The aim of this research was to explore whether the advantages of shared book reading (the joint attention and high quality adult language input) remain true where children have language difficulties. We compared parents' input to their young children with language difficulties during shared reading and play activities. Sharing books with young children is potentially an excellent opportunity for language development. The children and adults are jointly focused on the same words and pictures, and the text in children’s books tends to have a more varied vocabulary and more accurate and complex grammar than child-directed speech during play. However, in shared reading interventions, the best results have been shown for children who are already progressing well with spoken communication. Children who are at risk for language development (for example because of a slow start to talking, a family history of problems, or socio-economic disadvantage) have benefited less.The most cost-effective way to tackle the root causes of many social and educational problems is to intervene early in children's lives, before the problems have had a chance to entrench. Key to this strategy is improving children's language development in the early years. Children who enter school with good language skills have better chances in school, better chances of entering higher education, and better economic success in adulthood. Reading is very effective at boosting children's language. Children who read regularly with their parents or carers tend to learn language faster, enter school with a larger vocabulary of words and become more successful readers in school. Because of this, local authorities often commission services to promote family-based shared book reading (e.g. the Bookstart programme). However, recent studies suggest that shared book reading interventions work less effectively for children from disadvantaged backgrounds than originally thought, particularly when their parents have lower levels of education. This means that there is a danger that the benefits of shared reading will be restricted to children from more affluent homes and not get through to those who need them most. To solve this problem, we need to develop a better understanding of how reading interventions work, and of how parents use them. We need to identify what parents do and say when reading aloud with their children and why this makes reading so effective at boosting children's language. We need to find out whether differences in how parents read mean that parents from disadvantaged backgrounds use these language boosting behaviours less frequently. We need to determine how to design interventions that increase the use of these behaviours in all parents, especially those with lower levels of education. Then, once we have identified how reading interventions work, we need to determine how to help parents use them successfully in their daily lives. The aim of this project is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and use this knowledge to make it an effective language boosting tool for children from all social and economic backgrounds. In Work Package 1, we will identify what language boosting behaviours parents use in shared reading, and will determine how parents from different social/economic backgrounds use these behaviours during shared reading. In Work Package 2, we will create four targeted interventions, each focused on a particular language boosting behaviour, and investigate how they are implemented by parents from different backgrounds, and how they affect children's language development. In Work Package 3, we will explore what influences parents' decisions to read or not to read with their children, in order to work out why parents may be unwilling to read with their children and to identify how to make reading a more enjoyable experience. We will also evaluate the benefits of a new intervention, designed by national charity The Reader Organisation, to promote reading for pleasure. Across the project, we will study a range of language skills, covering the core language abilities that are essential for learning to read and write in school.

This study compared carers’ spoken input to their children with language difficulties, during shared book reading and play. A researcher visited participating families in their homes and video-recorded the carers and children, each of the two activities lasting no more than 10 minutes. Caregivers completed questionnaires to measure demographic information, and aspects of family life, including frequency of shared book reading. The researcher also assessed children’s expressive language and comprehension on a standardised measure. The carers’ utterances were analysed for diversity of vocabulary, length and complexity. As an indication of child engagement with the activities we also measured the amount the children contributed to the verbal interaction and the proportion of adult utterances which related to behaviour or attention control.