Engage preschool children in interactive reading and dialogic reading to improve language and literacy skills.

Preschool children, ages 3 to 5, develop early reading and language skills when teachers use interactive and dialogic reading strategies. In interactive reading, children talk with the teacher about the pictures and story; dialogic reading uses a more systematic method to scaffold adult-child language interaction around storybook reading.

Teachers can help children develop language skills by engaging them before, during, and/or after reading the text through explicit interactive techniques such as asking them to point to the story title, predict what might happen next, and retell story events. Dialogic reading can be used to assess and support oral language and vocabulary development through multiple readings, during which the teacher helps the child become the storyteller by gradually using higher level questions to move the child beyond naming objects in pictures to thinking more about what is happening in the pictures, and how this relates to his own experiences.