Low-income Latino mothers’ booksharing styles and children's emergent literacy development☆

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Abstract

Booksharing is often considered one of the most important activities parents can do to promote young children's early literacy skills. However, there is relatively little research on the style and nature of booksharing in Latino homes. This study examined the relation between maternal booksharing styles and low-income Latino children's subsequent language and literacy development. Eighty Latino Head Start four-year-old children and their mothers were audiotaped while they shared a wordless children's picture book together in their home. Six months later, children's emergent literacy ability was assessed. Results of a cluster analysis identified three types of maternal booksharing styles which had differential predictive power over children's literacy longitudinally. Results are discussed in terms of improving culturally appropriate research, practice and policy for early childhood and family literacy programming designed to meet the needs of young Latino children and their parents.

Section snippets

Children's emergent literacy

Although a variety of frameworks and models have been proposed to describe the components of emergent literacy (e.g., Páez et al., 2007, Storch and Whitehurst, 2002, Teale and Sulzby, 1986, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998), to some extent they all have acknowledged that it consists of two inter-related core dimensions: print-related and language-related skills. Print-related abilities include skills such as identifying alphabetic letters and knowledge of concepts about print (e.g., the

Social correlates of emergent literacy

Emergent literacy is related to experiences, skills and knowledge beyond what developmental level can predict (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Among the many social correlates of emergent literacy, early childhood settings and the family context are perhaps the two most important. A growing body of evidence shows that the quality of young children's preschool language environments is critical for their language and literacy development (Dickinson & Neuman, 2006). Young children who attend

Booksharing among Latino families

A growing body of research now demonstrates emerging patterns related to Latino mothers’ booksharing style and practices. Overall this literature suggests that Latino mothers might in fact engage their children in booksharing activities according to distinctive traditions. The current evidence base can best be categorized into three main methodological lines of research: (a) survey, (b) ethnographic, and (c) linguistic.

First, comparative survey studies tend to show that low-income immigrant

The present study

Taken together these three lines of research strongly suggest that Latino parents engage with stories in unique and cultural ways and prefer a booksharing style that creates distance between audience and narrator. In line with the language and linguistic approach, the present study sought to uncover booksharing styles among low-income Latino families and how they relate to children's emergent literacy. This study is important because there are very few studies that have analyzed Latino

Participants

As part of a larger family literacy project, in the fall of 2005, 80 low-income mothers and their children were recruited from four Head Start Centers located in New York City operated by a common community-based social service agency. Head Start is the largest federally funded early childhood program for young children at or below the poverty level (Zigler & Styfco, 2004). Mothers were eligible to participate if: (a) their children were between 4 or 5 years old and/or in their final year of

Results

The results of this study are presented as follows. First, maternal booksharing interactions and family literacy practices are described alongside a discussion of how cluster analysis was used to derive booksharing styles. Cluster analysis is a commonly used person-oriented statistical technique that allows investigators to detect the ways in which individuals or cases group together according to the variables or dimensions of interest (Gordon, 1999, Rapkin and Luke, 1993). Next, the two child

Discussion

The purpose of the present study was to investigate low-income Latino mothers’ booksharing styles and how they related to young children's subsequent emergent literacy. First and foremost this study offers a systematic examination of within-group variations in booksharing styles among low-income Latino populations using a microanalytic approach.

In this study, three maternal booksharing styles emerged: (a) storybuilder-labelers who co-constructed the story with their child by requesting

Limitations and conclusions

The findings of the present study should be interpreted in light of some limitations. First, this study utilized a wordless book in order to provide semi-structured task that mothers could engage in, regardless of whether they felt most comfortable speaking with their children in English or Spanish. However, care should be used when generalizing these findings to textual book scenarios. Moreover, as in the study conducted by Melzi and Caspe (2005), the booksharing session involved a novel story

Acknowledgements

I thank Gigliana Melzi for her suggestions and direction in all steps of conducting this study. Thanks also to Jamie Gónzalez, Mariana López and Alexandra Rodríguez for their assistance in data collection, transcription and coding and the children and families who participated in the project.

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    ☆

    This study was conducted as part of a doctoral dissertation presented to the Department of Applied Psychology at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development of New York University. It was generously funded through the Administration for Children and Families Head Start Graduate Student Research Program.

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