Letter from the Editors
Preface
- In Between the Images: The Therapeutic Benefits of Unconscious Exposure
- A Call for the Proper Evaluation of Treatment for Co-Occuring BD and SUD
- A Meta-Analysis on Father Involvement and Early Childhood Social-Emotional Development
- Loneliness and Depression among Foster Children: The Role of Caregiver Ethnic Match
- Father Involvement in Ethnically Diverse Populations
- Book Reading Styles in Bilingual Head Start Classrooms
- Demographic and Relational Predictors of Social Self-Awareness in Urban Elementary Classrooms
- Language Attitudes of Puerto Ricans Toward English and Bilingualism
- The Stories Friends Share: Structural and Thematic Analyses
Silvia Niño
Early narratives shared between children and adults are crucial for children’s linguistic and cognitive development. Most research on narrative development has focused on parent-child conversations and book-reading interactions. However, parent-child interactions are only one context through which children develop narrative skills. Because preschoolers spend a significant part of their day in preschool, interactions between children and their preschool-teachers also plays a formative role for children’s narrative competency. Nevertheless, only a handful studies have examined the book-sharing styles used by preschool teachers, and little is known about how teachers adapt their book-sharing approach to bilingual environments. The present study examined the book-sharing styles of teachers in 12 bilingual (Spanish-English) Head Start classrooms as they shared wordless and text-based books with their class. Preliminary results suggest that there are individual differences in teachers’ book-sharing styles, with some teachers focusing closely on the storyline, whereas others encourage their students to think analytically and make predictions about the plot. Interestingly, though, all teachers tend to include more meta-literacy talk and offer richer language lessons when sharing the wordless book. Results are discussed in relation to the role of teacher-class book-sharing on children’s language development.