Supporting early reading skills via parent-shared reading with a focus on sounds

By Ashley Grant, Johns Hopkins University

Reading is fundamental to children’s success in school, but how do we support its growth in the early childhood years (from ages 0-5) and specifically, how do we support parents in helping their children develop these early literacy skills? Elizabeth Schaughency and her colleagues investigated  this question in an article in Reading Research Quarterly, analyzing results from an RCT of 69 parents and their 3.5-4.5 year old children in New Zealand. Parents were randomly assigned to one of three groups for  6 weeks: 1) shared reading of books focused on sound and phonological awareness ("Strengthening Sound Sensitivity"; SSS); 2) shared reading focused on comprehension (Rich Reading and Reminiscing; RRR); or 3) the control group with recommendations for non-reading activities.

Follow-up impacts assessed after one year showed that  the SSS condition (focused on sounds rather than comprehension) had significant positive impacts on children's letter sounds (d = 0.74), decoding pseudowords (d = 0.85) and word reading (d = 0.66), book level (d = 0.82), and teachers’ judgments of students’ reading readiness (d = 0.60), but not phonemic awareness. The impact also varied by children’s age – while all children benefited from sound-focused reading, those aged 65 months (the average age) or older benefited even more. This evidence does come from a small sample, although families were recruited from eight different early childhood centers, and involved a short intervention (only 6 weeks), but the long-term follow-up for impacts strengthens the findings.