JCPSLP Vol 22 No 2 2020

Learning from our clients

Shared book reading between parent and child siblings with autism spectrum disorder Natalia Henderson-Faranda and Joanne Arciuli

The development of literacy skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an area of growing interest for educators and speech-language pathologists (SLPs). This study explored the nature of shared book reading (SBR) between parent–child dyads in two families, each of which had two primary school age siblings with ASD. Mothers’ utterances during dyadic SBR with each child were analysed in terms of utterance type: praise, error correction or book-related. Results indicated that, within each family, parents of children with ASD use different proportions of utterance types with each of their children during SBR interactions. Implications for educators and clinicians working on literacy development with this population, and further avenues for research, are discussed. L iteracy skills are important for educational and vocational achievement (Torgesen, 2002), and are increasingly necessary in the social sphere, for example, with the proliferation of social media platforms, emails and texting. Reading is a core literacy skill that requires explicit instruction and can be an area of weakness for many children with developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Arciuli, Villar, Colmar, Evans, Einfeld & Parmenter, 2013; Brown , Oram-Cardy, & Johnson, 2013; Nation, Clarke, Wright & Robinson, 2006). Shared reading (SR) is an activity involving a child and partner (usually parent or teacher) reading a book together. The benefits of SBR for children’s literacy development have been well documented (Bus, van IJzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995; Piasta, Justice, McGinty, & Kaderavek, 2012), and encompass positive impacts on children’s ability to decode and comprehend written text. The Simple View of Reading model suggests that decoding and comprehension are the two fundamental components of reading ability (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). SBR has been shown to enhance decoding (e.g., phonological awareness) and comprehension (e.g., vocabulary) skills in children (Swanson et al., 2011), setting them up for later reading success (see review by Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2001). Language and literacy are also known to be closely related, with strong oral language skills

providing an important foundation for both decoding and comprehension in reading (Nation & Snowling, 2004). Feedback (including praise, clarification questions, error correction, etc.) has been shown to promote children’s learning when appropriately balanced and paired with effective instruction (Hattie & Timperley, 2007), and SBR is a naturalistic setting in which parents can provide feedback to their children. Praise as an element of parent behaviour has been a subject of interest in the research on reading instruction for several decades. Specific, contingent, and timely praise can promote improvement in reading skill for children with reading difficulties. The Pause, Prompt, Praise (PPP) procedure is aimed at parents, teachers, and peers of struggling readers (McNaughton, Glynn & Robinson, 1987) and features provision of reading material at an appropriate level for the reader and increased positive feedback given to the child during reading. Given the involvement of parents in shared reading activities with their children, researchers have been interested in the nature of parent behaviours during SBR and the impact on literacy development of neurotypical preschool children (Hammett, van Kleeck, & Huberty, 2003; van Kleeck & Beckley-McCall, 2002), and more recently children with ASD (Fleury & Hugh, 2018; Tipton, Blacher, & Eisenhower, 2017; Westerveld, Paynter, & Wicks, 2020). Hammett et al. (2003) analysed the nature of parent utterances during SBR interactions in 96 middle-income parent–child dyads. Child participants were aged between three years and four months and four years and one month. Participants were provided with unfamiliar books and parents were asked to read to their child as they would in a normal reading interaction at home. Interactions were video-recorded, then parent extra textual utterances were categorised into print and book convention utterances (e.g., “What letter does this word start with?”), behaviour management and feedback utterances (e.g., “Come and sit back down”) and story content related utterances (e.g., “He tried”). This latter category was further categorised into four groups according to the level of abstraction (discussion extending beyond the text). This categorisation was adapted from Blank’s levels of questions (Blank, Rose & Berlin, 1978), with low level abstraction utterances such as “Who did X?” and high level abstraction utterances such as “Can the bear really fly?”. The largest group of parents ( n = 60) demonstrated a limited number of utterances across all categories, although they used utterances at both low and high levels of abstraction. The findings indicate that SBR in some families may not be as interactive as the activity’s

KEYWORDS AUTISM AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER (ASD) HOME-BASED

LITERACY LITERACY READING SIBLINGS

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN PEER- REVIEWED

Natalia Henderson- Faranda (top) and Joanne Arciuli

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JCPSLP Volume 22, Number 2 2020

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