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Box 2.1
Feature Study: Family Involvement in Reading Activities at Home
A study by Sénéchal and Lefevre (2002) indicated that different reading-related activities
at home, starting in the early years, were associated with specific kinds of reading readiness
skills at the preschool level and had direct and indirect long-term links to reading
abilities through third grade. The authors conducted a descriptive study of 168 kindergarten
and first-grade children in Canada to understand how parental engagement with children
in reading books together and doing other reading and writing activities at home
affected student outcomes over time. First, children’s exposure to books at home related
positively to their vocabulary and listening comprehension skills in kindergarten and
grade 1. These skills, in turn, directly related to children’s reading ability in grade 3.
Second, parents’ involvement in teaching specific reading and writing skills at home
related directly to other early literacy skills, predicted rates of word reading at the end of
first grade, and related positively to children’s reading ability at the end of third grade.
A series of fixed-order hierarchical regression analyses identified these paths of effects,
which, as in the meta-analyses reported here, indicated that exposure to books, shared
reading, and attention to specific reading readiness skills at home benefitted students’
reading skills over time. Other researchers have tested the influence paths that were identified
by Sénéchal and Lefevre (2002) and reported similar results (Hood, Conlon, and
Andrews, 2008).
Fawson, and Smith, 2006; Saint-Laurent and Giasson, 2005); and long-term effects for fifthand
sixth-grade students’ achievement (St. Clair et al., 2012). The interventions included
various forms of parent-teacher communications, networking among parents, and a focus on
writing in conjunction with reading. Also reviewed was a randomized study on Play and Learn
Strategies (PALS), a parenting curriculum designed to increase effective shared book reading
(Landry, Smith, Swank, Zucker, Crawford, and Solari, 2012).
In one intervention with kindergarteners, trained research assistants showed parents
videotapes of other parents and students modeling dialogic reading techniques. Parents also
were given written guidelines on dialogic reading strategies and eight books to read and reread
five times with their children. Kindergarten students in the intervention group showed significant
positive improvement (from February to November) in spelling and reading as well as on
concepts about print (CAP) (Clay, 1979) and final consonant identification, compared with
control group students (Fielding-Barnsley and Purdie, 2003). This underscores the importance
of providing multiple forms of information on dialogic reading to parents and specific guidelines
for interactions with their children. The clarity and intensity of the intervention may
explain students’ gains in spelling and reading achievement.
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