Preschool teachers' perceptions about dialogic reading and the relationship with implementation success

Abstract

Many children who are identified as being at academic risk are from low-income households and have lower than average levels of reading achievement. Since children's preschool experience with books has been linked to school readiness a possible strategy for reducing the achievement gap is to expose at-risk children to dialogic reading (DR). DR includes specific read-aloud strategies that promote children's language and vocabulary development. In order to facilitate children's development, it is important that preschool teachers have a sound understanding of DR and are able to skillfully implement DR strategies. The purpose of this study was to explore (a) the nature of teachers perceptions of DR (b) how well teachers enact DR and the degree of variation teachers' practice, and (c) whether teacher characteristics are associated with either perceptions of or skills in enacting DR practices. This study included five lead teachers and five assistant teachers. Data included videotapes of DR sessions in the classroom and individual interviews. Results suggested that teachers were moderately effective in their DR practices. In terms of the level of cognitive and linguistic challenge presented to children during DR sessions, teachers used more lower level than higher levels question and feedback strategies and scored a little above the mid-point on ratings of global instructional quality. This suggests that there was room for improvement in teachers' DR implementation quality. There was an unexpected lack of correspondence between the technical and global aspects of DR quality. In general lead teachers were more skillful than assistant teachers. As a group teachers felt that DR was a worthy technique and reported becoming increasing comfortable implementing DR in their classrooms. However, teachers' declarative knowledge of DR was limited and teachers were unlikely to identify the same strengths and weaknesses in their own practices as the researcher. There was some degree of correspondence between teachers' interview data and their observed DR quality and those teachers with the highest and lowest levels of implementation skill gave distinctive interview responses. Discussion focuses on the findings of four major themes, teacher's quality of DR compared to their perceptions, successful DR, teacher change process, and suggestions for improving DR training and coaching, and the limitations of this particular study.