‘Is that what we do?’ Using a conversation-analytic approach to highlight the contribution of dialogic reading strategies to educator–child interactions during storybook reading in two early childhood settings

Abstract

In Australia, much emphasis in early childhood education is placed on the importance of supporting young children’s literacy development, and book-reading occurs frequently during typical early-childhood education and care programmes. Reading a story to a child presents an opportunity for rich language-learning through reciprocal and extended conversations that link the story to the child’s world, introduce new vocabulary and encourage extended thinking and articulation of this thinking. Dialogic reading is a particular approach to book-reading that encourages the child to engage actively with the story. This paper presents data in the form of excerpts from transcripts of two book-reading sessions with young children. A conversation-analytic approach was applied to reveal and deconstruct dialogic reading prompts that occur within the data, thus revealing the interactional phenomena underpinning the dialogic reading strategies observed in two different book-reading episodes. The implications for applying such strategies to support sustained dialogue during storybook-reading are discussed.