Dialogic Reading:A Reading Strategy

forPreschoolers

What is Dialogic Reading?

• A systematic way to engage children in conversation about a storybook to build children’s language and vocabulary.

• The teacher works with a small group of children at a time so that each child can see the pictures in the book and the teacher can engage in conversation with each child.

What’s the difference?• When most adults share a book with

a preschooler, they read and the child listens.

• In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child.

• Children learn most from books when they are actively involved.

Dialogic Reading Works

• Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development.

• Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.

• Over a third of children in the U.S. enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills that are required to do well in school. Children who start behind generally stay behind – they drop out, they turn off. Their lives are at risk.

• Source: Read Together, Talk Together by Whitehurst

Dialogic Reading Framework

The fundamental reading technique in dialogic reading is the PEER sequence.

P Prompt What is animal is this?

E Evaluate

That's right! It is a bear.

E Expand What color is the bear?

R Repeat the prompt

Good job! It is a brown bear . That’s called a Grizzly bear. Can you say Grizzly bear?

Five Type of Prompts for PEER Sequence

C Completion "Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you ___"

R Recall "What are some animals we meet in this book?”

O Open Ended "What's your favorite animal? What do you like about it?"

W Wh- prompts Ask who, what, where, why questions, such as "what animal is this, where does it live, what sound does it make?"

D Distancing "Have you been to the zoo? What animals did you see at the zoo?"

Completion Prompts

• You leave a blank at the end of a sentence and get the child to fill it in.

• These are typically used in books with rhyme or books with repetitive phases. For example, you might say, “Brown bear, brown bear what do you ____," letting the child fill in the blank with the word see.

Recall Prompts

• These are questions about what happened in a book a child has already read.

• Recall prompts work for nearly everything except alphabet books. For example, you might say, “What are some animals in this book?”

Open-ended Prompts

• These prompts can focus on the pictures in books. It should generate more than a single word response

• For example, while looking at a page in a book that the child is familiar with, you might say, “What is your favorite animal? What do you like about it?"

Wh- Prompts• These prompts usually begin

with what, where, when, why, and how questions.

• For example, you might say, “What animal is this?" while pointing to the picture in the book. “What sound would it make? Where would it live?”

Distancing Prompts

• These ask children to relate the pictures or words in the book they are reading to experiences outside the book.

• For example, while looking at a book with a picture of animals on a farm, you might say something like, "Remember when we went to the farm. Which of these animals did we see there?"

How Do I Implement Dialogic Reading?

• The following readings are in a small group ideally no larger then six students.

• Depending on what works best for your classroom, it’s important to plan what the other students will be doing.

What kind of books work best?

Books that • have clear pictures• have a simple story• are not too long• have pictures of things that are

familiar to your class• show action and detail in the

pictures• are interesting to your class

Building Your Prompts

• Write prompts on post its and place throughout your selected book.

Activity Time

Have FUN!

Dialogic Reading is having a conversation with students about books!

Start your reading dialogue today!

ReferencesReading Rockets http://www.readingrockets.org/

podcasts/earlylit Books Build Strong Vocabulary- Reading Rockets

Whitehurst,G. (1992), Dialogic Reading: An Effective way to read to preschoolers.

Michele Sprague and Angela Wilmett at www.yourreachcoaches.weebly.com