Open the Door for Reading: Family Literacy Interventions and Their Effects on Young Children

Family literacy interventions and their effects on (young) children

Amos van Gelderen Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences Kohnstamm Institute, University of Amsterdam

What are family literacy interventions good for?

• Language use at home is an important determinant for childrens’ language development • Research shows: low-educated parents have little verbal interaction with their children • Also, quality of verbal interaction (use of abstract language) is limited • Interventions aim at awareness and support of verbal interaction at home

Oral language development of young children • School has limited effect on oral language development • Oral language skills are basic for development of literacy skills in general • Children from low-educated backgrounds are at a disadvantage in their school carreers (including reading, writing and other subjects) • Young children (age 3-7) from low-educated parents are the prime targets for family literacy interventions

Early childhood education and care interventions in the Netherlands • Mostly large scale school based programs (teachers deliver the intervention to children) • A recent review (Fukkink, e.a. 2017) showed for 21 studies no significant effects on childrens’ language development • Many possible causes

Family literacy interventions (FLI) • In contrast, FL interventions focus on parental participation and parent-school partnership • Main idea: improving at-risk childrens’ language development should be supported from the home-environment • Parents and teachers should together take the responsibility to bridge the gap between home and school

Example • The program ‘Early education at home’ (VvE thuis) is being implemented in many Dutch (pre-)schools • It contains different language activities that parents can carry out with their children at home (such as storybooks, arts and crafts, rhyming) • Teachers instruct parents how these activities should be used

Two effect studies of Early Education at Home • One study in preschool (Teepe 2017) and one into kindergarten (de la Rie 2018) • Preschool showed a small effect on vocabulary development but kindergarten showed no effects on measures of oral language development and emergent literacy after one year • Both studies dealt with heterogeneous groups of parents (education levels and languages spoken at home)

Reviews of Family Literacy Interventions • Many reviews with wide variability in effects • Probable causes: implementation quality • De La Rie (2016) analyzed 46 effect studies and found that implementation quality is poorly reported in most of them and relations with intervention effects are not reported

What is involved in implementation quality?

Experts deliver intervention to

Teachers deliver intervention to

Parents deliver intervention to

Their children

Which factors are involved?

• Expertise of teachers and other participants (researchers, assistents, social workers) • Motivation of parents • Relationship teacher-parents • Relationship parents-children • Language and literacy skills parents

Which expertise?

• How to bridge the gap between school and (loweducated) parents • How to deal with cultural and linguistic diversity target group • Knowledge of home language environments (lowliteracy, other languages) • Awareness of the importance of enhancing language development in the home situation • How to connect to meaningful contexts of interaction at home

An adaptive approach • An FLI called At Home in Language was carried out in seven schools (14 teachers) in Rotterdam (Van der Pluijm, e.a. in prep.) • Teachers of children of low-educated parents (ages 3-7) were trained and coached intensively for a period of one year to optimize implementation quality

Seven steps 1) 2) 3) 4)

Insight in home language environments Organizing parent activities in class Building reciprocal relationships Using previous steps for designing parentchild activities 5) Parental role construction (in interaction) 6) Prioratizing language use (in interaction) 7) Expanding language (in interaction)

Lessons learned • It takes much time for teachers to incorporate each of these steps and to finally reach the seventh step • Bridging the gap between the worlds of low-educated parents and teachers, and acknowledging each other’s roles are crucial • The intervention resulted in high participation and low attrition of parents at the end • Teachers reported they would continue with this approach after the intervention • Observed parent-child interactions in class improved considerably compared to the start of the intervention

Effective language activities for FLI A review based on 28 international studies (Van der Pluijm e.a. 2019) suggests that playful parent child activities are more effective for childrens’ oral language development than activities requiring literacy skills (shared reading) or aiming at school related skills (early reading or writing)

Future challenges • Longitudinal effects of family literacy interventions on at-risk children’s reading and writing skills?

• Are adaptive approaches for low-educated parents sustainable and feasible on a large(r) scale?

• Can other parties (social work, public libraries, sports, community organisations) contribute to adaptive family literacy interventions?

• Are home based interventions needed for more succes?