops by instructing parents to ask “what” questions about the pictures and the story. Parents should always start with questions they know their two- or three-year-olds can easily answer. For example, an adult can point to a picture of a truck and ask, “What is that?” As soon as the child identifies it, the adult should respond with encouragement: “Yes! That’s a truck.”

Next, the adult should expand on what the child says, keeping the additions short and simple. For example, an adult can respond, “Yes, you’re right! That’s a truck, a yellow dump truck.” The response should build on the child’s phrases just a little so that he can imitate what is said. (The adult might have the child repeat longer phrases.) The conversation may continue, “What is that truck doing?” “Yes! The dump truck is dumping the dirt into the hole.”

After a child is comfortable answering “what” questions, parents can begin asking open-ended questions—questions that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. Open-ended questions do not have right or wrong answers. They send the message, “I want to know what you think.” They require reflection and encourage children to use their imaginations.

Open-ended questions can begin with “Tell me about,” “What if,” or “I wonder how”; or they can be complete sentences, such as “How did that happen?” or “What do you think?” If a child doesn’t know what to say about a picture, the parent may need to help by suggesting an answer such as, “I think he may have….” Tell parents to be sure to praise and encourage the child and to always follow his interests.

It takes time to learn how to ask open-ended questions; they don’t come naturally to us. With practice and by following a child’s lead, however, it becomes much easier to think of the sort of question that can spark conversation.

Let parents know how important it is to make connections between the story and a child’s real-life experiences. For example, an adult might say, “This little girl in the story has a kitten just like Grandma’s. I wonder where he likes to sleep. Where do you think?”

Dialogic reading can be used with children of all ages, but it’s most effective when a child has at least 50 vocabulary words in his repertoire. Whitehurst recommends that parents use dialogic reading when a child reaches the age of two. But you may find, as we did, that this technique works well with younger kids, too. When sharing books with a baby, a parent simply asks a question, pauses, and then answers the question. This helps the infant learn new vocabulary and that conversation involves “taking turns.” For example, a mother may ask, “Where’s the baby’s nose?” Then, pointing to the picture, “There’s the baby’s nose!”

At your library, you probably already use many of the techniques of dialogic reading in your storytimes. Whenever you ask “Wh…” questions of the group, such as, “Where is the snake?” and answer, in response to a child’s answer, “Yes, he’s hanging from the tree,” you are reading dialogically. Another common dialogic-reading technique is to pause to let the children fill in the blank, such as, “Did you ever see a cat wearing a __?” Or if you encourage children to echo a repeating phrase, such as “But it wasn’t spilt milk,” you are encouraging interactive reading. These audience-participation approaches are particularly effective when children are already very familiar with the book.

Dialogic reading is valuable for cueing into characters’ emotions, too. Children’s comprehension increases when you ask about the feelings expressed in a story. When reading Gail Jorgensen’s Crocodile Beat (“Watch out animals! Mean croc’s about. Careful! He’ll eat you, without a doubt”), children can be pulled into the story with a question such as, “Look at the monkey’s face. How do you think he feels?” With eyes as huge as the monkey’s, they may reply, “Scared!”

Of course, there are limits to any approach. Obviously, dialogic reading works better one-on-one than with large groups, as you’ve probably discovered at library storytimes. You don’t want to ask a group of 40 preschoolers the open-ended questions that get them all talking. Can you imagine?!

The key, of course, is to tell parents to have fun. They might want to switch between asking questions and just plain reading—asking questions, for example, on every other page. There’s nothing wrong with reading a book all the way through without stopping, and parents need to know this. A straight reading helps children understand the continuity of a story and enjoy the rhythms of language. Like grown-ups, kids crave variety. Parents should be given a license to provide some. But we can’t let them forget how important it is to make dialogic reading, that “conversation about a book,” a regular part of their children’s introduction to literature and learning.