Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2017

Reported Book-Sharing Practices of Spanish-English Speech-Language Pathologists Who Target Academic Language in Preschoolers

AUTHOR(S):

  • Amy Louise Schwarz, PhD, CCC-SLP, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
  • Maria D. Gonzales, PhD, CCC-SLP, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
  • Maria D. Resendiz, PhD, CCC-SLP, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
  • Hervé Abdi, PhD, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX

ABSTRACT

When an adult and a child read a book together, they interact with the book. To promote academic language use, parents and educators are encouraged to direct 60% of their talk during book-sharing sessions to the cognitive and linguistic content that preschoolers have already mastered and to direct 40% to the cognitive and linguistic content that is relatively abstract (e.g., higher level vocabulary, predictions, inferences). Past research has viewed book sharing largely through a monolingual lens. When another language is added to book sharing, the relationships among the book, the adult, and the child become more complex. To capture this complexity, we surveyed 90 Spanish-English bilingual speech language pathologists (SLPs) who treat Spanish-English preschoolers for academic language to analyze the complex relationships among the book, the adult, and the child. Our online survey was designed to evaluate the multivariate effects of a book factor (i.e., language version of books), adult factors (e.g., experience, reading behavior), and child factors (i.e., language input, existence of home reading routine). Two patterns in the data explained 90.69% of the total variance of the responses. For preschoolers receiving Spanish input, SLPs who used books written in Spanish tended to read every word of the text whereas SLPs who translated English books into Spanish tended to read only some text. For preschoolers receiving equal amounts of Spanish and English input, SLPs used dual language books or two books in each language. Only the SLPs who used translated books knew whether an adult read at home to the preschoolers. SLPs must know whether bilingual preschoolers are read to at home because preschoolers unfamiliar with book sharing discourse routines may not know how to respond. SLPs should not translate English books into Spanish because the academic language targets will likely be compromised. Alternative clinical activities are presented.

DOI:

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