Professional Development: New Directions for Texas

Supporting Family Literacy Through Dialogical Reading

Dialogic Reading is the technique developed by Dr. Grover Whitehurst whereby the child becomes an active participant in reading a book. Our traditional method of reading is a parent reads and a child listens.

How the book is read is the key to dialogic reading. From the start the parent involves the child by asking questions before reading the first line. For example; looking at the picture on the cover of a book a parent might say...what do you think the book is about? If there is an animal on the page you ask what is that? What do you think it is doing? followed by the actual reading of the page. This process would continue throughout the story. Asking open-ended questions and additional description allows the child to use their own imagination to tell their own story. As a child gets older or has read the book before you can ask the child to remember something that happened in the story or relate it to their own daily events.

What it does? Dialogic reading is shared-reading designed to increase a child's oral language skills. Specifically the benefits are:

*an increased vocabulary
*picture/print recognition
*enhanced language skills describing what they see
*the understanding that letters have different names and sounds and increased enjoyment of reading due to active participation

Additional Resources on Dialogic Reading:

http://www.whitehurst.sbs.sunysb.edu/pubs/ctread.htm

www.reachoutandread.org/coordinatororientation/voldialog.html