Prekindergarten teachers' verbal references to print during classroom-based, large-group shared reading

Area of Science:

• Early Childhood Education
• Literacy Development
• Classroom Discourse Analysis

Background:

• Adults referencing print during reading with children correlates with enhanced print knowledge.
• Understanding how teachers reference print in prekindergarten (pre-K) settings is crucial for literacy instruction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if pre-K teachers naturally reference print during shared reading sessions.
• To determine if print referencing occurs at varying rates across different book types.
• To examine the relationship between print referencing frequency and the quality of teachers' language instruction.

Main Methods:

• Analyzed 92 videos of large-group, shared-reading sessions involving 17 pre-K teachers.
• Quantified teachers' verbal print-referencing utterances and assessed language instruction quality.
• Compared print referencing rates across books with varying levels of print salience.

Main Results:

• Teachers discussed various print domains, but overall print referencing was infrequent.
• Higher rates of verbal print references were observed when reading books with more prominent print features.
• No clear association was found between the frequency of print referencing and the quality of language instruction.

Conclusions:

• The impact of low explicit print referencing on children's print knowledge remains uncertain.
• Books with print-salient features provide a natural opportunity for print-related discussions.
• Findings suggest considerations for educational practices in early literacy instruction.