In this manuscript we show how read alouds can significantly enrich student vocabulary and comprehension by demonstrating enhancements that will foster student learning and language development. We anchor our examples to empirical evidence demonstrating that the content of a read aloud (i.e., the what we teach) as well as the quality of the…

Parents' attitudes are an important indicator of whether and how parents engage in shared book reading (SBR) at home. This study analysed Norwegian parents' attitudes towards reading books with their children aged between 1-4.5 years. Thematic analysis of data from 24 interviews revealed two main themes in parents' accounts: agency (the child's…

The aim of this paper was to examine the influence of picturebooks on children's "physical literacy" (PL). Fostering PL in early childhood can promote a physically active lifestyle in children and later adults. Picturebook use is a great opportunity for movement exploration in physical education classes, and recent research findings…

This article presents the results of an RCT assessing the impact of a Shared Book Reading (SBR) intervention that targeted children aged 4 attending kindergarten. We selected a large, random sample of families living in the city of Paris and provided parents of treated classes with free books for children, information on the benefits of book…

Parent-child reading critically affects children's learning and development, and dialog reading (DR) is a highly effective strategy for parent-child reading. This study employed the prompt, expand, evaluate, and repeat (PEER) DR strategy to develop a picture book incorporating augmented reality (AR) technology. AR information is extracted from the…

Although it is well established that reading with young children supports early language and literacy development, few studies have focused on the importance of parental beliefs about reading with infants. The current study, which sheds light on parental beliefs had three main aims. The first was to examine practices of shared reading in infancy…

Previous studies have shown that children as young as 5 years of age are able to form a basic understanding of evolution after listening to a storybook about natural selection. This study offers a semiotic exploration of children's meaning making during an interactive read aloud of the same storybook by investigating what children focus on and…

Cross-cultural differences in book sharing practices of American and Thai mother-preschooler dyads were examined. Twenty-one Thai monolingual and 21 American-English monolingual mothers and their four-year-olds completed a book sharing task. Results revealed narrative style differences between the American and Thai groups: American mothers adopted…

Might dialogic reading require previous or concurrent embodied activities to be effective? Twenty-nine preschool children, ages 3-5 years, were randomly assigned to the control condition (children listened to a story eight times), the dialogic-then-embodied condition (children engaged in dialogic reading for four readings and then embodied action…

Snakes and spiders are two of the most commonly feared animals worldwide, yet we know very little about the mechanisms by which such fears are acquired. We explored whether negative information about snakes and spiders from parents shapes children's fear beliefs. Study 1 included 27 parents (22 mothers, five fathers) and children (12 female, 15…

Although reading aloud to elementary students is a common practice, few studies have focused on the actual texts read, beyond considerations of fiction versus nonfiction, and few studies have included a line of inquiry exploring teachers' rationales for text selection. In this mixed-methods study, we pair a content analysis of the reported read…

Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children's vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance…

This descriptive case study presents findings from a 2 year research study on an intervention program, "Reading with Animals," launched in a linguistically, ethnically, and racially diverse Central New York community. The local literacy coalition implemented the Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (IL) program in two low-income zip codes…

The authors highlight two first-grade teachers who teach in New York City. Using a read-aloud, they explore differences between equity and equality and then engage children in a real-world scenario that engages concepts of fairness when allocating resources to disparate groups of people.

"Engaging" and "connecting" are often buzzwords associated with social media. While much has been made of its use and value for professional learning for teachers, classroom uses of social media with students have received less attention. The Global Read Aloud (GRA) is a collaborative book study where classes read a common book…