Chinese Mothers’ Joint-Reading Behaviors and Preschoolers’ Reading Interest and Joint-Reading Engagement
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Wu, Shu-Chuan
Abstract
Prior research in the Western societies has revealed both the socioemotional interaction and parental reading strategies during parent-child joint-reading sessions significantly predicted children’s reading motivation. Children’s reading motivation, in turn, is related to their later literacy development and school success. Although Chinese parents are much concerned with their children’ academic achievement, shared reading is not a common activity in traditional Chinese families. The goal of this study is to investigate how Chinese mothers’ socioemotional behaviors and joint-reading skills may predict preschoolers’ reading motivation. In order to give Taiwanese parents sensible suggestion suitable for their family background about the way to implement joint-reading activities, this study also examined the moderating effect of child’s sex and maternal education level on the relation between maternal behaviors and child’s reading motivation. A coding scheme was developed in this study to capture the culture-specificity of Chinese mothers’ joint reading behaviors. Fifty-one mothers and their 50- to 60-month-old preschoolers completed two 10-minute joint-reading sessions 7 to 14 days apart. Maternal behaviors were coded into two major behavioral aspects by time sampling method. The aspect of Socioemotional Expression was further divided into two dimensions of Child-Centered Behavior and Parent-Centered Behavior. The aspect of Cognitive/Linguistic Guidance was further divided into four dimensions of Teaching, Elaboration, Specific Question, and Open-Ended Question. Hierarchical regression analyses on maternal rating of child’s everyday reading interest and observer’s rating of joint-reading engagement revealed the following results. (1) Mothers’ Child-Centered Behavior positively predicted child’s reading engagement, but did not predict child’s everyday reading interest. Parent-Centered Behavior inversely predicted child’s reading interest as well as engagement. (2) Specific Question asked by mothers inversely predicted child’s reading interest. (3) Girls showed more everyday reading interest than did boys, but gender could not predict child’s joint-reading engagement. (4) Maternal education level moderated the predictability of Parent-Centered Behavior and Elaboration on child’s joint-reading engagement. (5) Maternal education level also moderated the predictability of Child-Centered Behavior on child’s reading interest. The coding scheme developed in the current study helped revealed that Chinese mothers’ Teaching behavior per se would not harm children’s reading motivation. It was Parent-Centered Behavior, such as criticism, demand for reading tempo, and unresponsiveness, that played a negative role in children’s everyday reading interest. In addition, Child-Centered Behavior played a positive role in reading interest among preschoolers of mothers in the lower bracket of education level.
Subjects
Shared Reading
Chinese Parenting
Child-Centered Behavior
Parent-Centered Behavior
Maternal Joint-Reading Behaviors
Reading Motivation
Type
thesis
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