Mothers Reading Children's Books to Preschoolers. A Greek study

Abstract

This article presents the results of a Greek study on the extratextual interactions between mothersand their preschoolers during repeated readings of the same storybook. Eleven (11) mothers with tertiary andeleven mothers (11) with secondary education read out loud the book “The three little wolves and the big bad pig”three times, once every three days and the fourth time they narrated it to their 4–5 year olds. All four times, whichwere recorded by the parents, were done in one-to-one settings, in their homes. Mothers with a tertiary educationduring the first reading made more extratextual interactions overall, as well as more verbal exchanges in thelow-level abstraction categories: organizing the reading, names, clarifying, and in high-level abstraction categoryrelating the story to real life. Mothers with secondary education during the second reading made more extratextualinteractions overall, as well as more verbal exchanges in the low-level abstraction categories: clarifying and attention.Both categories of mothers progressively decreased their insertions with subsequent readings. During the firsttwo readings mothers with tertiary education made more extratextual interactions overall, as well as more low- andhigh-level abstraction insertions, than mothers with secondary education. Children whose mothers had a tertiaryeducation made more insertions overall, including more low- and high-level abstraction extratextual interactions,than the other preschoolers. It was found that all mothers and children had a high percentage of low-level abstractionextratextual interactions. More specifically, this was noted in the following categories for mothers: clarifying,feedback and names; for children: clarifying and asking for clarification. Nevertheless, mothers with a tertiary educationand their children made more high-level abstract extratextual interactions in the category relating the storyto real life than the others