When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens. In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child. No one can learn to play the piano just by listening to someone else play. Likewise, no one can learn to read just by listening to someone else read.
Children learn most from books when they are actively involved.
The fundamental reading technique in dialogic reading is the PEER sequence. This is a short interaction between a child and the adult. The adult prompts the child to say something about the book, evaluates the child's response, expands the child's response by rephrasing and adding information to it, and repeats the prompt to make sure that the child has learned from the expansion. Imagine that the parent and the child are looking at the page of a book that has a picture of a fire engine on it. Except for the first reading of a book to children, PEER sequences should occur on nearly every page.