Teacher-child talk in Shared-book Reading with Preschoolers: Linkages between Teacher Questioning and Child Responsiveness

Teacher-child shared-book reading is an everyday activity that promotes preschoolers’ oral language and reading development. Previous studies have investigated various facets of teachers’ questioning techniques. Little research, however, has focused on text-based questions (TQ) and life-experience-based questions (LQ) and how they are associated with children’s responsiveness. Furthermore, teachers’ questioning in the Mandarin Chinese context remains underexplored. This study examines how text-based questions and life-experience based questions influenced teacher-child talk during two shared-book reading activities. The participants included 88 children and 15 teachers who were randomly paired with 5 to 7 children for one-on-one shared book reading sessions on different themes, totaling 88 dyads. All the sessions were videotaped and transcribed. We coded teachers’ questions by type and content based on level of cognitive demand, and the form of response elicited from the children. The results indicate that life-experience based questions significantly, positively predicted children’s verbal response, when controlling for the variables of children’s Expressive Vocabulary Test scores, age, quantity of teachers’ questions, and book themes. Conversely, text-based questions negatively predicted children’s verbal responses. Open questions (rather than closed questions) were associated with increased verbal response from the children. These findings suggest that teachers could increase the effectiveness of shared-book reading and preschoolers’ engagement in discussions by incorporating more open-ended, life-experience based questions.