An Exploratory Study of a Shared-Book Reading Intervention Involving Spanish-Speaking Latino Families

The present pilot study examined the effectiveness of a 12-week parent-delivered shared book-reading curriculum in Spanish using a pre-, post-between-groups, with a 12-month follow-up test design. Twenty Spanish-speaking mother-child dyads were assigned to one of two conditions (shared-book reading curriculum, or control condition). Child participants were tested at three points in time on general Spanish receptive and expressive vocabulary, knowledge of targeted words taught by the shared-book reading curriculum, knowledge of concepts about print (CAP) and oral narrative abilities (microstructure and macrostructure elements). Based on prior research, it was predicted that children in the intervention group would outperform their peers in the control group on all outcome variables at post-testing and at the 12-month follow-up.

Results at post-testing revealed positive effects of the Spanish shared-book reading curriculum on measures of generalized receptive vocabulary, targeted receptive vocabulary, CAP, microstructural oral narrative skills (lengthier mean length utterances; MLU) for the story retell task and macrostructural oral narrative skills (story grammar) for the two oral narrative tasks (story retell and story spontaneous). Results at the 12- month follow-up revealed a positive impact of the intervention for the story retell task.

Although we were unable to detect long-term sustained effects of the intervention on all child outcome variables, the pilot study makes a contribution to the literature by showing that teaching Low-SES Spanish-speaking parents how to use a scripted shared-book reading curriculum that incorporates cognitively complex questions about words and stories before, during and after reading, can produce positive impacts on children?s oral language, CAP and narrative skills at short-term. Implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.