Effects of a Family Literacy Program for Latino Parents: Evidence From a Single-Subject Design

Area of Science:

• Early Childhood Education
• Applied Linguistics
• Family Literacy

Background:

• Low-income, low-education Latino families often face barriers to early literacy development.
• Targeted family literacy programs can support language and literacy acquisition in culturally and linguistically diverse populations.
• Parental engagement in home literacy practices is crucial for children's oral language development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of the Family Reading Intervention for Language and Literacy in Spanish program.
• To assess the program's impact on Latino parents' use of specific language strategies during read-alouds.
• To determine if parents' implementation of these strategies influences their children's oral language skills.

Main Methods:

• A multiple-baseline, single-subject design across five Latino mother-preschool child dyads.
• Data collection across baseline, intervention, and follow-up conditions.
• Visual data analysis to examine program effects on parent and child outcomes.

Main Results:

• The program significantly increased parental use of comments and high-level questions during reading.
• Children demonstrated improvements in vocabulary diversity and conversational turn-taking.
• The program had limited impact on parental use of recasts and children's mean length of utterance.

Conclusions:

• The Family Reading Intervention for Language and Literacy in Spanish effectively enhances home reading practices for low-income, culturally diverse families.
• The findings support the use of targeted family literacy interventions to improve language and literacy outcomes for Spanish-speaking children.
• Implications exist for designing culturally relevant family literacy programs for minority populations.