ABSTRACT
Joint reading between mothers and their children enjoys a privileged place in the child language and the early literacy literatures. This chapter presents research in the area of joint book reading and children's language and literacy learning. One common limitation of the extant literature in joint reading is that it for the most part presents a unidirectional model of parents socializing children. The chapter examines how mothers and fathers accommodate to one sort of individual difference in children. It provides the three studies that are guided by Vygotsky's theory that executive cognitive processes, such as monitoring and regulating behavior and cognitive processes, originate in the social interaction between children and significant adults, typically caregivers. The chapter shows that the ways in which maternal strategies which maximized children's participation in the joint reading task related to children's development of literate language, and vocabulary.
