Reading Together: How to Promote Children's Language Development Using Family-based Shared Book Reading

September 13, 2018 updated by: Caroline Rowland
The aim of this project is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and to use this knowledge to make it an effective language-boosting tool for children from all social and economic backgrounds.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

Two interventions will be created which are intended to boost children's vocabulary and grammar abilities, and will be assessed on how they are implemented by caregivers across different socio economic groups, and how they affect children's development of these language skills. Previous research has found dialogic reading interventions to be less effective for children from low socio-economic backgrounds. This project will investigate whether a shared reading intervention, designed to require less of a behaviour change from caregivers than dialogic reading, can be used to effectively boost vocabulary and grammar development in children across the whole socio-economic spectrum.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

150

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United Kingdom
    • Merseyside
      • Liverpool, Merseyside, United Kingdom, L69 7ZA
        • Liverpool Language Lab at the University of Liverpool

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

2 years to 3 years (Child)

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Genders Eligible for Study

All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • All families will be included unless they fit the exclusion criteria.

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Children born before 37 weeks gestation (premature)
  • Children who weighed less than 5lb 9oz at birth (low birth weight)
  • Children who have had an ear infection/glue ear for longer than 3 months, 4-6 ear infections within a 6 month period or another identified hearing problem (e.g. at newborn hearing screening)
  • Children with an identified developmental disability (e.g. Cerebral Palsy, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Fragile X syndrome, Muscular dystrophy, Di George syndrome, Down's syndrome, Williams syndrome)
  • Children with a hearing or visual impairment
  • Children who hear another language (not English) for 1 day or more in a typical week (please note that this also excludes children of parents who do not speak English)
  • Children whose parents have a learning disability which puts their children at risk of language delay and excludes the parents from giving informed consent on their own and on their children's behalf.

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Treatment
  • Allocation: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: Quadruple

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Other: Shared Reading Control
Reading Together - Shared Reading Control. The intervention will run for six weeks and the caregivers will be provided with books to read with their children. Caregivers will not be trained to read with their child. The caregivers will be asked to read two books to their child five times a week. Caregivers will keep a reading diary and audio record all shared book reading sessions with their child.
Behavioral: Reading Together - Shared Reading Control
Experimental: Dialogic Reading
Reading Together - Dialogic Reading. The intervention will run for six weeks and the caregivers will be provided with books to read with their children. Caregivers will be trained to read with their child using a dialogic reading style. The caregivers will be asked to read two books to their child five times a week. Caregivers will keep a reading diary and audio record all shared book reading sessions with their child.
Behavioral: Reading Together - Dialogic Reading
Experimental: Pausing for Reading
Reading Together - Pausing for Reading. The intervention will run for six weeks and the caregivers will be provided with books to read with their children. Caregivers will be trained to read with their child using a style which involves pausing, recasting and open questioning. The caregivers will be asked to read two books to their child five times a week. Caregivers will keep a reading diary and audio record all shared book reading sessions with their child.
Behavioral: Reading Together - Pausing for Reading

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Change in baseline language skills (PLS-5)
Time Frame: Baseline and 6 weeks
The Preschool Language Scale Fifth Edition (PLS-5) Will be administered. This is a published standardized measure of the language knowledge of individual children. The investigators will use both the Auditory Comprehension and Expressive Communication scales to measure vocabulary and grammar knowledge. The PLS-5 standard scores are based on a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15. Scores between 85 and 115 are considered to be within the normal range.
Baseline and 6 weeks

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Change in baseline syntax comprehension (CELF Preschool-2 UK)
Time Frame: Baseline and 6 weeks
The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Preschool 2 UK (CELF Preschool-2) will be administered. This is a published standardized measure of the language knowledge of individual children. The investigators will use the 'Sentence Structure' subtest. This will allow measurement of the children's understanding of a range of simple and complex sentence structures. A sentence is read to the child and the child chooses, from a set of pictures, which picture ''goes with'' that sentence.
Baseline and 6 weeks
Change in baseline caregiver dialogic reading behaviour
Time Frame: Baseline and 6 weeks
10 minute video recordings of the dyads reading books at baseline and 6 weeks will be analysed for the number of target dialogic reading behaviours. This will allow measurement of the caregiver's dialogic reading behaviour pre- and post-intervention.
Baseline and 6 weeks
Change in baseline caregiver pause reading behaviour
Time Frame: Baseline and 6 weeks
10 minute video recordings of the dyads reading books at baseline and 6 weeks will be analysed for the number of target pause reading behaviours. This will allow measurement of the caregiver's pause reading behaviour pre- and post-intervention.
Baseline and 6 weeks

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Caroline Rowland

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Caroline F Rowland, PhD, The University of Liverpool

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

  • Manz PH , Hughes C , Barnabas E , Bracaliello C , Ginsburg-Block M. A descriptive review and meta-analysis of family-based emergent literacy interventions: To what extent is the research applicable to low-income, ethnic-minority or linguistically-diverse young children? Early Childhood Research Quarterly 25(4): 409-431, 2010.

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start

January 1, 2016

Primary Completion (Actual)

April 1, 2018

Study Completion (Actual)

April 1, 2018

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

November 24, 2015

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

December 4, 2015

First Posted (Estimate)

December 9, 2015

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

September 14, 2018

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

September 13, 2018

Last Verified

September 1, 2018

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Other Study ID Numbers

  • RETH000849

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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