Print Referencing Strategies in Shared Book Reading: Effects on Preschoolers’ Word Recognition Author:Hui-Ju Chen, Chien-Ju Chang
Research Article
A total of 94 preschool children aged 3 to 6 from three nursery schools in Tao-Yuan County participated in this study. Children were evenly divided into an experimental group and a control group. Children in both groups read with an adult together for a total of 20 story books twice a week for ten consecutive weeks, using print referencing reading and dialogic reading methods in the respective groups. Results indicated that (1) children that participated in print referencing reading group showed a significant improvement in word recognition than their counterparts in the dialogic reading group; (2) the print referencing method in shared book reading elevated children’s word recognition and target word identification abilities; and (3) adult instruction of orthography, sound, and meaning of target words in the storybooks and provision of morphological training associated with those words substantially increase the children’s abilities of target word identification.