Increasing the Expressive Vocabulary of Young Children Learning English as a Second Language Through Parent Involvement

The Parents as Reading Teachers Nightly Encouraging Reading Success (PARTNERS) program was designed to provide low-income Hispanic families with training about how and why to read with their children. It provided parents and caregivers with dialogic reading training to help increase both families’ literacy interactions with their children and children's expressive language skills. The researchers found that families’ literacy interactions with their children were positively influenced with the dialogic reading training and that families’ use of dialogic reading positively affected their children's expressive language skills. Parents and caregivers in the dialogic reading group allowed their children access to the book, posed and solicited questions, and elaborated on their children's ideas significantly more often than the traditional family time group. Children with parents or caregivers in the dialogic reading group posed and solicited questions, identified visual clues, and elaborated on ideas significantly more often than children in the traditional family time group. Children whose parents or caregivers received the dialogic reading training also attempted and acquired significantly more words from pre-test to post-test than children in the traditional family time group.