Young children's spontaneous participation during classroom book reading: differences according to various types of books

This study examined young children's spontaneous participation during classroom book reading in response to different types of books. Twenty kindergarten teachers read four books—two fiction (familiar/unfamiliar story format) and two information books (expository/narrative text). The majority of children's spontaneous participation was related to the book illustrations and the children's personal experiences. Information books elicited more comments about personal experiences, while fiction books elicited more predictions, personal responses, chiming, recall, clarifying, and evaluation comments. The minimal expository text prompted more personal experiences and analytical comments compared to the narrative text of the information book. The familiar story form provoked more predictive and analytical comments. Finally, the quality of illustrations instigated an increased proportion of children's labeling comments. Introduction Book reading with young children has been the focus of much research. The majority of such research has focused on the development of early literacy concepts, mainly related to the decoding aspect of print and the development of oral language skills (see reviews in Scarborough & Dorbich, 1994; Bus, Van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995; Blok, 1999). However, little research exists on book-reading interaction in relation to the cognitive engagement of the participants. Cognitive engagement refers to the thinking skills that a participant activates in order to understand the text and successfully participate during group discussion. In this article, we focus on young children's spontaneous behavior and how that varies in response to different types of books. Children's spontaneous comments and questions indicate their focus of attention during book reading and reveal the thinking skills that children apply during text comprehension. A detailed analysis of their spontaneous participation can shed light on features of the book that have attracted children's attention; it can also reveal how such features assist their ability to comprehend the text. Children's spontaneous questions can also throw light on the way they try to fill their knowledge gap by eliciting information from the adult who is reading. Research on children's language, cognitive, and literacy development (Wells, 1985, 1986; Tizard & Hughes, 1986; Pappas, 1991; Pappas & Brown, 1988) has revealed the picture of a child as an active meaning maker who strives to make sense of the surrounding world. Young children's concentration span is limited when they have to attend to language alone, and usually the nonverbal context assists them in interpreting the situation at hand (Donaldson, 1978). If children do not have access to the book illustrations during the reading of the text, the degree of difficulty of the task increases, because children have to concentrate on language alone for prolonged periods of time. Thus, book illustrations facilitate text comprehension. Research on fiction books has indicated that as children become older, there is a shift in their comments from focusing on the illustrations to inferences, predictions, interpretations, personal experiences (Yaden & McGee, 1984; Hayden & Fagan, 1987; Yaden, Smolkin, & Conlon, 1989; Phillips & McNaughton, 1990), and comments related to the print (Morrow, 1988). In addition, there is an increase in spontaneous comments as children become more familiar with the book (Beals, DeTemple, & Dickinson, 1994). Shine and Roser (1999) have investigated children's spontaneous responses during the reading of fiction books (fantasy and realistic), information, and poetry books. Children participated in a small-group situation (nine children) in which the adult refrained from directing the conversation. In response to the information books, children adopted an information stance, sharing their knowledge about the topic and associating texts with their own lives. With fantasy fiction books, children were more engaged; they tried to interpret the characters' emotions and understand the whole story line. Interestingly, the information and the fantasy fiction books prompted children to go beyond the text and to try to find solutions to problems or imagine the consequences of various events. In the realistic fiction books, children focused on details and discrete events with little attempt to achieve a coherent understanding of the whole story. They used the illustrations to reconstruct the story. Overall, more predictions took place when discussing the fiction books. With poetry books, children focused on the rhyming pattern of the language, which they chimed (e.g., rhyming, singing, or engaging in language play). Thus, apart from book genre (informationfiction), the particularities of the text (realistic-fantasy-poetic) also seem to have an impact on children's spontaneous behavior. Various studies on book-reading interaction have also revealed differences in young children's cognitive engagement according to text genre and story format. Research on home book reading with preschool-age children (Pellegrini, Perlmutter, Galda, & Brody, 1990; Sulzby & Teale, 1987) has revealed that when parents are using narrative texts (fiction books), interaction is limited (mothers wished to present the whole story), while in expository texts, interaction is accentuated. In particular, Pellegrini et al. (1990) observed mothers using more strategies to ensure their children's participation in expository texts (both books were collections of pictures and labels with a minimal underlying text structure), and the discussion was of high cognitive demand in contrast to the lower cognitive demand discussion of fiction books. However, no differences were found between familiar texts (comics, toy advertisements) and traditional stories in the cognitive demand of discussion. Bus and Van Ijzendoorn (1988) found more reading instruction focusing on letters and sounds with an ABC book, while picture books (Where Is Spot? ) emphasized a question-answer pattern of interaction. Mason, Peterman, and Kerr (1989) reported differences in teachers' presentation styles according to the type of book; however, these differences were not examined in a systematic way. They mention that during the reading of storybooks, teachers elaborated on the story line, and reading was usually followed by retelling of the story. With information books, the teachers mainly focused on the children's vocabulary and concept building by discussing children's experiences related to the topic. When reading picture phrase books (with three or four words on each page), the teachers focused on children's own bedtime events, and more emphasis was given to print. Thus, both parents and teachers adopt different interactive styles according to book and text genre. Undoubtedly, such experiences influence or even shape children's interpretive strategies during the reading aloud of picture books. Although a body of evidence attests that even young children are sensitive to differences in types of texts, we still do not have a clear picture of how variations in the text of information (expository-narrative) and fiction books (familiar-unfamiliar format) influence the way children think about and respond to picture books. In particular, we are interested in the thinking skills that young children spontaneously activate during book reading. This study addressed the following research questions: • What type of thinking skills do young children apply (cognitive engagement) during the reading aloud of picture books? • Are there significant differences in children's spontaneous cognitive engagement between information and fiction books? • Are there significant differences in children's spontaneous cognitive engagement between the expository and narrative text of information books? • Are there significant differences in children's spontaneous cognitive engagement between the familiar and unfamiliar format of fiction books?