Alphabet Book Reading and Emergent Readers

Mary Ann Evans

This project began in May 2007. In North America most children enter kindergarten with some knowledge of letters, and parents frequently report teaching their children about the alphabet at home. Observational studies show that parents rarely reference print while reading storybooks and recent eye-tracking studies have clearly demonstrated that children rarely look at a book’s print when read stories. Thus frequency of storybook reading shows little relationship to children’s print knowledge. However the use of alphabet books might tell a different story. There is some suggestion that substantially more print referencing occurs when parents read alphabet books than storybooks with their children, and that children’s phonemic awareness improves when children are read alphabet books linking letters with sounds. However, in contrast to the increasing attention paid to storybook reading, research on alphabet book use is scant. The goal of this research program is to understand how children and parents use alphabet books, by conducting an integrated combination of naturalistic and laboratory- based studies. Our naturalistic studies entail observations of parents and children reading trade books of an alphabet book format. In addition to audiotaping children reading alphabet books, our laboratory work employs an eye-tracker to determine what and in what sequence children fixate the letters and corresponding objects in the books, what features of the letters they fixate, and how design characteristics of books alter fixation patterns. Thus we will be able to describe how parents scaffold alphabet book reading, determine how children “read” alphabet books without the assistance of adults and how this changes across the early years, and specify how alphabet books might be designed to facilitate the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge