Reading Together: How to Promote Children's Language Development Using Family-based Shared Book Reading

Reading Together: How to Promote Children's Language Development Using Family-based Shared Book Reading

The aim of this project is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and to use this knowledge to make it an effective language-boosting tool for children from all social and economic backgrounds.

Two interventions will be created which are intended to boost children's vocabulary and grammar abilities, and will be assessed on how they are implemented by caregivers across different socio economic groups, and how they affect children's development of these language skills. Previous research has found dialogic reading interventions to be less effective for children from low socio-economic backgrounds. This project will investigate whether a shared reading intervention, designed to require less of a behaviour change from caregivers than dialogic reading, can be used to effectively boost vocabulary and grammar development in children across the whole socio-economic spectrum.

Inclusion Criteria:

• All families will be included unless they fit the exclusion criteria.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Children born before 37 weeks gestation (premature)
• Children who weighed less than 5lb 9oz at birth (low birth weight)
• Children who have had an ear infection/glue ear for longer than 3 months, 4-6 ear infections within a 6 month period or another identified hearing problem (e.g. at newborn hearing screening)
• Children with an identified developmental disability (e.g. Cerebral Palsy, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Fragile X syndrome, Muscular dystrophy, Di George syndrome, Down's syndrome, Williams syndrome)
• Children with a hearing or visual impairment
• Children who hear another language (not English) for 1 day or more in a typical week (please note that this also excludes children of parents who do not speak English)
• Children whose parents have a learning disability which puts their children at risk of language delay and excludes the parents from giving informed consent on their own and on their children's behalf.