Home-school Partnership

Home-school partnership has been recognized as an important approach to promote student learning since the last century. Though families bear an inevitable role to teach reading at home, teachers and parent volunteers working together at school may motivate those students who are uninterested or less supported by their families to read. The interests of the current readers may also be strengthened. This paper presents a parent-child reading programme adopted in a Hong Kong primary school that engaged parent volunteers to read with the children in the morning. The objectives, the detailed plan and evaluation methods are discussed. After a year of implementation, the P.1 and P.2 students involved had remarkable improvements in various skills such as prediction skills, reading aloud and communication skills. Moreover, it served as a media to promote home-school partnership.

Enhancing Parent Engagement While Reading Online and at Home

This chapter reviews how to use online platforms for reading at home while also engaging parents. To better understand parent engagement during assigned reading homework, an exploratory study was conducted with the families of kindergarteners. Parents were asked about their involvement when working on assigned reading homework. The results of the survey indicated that many parents are willing to take time to support their child as they complete homework assignments and that they already read at home, whether it is assigned or not. These findings, along with recent literature, are useful for developing strategies to better engage families during online learning.

Telling stories multimodally: what observations of parent-child shared book-reading activities can bring to L2 kindergarten teachers’ training

In Chapter 6, Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel presents multimodal and plurisemiotic analyses of storytelling activities in adult-child dyadic interactions at home in France and analyzes the extent to which this context can inform the professionalization of teachers in the 21st century. Findings show that spontaneous adult-child interactions during storytelling and shared book reading at home provide valuable insights for kindergarten and primary school teachers to teach an L2, as well as new multimodal perspectives on fostering linguistic, narrative, and communication skills in young children at school.

Language activities in a minority–majority language context: book-reading at home is more important for Frisian than for Dutch

Previous research has shown that in a minority–majority language context, the quantity of language input at home is more important for the development of the minority language than for the development of the majority language. In the current study, we examined whether the same holds true for the frequency of specific language activities at home. In a group of five- and six-year-old Frisian–Dutch bilingual children (n = 120), we investigated to what extent vocabulary and morphology knowledge were predicted by reading activities, watching TV, and story-telling activities in both languages. The results showed that reading in Frisian predicted both Frisian vocabulary and morphology, while reading in Dutch only predicted Dutch vocabulary. This shows that reading at home is most important for the development of the minority language. This especially holds true for the acquisition of Frisian morphology, a domain that is known to be vulnerable in language acquisition.

Despotic reading

This chapter focuses on the reading of the ‘despotic’ Gurney script, which was so different from the Roman script that Dickens was used to decoding (section 3.1). It explores how Dickens was able to emerge from his initial state of bewilderment, described in David Copperfield as a ‘sea of perplexity’, by training himself in visualizing its character shapes (section 3.2), sounding out the missing vowel sounds in the Gurney script (section 3.3), and inferencing their meaning (section 3.4). The process of decoding Gurney is then compared to episodes from Dickens’s own childhood reading at home and at school (section 3.5). The chapter argues that the Gurney system’s extra level of coding, which involved the graphic representation of letters rather than sounds, drastically diminished its learnability. Dickens’s undeciphered shorthand letters are used to illustrate these difficulties.