Parents’ shared storybook reading – learning to read

Parents engage in joint story book sharing where adults read an appropriate text to children, usually in the home environment. Story book sharing promotes the young children's development of receptive and expressive language abilities as well as their emerging early literacy abilities, which have an effect on the childrens success in school-based literacy instruction. This review describes and analyses studies that have examined the parents and children’s involvement in shared storybook reading. It specifically focuses on the parents teaching behaviours and storybook reading interactions during formal and informal literacy experiences including the quality of their interactions, interactions in dialogic reading, and extratextual interactions. The review also discusses studies on the value and effect of using different story book genres in particular narrative and informational texts (such as science texts as information books). These studies support that storybook reading promotes childrens language growth, emergent literacy, and reading achievement.