BLOG ENTRY #11 Research Article: The relationship between children's spontaneous utterances during joint bookreading and their retellings

Kim,Y., Kang, J.Y., & Pan,B.A. (2011). The relationship between children's spontaneous utterances during joint bookreading and their retellings. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 11: 402.

This research article aims at investigating the relationship between low SES children's spontaneous utterances during joint bookreading with their parents and their retelling skills and results. The authors have targeted 62 mothers of low socioeconomic status and their preschool-aged children, and videotaped their joint bookreading with the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carl, 1983).

The findings of the article have suggested that the preschool children’s story retelling quality and skills are closely related to their active participation and spontaneous utterances during the joint bookreading with an adult: the more spontaneous utterances a child produce during joint bookreading, the higher quality the story retelling based on the book would be. How we define a “spontaneous utterance” then? I am very impressed by the categories this article provides, and find it very helpful for us teachers or parents to evaluate a child’s performance during the joint bookreading, so we will know whether the child needs more encouragement or support on which aspect of active participation. (It could be a good rubric for joint bookreading spontaneous utterances. Shared below)

Children’s spontaneous utterances were categorized as follows:

. Vocabulary/labeling. Utterances about name of objects, or definition of a word (e.g.‘What is a cocoon?’, ‘This is the big leaf.’)

. Event and description. Utterances about description of the story, actions of the character, or events in the story (e.g. ‘He popped out of the egg.’, ‘He was fat now.’)

. Evaluation. Utterances that provide a perspective on actions and events in the story such as references to thoughts and feelings of characters about events (e.g. ‘This is a sad story.’, ‘Oh my goodness. He is gonna be fat.’).

. Interpretive questions/information. Utterances that interpret or paraphrase story lines (e.g.‘Why he got tummy ache?’, ‘That [butterfly] is what he wanted to turn into?’,‘I don’t like salami.’)

. Repetition of mother’s utterances (e.g. Mother: ‘What did he eat?. . . one apple.’ Child:‘One apple.’)

            The findings above suggest the importance of acknowledging, and encouraging and reinforcing children’s active participation in bookreading interactions, beyond simply responding to adult questions, which makes me think, as pre-k literacy educators, maybe we should put more attention to encourage the children to do active thinking, but not to focus on teaching them how to think by throwing out evaluate-related questions, although some kind of scaffolding is necessary.

After reading the article, I am very much persuaded that for pre-k children, story retelling is one of the most important skills to get for children, and to accomplish that, teachers, along with parents, should create a not only literacy-rich environment, but also an supportive and encouraging atmosphere to build on children’s spontaneous verbal contributions to joint bookreading with adults.