Effects of Print Awareness and Morphological Awareness Trainings on Preschoolers’ Literacy Development: a Study of Shared Storybook Reading Strategy

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of participation in extensive shared storybook reading sessions with embedded print awareness and morphological awareness trainings on preschoolers’early literacy development. Storybook reading interventions will be conducted once a year for 60 young children from the age of 3 until 6 years old. Children are matched on chronological age, gender, reading skills and then placed into an experimental or control group evenly. Pretest measures of children’s print awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary, word recognition, , reading comprehension, and reading motivation will be administered. Subsequently, children in both groups will participate in a 20-week shared reading sessions with a total of 40 story books guided by adults twice a week for twenty consecutive weeks each year. For children of the experimental group, print-referencing strategies are used during shared reading. From each storybook two particular words are selected as target words to strengthen the illustration of each word’s configuration, sound, and meaning when children come across this specific word during shared reading. These target words will be also used for children’s morphologicaltraining, and children will be asked to induce compound words associated with the target word. As for the children of the control group, shared reading is carried out by dialogic fashion. Along the story telling, children will be asked to question the plots, to predict the development of the plots, or to further discuss children’s daily experience related to the stories. All children’s literacy abilities are measured after three intervention sessions for within- and between-group variation analyses to compare the impact of participation in dialogic or print-referencing shared reading interventions. Finally, implications for pedagogy will be discussed and future research directions will also be suggested.

Project ID:PF10112-0031
External Project ID:NSC101-2410-H182-032