Young children's use of decontextualized language as a function of parents' mediation of storybook reading.

Abstract

Young children use contextualized language or context-bound language. School language is decontextualized language with rules drawn from written rather than spoken language. Success in school is thought to depend on pre-school mastery of decontextualized language, and parents are thought to teach it by means of storybook reading. This study investigates correlates of decontextualized language and characteristics of storybook reading which may facilitate such learning. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (1978) and Bruner's notion of scaffolding talk (1978) provide the theoretical framework for the study. Studies of parent-child storybook reading show that the process of language acquisition in the reading episode follows Vygotsky's notion of a shift from interpsychological to intrapsychological function. The study procedure included three stages: (1) assessing the extent to which young children's language is contextualized, by means of an adapted version of an experimental task developed by Glucksberg, Krauss, and Weisberg (1966), (2) assessing home support for reading by using a questionnaire, and (3) assessing parent-child verbal interaction during joint storybook reading by tape-recording four episodes. Subjects were: (1) 79 five- and six-year-old children attending four different preschools and kindergartens; (2) 59 parents who returned a questionnaire; (3) 44 parent-child dyads who tape-recorded each storybook reading episode. Based on the test scores, children were classified into three groups: decontextualized, contextualized, and moderate language user. Data analysis included Chi-Square, Student t-tests, and paired t-tests. Conclusions: Predictors of the child's use of decontextualized language are: (1) the home literacy environment (number of children's books, early age of starting being read to, and bedtime storybook reading as a routine activity); (2) parents' style of mediating storybook reading (the incidence of relating the story to life, utterances, and turn-takings); and (3) the parents' education level. Finally, repeated reading of the same book facilitates the child's independent reading. Implications and recommendations for further study are discussed.