Improving rural boarding preschoolers' language development through after-school reading interventions

Abstract

To centralize educational resources and expand children’s preschool enrolment, many preschools in the rural areas of Southwest China provide boarding services for children living in remote areas. Attending boarding preschools leads young children to be separated from their families for five days each week. One recent study showed the disadvantaged language development of rural boarding preschoolers relative to their non-boarding peers. Given the importance of early language development, effective language interventions for these rural boarding preschoolers are urgently needed. Dialogic reading (DR) is a widely-used reading technique for preschool-aged children; yet, little research has evaluated its effectiveness in Chinese preschools, letting alone rural boarding preschools. Additionally, given the low teacher-child ratio and heavy workload of teachers in those rural boarding preschools, incorporating DR techniques into pre-recorded videos might provide a more cost-effective way to improve boarders’ language skills. Prior research indicated that watching videos with pseudo-contingent interactions could provide children with a similar feeling of real interaction. However, few studies have explored the effects of pseudo-contingent book reading videos on children’s language development, especially in rural boarding preschools. This study aimed to examine and compare the effects of DR and pseudo-contingent book-reading videos on rural boarding preschoolers’ language development. One hundred and four rural boarding preschoolers in Yunnan Province, China (M = 63.6 months, SD = 6.6 months, 47 girls) were randomly assigned to a DR group, a pseudo-contingent book-reading group or a business-as-usual group. Across the two intervention conditions, children were read the same picture books twice a week after school for eight weeks. In the DR condition, the trained local teachers conducted live DR to children using sample prompts. In the pseudo-contingent book-reading group, children viewed videos of the researcher reading the book, posing the same DR-type prompts, pausing for several seconds, and giving generic feedback. Children’s primary caregivers completed the demographic information questionnaires, and children completed a measure of nonverbal IQ at the pretest. Before and after the interventions, children took measures of language (i.e., expressive vocabulary and receptive vocabulary) and Chinese reading. Mixed design MANCOVA was applied to evaluate the experimental effects of the two interventions on rural boarding preschoolers’ language development relative to the control group. After eight weeks, boarding preschoolers in the two intervention conditions improved their general and book-specific expressive vocabulary to a larger extent than their peers in the control condition, and there was no significant difference between the two intervention conditions. Additionally, no significant effects of the two interventions on children’s general receptive vocabulary, general Chinese reading, or book-specific Chinese reading were found. The results indicate that rural boarding preschoolers can learn language by receiving live DR and watching pseudo-contingent book-reading videos. The comparable effects of pseudo-contingent book-reading videos to live DR highlight a relatively novel and cost-effective way to improve early language development, especially for children from resource-limited areas (e.g., rural areas).