ABSTRACT
Looking at and reading books with young children is widely recommended as a contribution to children’s school readiness and as preparation for learning to read. No doubt there are multiple paths by which such experiences contribute to children’s development during the preschool period-including the positive affective consequences of having an adult’s full attention; opportunities for becoming familiar with the conventions of text and the organization of books in various genres; exposure to print leading to knowledge of letters and numbers; opportunities to develop phonological awareness from books focusing on rhyme and word play; exposure to culturally valued information; and engagement in linguistically relatively complex conversations. In this chapter, though, we focus on examining the potential of shared book reading to contribute to a very specific, and, we argue, crucial aspect of preschool development: children’s vocabulary,
Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive review of the sizeable body of research which has shown empirical links between book reading experiences and vocabulary (e.g., Beals, De Temple, & Dickinson, 1994; Sénéchal, LeFevre, Hudson, & Lawson, 1996; Sénéchal, LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998), Rather, it is to link analyses of interaction during book reading and the particular affordances of book reading to the body of research on the nature and course of children’s vocabulary development.
