In the current study, I examined the benefits of bilingual parent-child shared book reading by investigating (1) its influence on bilingual children’s emergent literacy and (2) its mediating or moderating role on the relation between SES and children’s emergent literacy.
The present study includes participants from the Early Childhood Program Participation
(ECPP) survey from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2016 (NHES;
NCES, 2017). This included over 900 bilingual children 2-to-6 years old, whose parents spoke a language other than English at home. A Latent Variable Path Analysis (LVPA) was used to examine the influence of bilingual parent-child shared book reading on children’s emergent literacy. This included bilingual parent-child book reading as a latent construct predicting children’s letter recognition. The latent variable included five observed variables: time spent reading to child, minutes spent each time reading to child, books child owned, monthly visits to the library and bookstore. Two additional LVPAs were constructed to determine if parent-child book reading served as either a mediator or moderator of the relation between SES and children’s emergent literacy.
As predicted, the results of our study indicated that bilingual parent-child shared book reading positively influenced bilingual children’s ability to recognize letters. This demonstrated the benefit and importance of bilingual parent-child shared book reading for children’s literacy development. Moreover, the results showed that bilingual parent-child book reading mediated, (but did not moderate) the relation between SES and bilingual children’s emergent literacy. This indicates that bilingual parent-child shared book reading is an underlying variable explaining the relation between SES and bilingual children’s emergent literacy. By dissociating socioeconomic disadvantage from bilingual literacy development, this paper provides a first step towards moving from a deficit model to an asset model of bilingualism.
…Read more
Less…