Print-related practices in low-income Latino homes and preschoolers’ school-readiness outcomes

Abstract

This study examined literacy practices in the homes of 127 low-income Latino preschoolers enrolled in bilingual preschool classrooms. Specifically, we investigated the print-related practices that Latino primary caregivers engaged in with their preschool-aged children at the start of the school year and explored the relation between these practices and children’s language, literacy, and social–emotional school-readiness outcomes at the end of the preschool year. The results demonstrate the importance of print – including books and non-book-related environmental print – for Latino preschool children’s development of early literacy and self-regulation skills. In addition, the results highlight that when sharing picture books with their children, low-income Latino caregivers provided the majority of the information to their children, and ask few questions of them, thereby adopting a sole-narrator participatory role. Interestingly, the manner in which caregivers shared the books with their children was not related to child outcomes. The results are discussed in relation to the importance of enhancing Latino caregivers’ culturally preferred print-related practices as a means of fostering their preschoolers’ language, literacy, and social–emotional development.

Keywords

Home literacy environment Latina/o children parent–child interactions preschool children school readiness storybook interactions storybook sharing wordless picture book early literacy development self-regulation

Becoming literate – learning to read and write – is critical to ensure success during one's school years and beyond. At the same time, however, social–emotional competencies, such as self-regulation, motivation and approaches to learning, are equally integral to academic achievement (e.g. La Paro and Pianta, 2000). Both sets of skills are fostered through early parent–child interactions, and thus, individual differences in children’s early literacy and social–emotional abilities upon school entry have been attributed to the home-literacy environment (e.g. Hart and Risley, 1995). As such, researchers and policymakers alike have suggested that the achievement gap experienced by low-income Latino children in the U.S., which is already evident in the preschool years (Espinosa et al., 2006), might be related to a disparity in family literacy activities, including practices involving print. Yet, although Latinos represent both the fastest growing population of children in the U.S. and the population most at risk of school failure (Páez et al., 2007; Planty et al., 2008; Rumberger and Anguiano, 2004), the current understanding of print-related practices in low-income U.S. Latino homes is very limited in its scope. Consequently, the current study sought to address this gap in the research by adopting a strengths-based approach to explore the range of print-related practices Latino caregivers engage in with their preschool-aged children and to investigate how these practices might be related to children’s emergent literacy and social–emotional school-readiness outcomes.

Home print-related practices during the preschool years

Despite its increasing broadness, much of the research on print-related literacy practices during the preschool years has focused exclusively on book-sharing between caregivers and children (Bus, 2001; Farver et al., 2006; Haden et al., 1996; Lonigan et al., 2008). For instance, the number of books in the home and the frequency with which books are shared with young children are correlated with various aspects of early language and literacy development, including increased vocabulary (Sénéchal et al., 2008), better understanding of print concepts, and more sophisticated story-comprehension skills (Raikes et al., 2006). Caregivers’ expertise in selecting appropriate books for their five-year-olds, as another example, has been found to predict children’s empathy (Aram and Aviram, 2009), and library visits, as well as the frequency of reading in the home, have been positively linked to teachers’ ratings of children’s social functioning (Farver et al., 2006).

Equally important seems to be the way caregivers share books with their preschool-aged children. For example, some mothers include rich descriptions and focus on vocabulary, expository language and concepts but do not engage their children in discussions about the events that transpire. Other mothers invite their children to participate in the telling of the story and provide positive feedback, and yet others engage their children in high-level extratextual talk, and encourage them to draw inferences and make predictions (Haden et al., 1996). These different ways of sharing books foster different literacy skills in young children. For example, Haden et al. (1996) found that children of mothers who encouraged child participation, whether to tell or go beyond the story, had more advanced vocabulary and story comprehension skills 2½ years later, as compared to children of mothers who did not encourage such child participation. Moreover, as children’s books are replete with references to characters’ feelings, beliefs and motivations (Dyer et al., 2000), they often serve as an invaluable forum for children to develop socio-cognitive skills. As such, caregivers’ language, particularly their use of cognitive verbs as they share picture books with their children, has been shown to predict preschoolers’ understanding of mental states (Adrián et al., 2007). Thus, it appears that asking elaborate open-ended questions, scaffolding analytical thinking, and using cognitively challenging language when sharing storybooks with young children are important for various developmental outcomes.

Not surprisingly, research suggests that dialogic reading, a renowned intervention that encourages adults to promote child participation when engaging in book-reading, is effective in helping to support children’s early literacy development (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998), as well as key social–emotional competencies, such as self-regulation (Farver et al., 2006). However, while asking questions and scaffolding inferential and analytical thinking are common features of adult–child book-sharing in middle-class European-American homes, these book-sharing strategies seem not to align with the literacy practices of all sociocultural populations, nor do they lead to similar outcomes in all groups of children (e.g. Mol et al., 2008). Past research has suggested that for children with less advanced language skills, for example, telling a linguistically rich story with little child participation, is, in fact, more successful at fostering children’s skills than is encouraging the child to participate by making predictions and inferences (Reese and Cox, 1999). Moreover, the results of a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of dialogic reading on children’s vocabulary development showed that although dialogic reading is linked to positive outcomes when used by middle-class mother–child dyads, it is not as beneficial when implemented as an intervention with low-income families (Mol et al., 2008). In fact, the results of a recent intervention study showed that training low-income mothers in dialogic reading did not lead to an increase in children’s narrative skills or expressive language skills. Instead, the results of the intervention suggested that the quality of the narratives shared by children whose mothers were undergoing dialogic reading training actually decreased over time (Reese et al., 2010). Thus, in recent years, researchers have begun to explore home and community literacy practices among diverse sociocultural groups to gain a better understanding of the most effective ways of promoting literacy in diverse populations. One focus in the last decade, given their rising numbers, has been on the literacy practices of Latino families in the United States (e.g. Caspe, 2009; McCabe, Bailey, & Melzi, 2008; Reese and Gallimore, 2000).

Print-related practices of Latino families

Recent research has demonstrated that low-income Latino families in the United States have fewer books in their homes and visit libraries less frequently than do middle-class European-American families. Moreover, low-income Latino mothers read to their children less often than do European-American mothers (Barrueco et al., 2007; Boyce et al., 2004; Brooks-Gunn and Markman, 2005; Raikes et al., 2006; Reese and Gallimore, 2000). Many of these findings, however, stem from large-scale studies that rely on measures that were developed for middle-class European-American families, rather than for members of specific ethnically/culturally diverse communities. As a result, they typically compare the literacy practices of low-income Latino populations to those common in middle-class European American homes, disregarding the practices that are unique to Latino communities (García, 2000). Yet, having a clear understanding of the cultural practices of Latino families is a necessary first step before these practices can be meaningfully explored in relation to those prevalent in other groups (see, for example, Jahoda, 1990). Moreover, these studies typically fail to consider the cultural diversity that exists across Latino populations (Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Finally, they are also often ill-equipped to include children from non-English-speaking families (Espinosa and López, 2007), as is evidenced by the measures used. In other words, as dual-language learners are typically exposed to one primary language in the home and a second language outside the home (Spanish and English, respectively, in the case of Latino children in the United States), they generally demonstrate varying levels of competence in each language (see Bialystock et al., 2000). Thus, it is imperative that the measures used to assess Latino children’s skills are selected in keeping with a strengths-based approach (Espinosa and López, 2007) and have been validated for use with similar groups of children (Barrueco et al., 2012; Espinosa and López, 2007). Yet, all too often this is not the case.

By contrast, researchers who have taken a more qualitative approach to the study of literacy in Latino homes have shown that Latino families do engage in literacy-related activities, but their beliefs – and, in turn, their practices – differ from those of mainstream middle-class families (e.g. Reese and Gallimore, 2000; Reese and Goldenberg, 2008). For example, Latino mothers tend to view reading as a school rather than a home activity; and, as a result, they do not consider reading to children below the age of five to be a necessary activity (Reese and Gallimore, 2000). Thus, it is not surprising that, in some Latino communities, parent–child book-sharing is not a common literacy routine (Barrueco et al., 2007). Instead, literacy activities in a variety of Latino communities often focus on environmental print – such as words and letters on food labels and signs on the street (Reese et al., 2012). Nonetheless, this does not mean that children are not exposed to books. In fact, in some Mexican-American communities, older siblings frequently share storybooks with their younger siblings as part of their caregiving responsibilities (Orellana et al., 2003). Moreover, when they do read to their children, Latino caregivers typically focus on school-based skills, such as decoding (Reese, 2002; Reese and Gallimore, 2000). This style of reading is very different from the book-sharing approach promoted by researchers, which encourages mothers to engage their children in elaborative co-constructions during book-reading interactions.

As cultural norms are embedded in the manner in which stories are shared, research has also shown that Latino mothers adopt specific, culturally preferred ways of sharing books with their children, varying in the extent to which children are actively engaged in the conversational interactions (Boyce et al., 2004). For example, Hammer et al. (2005) found that most of the low-income Puerto Rican mothers in their study used either a child-centred approach (i.e. allowed their children to take control of the story) or a combinational style (i.e. provided most of the information to the children) when sharing books with their preschool-aged children. Mothers who adopted a child-centred style produced a lower proportion of utterances than their children and encouraged their children to serve as primary storytellers. The authors argued that this style was consistent with the Latino parenting tradition in which children are to be nurtured and positive emotions are to be expressed. By contrast, other mothers used a combinational style and served as the main storytellers, reading directly from the text, and including questions to monitor their children’s comprehension of the storyline.

Similarly, when sharing wordless picture books with their preschool-aged children, middle-class Peruvian mothers tend to serve as the sole narrator of an engaging story with minimal child participation (Caspe and Melzi, 2008; Melzi and Caspe, 2005) and thus adopt a strong participatory narrative role (see Melzi et al., 2011). Working with low-income Spanish-speaking Dominican and Mexican low-income immigrant families living in New York City, Caspe (2009) found similar book-sharing styles to those reported with the middle-class Peruvian samples, with the majority of mothers (68%) serving as the sole narrator, requesting little input from their children. Melzi et al. (2011) argue that using a strong narrative participatory role is consistent with oral-language practices documented in various ethnographic studies conducted in U.S. Latino communities (e.g. Eisenberg, 1985, 1986; Schieffelin and Eisenberg, 1984; Zentella, 1997). In other words, Latino caregivers typically suscribe to a situation-centred approach in which they expect children to meet the demands of a given situation. Participation is, thus, contingent on age and expertise. As such, during adult-led conversations, young children are expected to listen intently and quietly, contributing only when directly addressed (Rogoff, 2003; Schieffelin and Eisenberg, 1984; Zentella, 1997). Similarly, because mothers are more skilled readers and storytellers relative to their preschool-aged children, they adopt the role of main narrator, and expect their children to be an attentive audience¹ (see Paradise and Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff, 2003, 2014; Rogoff et al., 2003, for similar styles in non-verbal contexts). Interestingly, Caspe’s (2009) work shows that, controlling for years of maternal education and children’s initial developmental competencies, the children of mothers who served as the primary storyteller had higher print-based literacy scores (i.e. concepts about print and letter recognition) at the end of the school year. Moreover, in contrast to findings with European-American mothers that demonstrate the importance of open-ended questions, the results of a recent study of book-sharing among Latino mothers and their preschool-aged children suggest that it was maternal requests for labels that were related to children’s vocabulary skills in both Spanish and English (Quiroz et al., 2010).

Taken together, this body of research suggests that Latino families’ literacy-related practices are important for supporting the language, literacy and social–emotional skills that are seen as key indictors of children’s preparedness for formal schooling (i.e. children’s school readiness; Daily et al., 2010) in the U.S. Nevertheless, much of the research on literacy practices in low-income Latino homes has been comparative in nature (i.e. investigating Latino and non-Latino families), often using measures designed for use with non-Latino families. Moreover, the few studies that have explored the influence of home literacy on low-income Latino preschoolers’ outcomes have focused on only one print-based home activity (i.e. book reading) and examined its effects on language and literacy outcomes, thus leaving a gap in our understanding of how other literacy practices might impact on a variety of children’s school readiness skills, including social–emotional competencies. Thus, the current study addressed this gap in the literature by examining the print-related practices used by primary caregivers of low-income Latino preschoolers and investigating the relation between these practices and children’s school readiness competencies. Specifically, the study focused on (a) access to children’s books, (b) features of caregiver–child book-sharing interactions, and (c) non-book, print-related activities. Two main research questions guided the study: (1) What are the print-related practices of low-income Latino caregivers of preschool-aged children in the U.S.? (2) How are these practices related to Latino preschoolers’ school readiness skills, as measured through oral language, narrative and print-based knowledge, as well as social–emotional skills?

Method

Participants

One hundred and twenty-seven primary caregivers² and their preschool-aged children³ were recruited from a bilingual (Spanish-English) preschool centre at the start of the school year. Children ranged in age from 37 months to 59 months (M = 47.64, SD = 6.01). Slightly more than half of the children (53%) were girls, and 51% of the children were in their first year of preschool. Ninety-five per cent of primary caregivers (n = 120) were the children’s mothers; of the remaining caregivers, four were grandmothers, two were fathers and one was a great aunt. Half of the caregivers (55%, n = 67) were born in Mexico. Twenty per cent (n = 25) were born in other Spanish-speaking Latin-American countries (including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, El Salvador and Puerto Rico), and 25 per cent (n = 31) were born in the mainland United States. Foreign-born caregivers had been living in the United States for an average of 15 years (SD = 11.13) at the time of data collection and ranged in age from 20 to 60 years (M = 29.94, SD = 7.48). The majority of the homes (60%) were monolingual Spanish-speaking homes; 22% were bilingual Spanish-English homes, 15% English-speaking homes and 3% bilingual Spanish-Mixtec speaking homes (see Table 1 for additional demographic information).

Table 1.

Demographic information.

Caregivers
Age	29.95 (7.57)
Country of origin
Mexico	55%
US	25%
Other	20%
Education
<Elementary school	10%
<High school	26%
High school (or GED)	38%
More than high school	26%
Employment
Full-time	28%
Part-time	22%
Not employed	50%
Children
Age (in months)	47.64 (6.01)
Gender	53% girls
Years in head start
First year	51%
Second year	49%
Home
Household size	5.42 (2.14)
Primary language
Spanish	60%
English	15%
Spanish-English	22%
Spanish-Mixteco	3%

Procedure

Caregivers were visited in their homes on one occasion during the first few months of the school year by a bilingual Spanish-English Latino research assistant. Home visits were scheduled at a day and time convenient for the families and lasted for approximately 30 min. Caregivers were asked to complete a brief demographic questionnaire in the language of their choice (i.e. Spanish or English). Then, using a mixed-methods and strengths-based approach, two forms of data, survey-based and semi-naturalistic, were collected. More specifically, print-related practices were assessed using a self-report questionnaire adapted from the Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) (ACF, 1999), as well as via a wordless picture-book task. Caregivers were asked to share the wordless book with their child in the way they normally would and in the language(s) of their choice. No time limit was placed on the book-sharing interaction, and the researcher was not present in the room during the interaction. All interactions were both audio- and video-recorded

During the final months of the school year, children’s school readiness skills were assessed during two school visits. In keeping with a culturally sensitive strengths-based approach (see Espinosa and López, 2007), all assessments were conducted in the child’s dominant language. Children’s language dominance was ascertained by a bilingual research assistant using a combination of parent, teacher and child reports, as well as two subscales of the Preschool Language Assessment Scale (Pre-LAS; Duncan and de Avila, 1998): Simon Says (to assess receptive skills) and Say What You Hear (to assess expressive skills). In most cases, the pre-LAS scores clearly indicated language dominance. In the few instances where a child scored high – or low – in both languages, the pattern across all four sources of information was used to make the determination.⁴

Once language dominance was ascertained, children’s print-related skills were measured via two tasks: a letter-recognition task and an adaptation of Clay’s Concepts about Print task (Clay, 1979). Children were then asked to share a wordless picture book with the investigator. The title of the book was read to the children, and they were told that the book was a continuation of the frog story their caregiver had shared with them earlier in the year. The children were also informed that the book contained pictures but no words. They were asked to look through the pages in the book, one by one, to familiarize themselves with the storyline before they shared the story with the investigator (see Berman and Slobin, 1994). Then, they were encouraged to narrate in the language(s) of their choice. No time limit was placed on the length of the interaction, and all narratives were audio-recorded.

One week later,⁵ during the second visit, children’s receptive and expressive language skills were assessed in their dominant language (i.e. Spanish or English) using the Preschool Language-Scale Fourth Edition (PLS-4; Zimmerman et al., 2004). Following that assessment, children’s self-regulation skills were rated using the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment Assessor’s Report (PSRA; Smith-Donald et al., 2007).

Measures

Home print practices

Print-related practices in the home were measured using an adapted version of the Head Start FACES (ACF, 1999). For the purposes of the current study, two survey items from the adapted measure regarding children’s books in the home were included, as were seven survey items related to print-related practices (e.g. the frequency with which books are read to the target child, library visits, the frequency with which words and letters on food labels are pointed out). These items were rated on a four-point Likert scale, ranging from never to daily, and a composite score was computed, with higher numbers denoting a greater number of literacy activities.

Home book-sharing practices

As an observational measure of a print-related practice, caregivers were asked to share the wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) with the target child. A wordless book was selected as it ensured that caregivers were able to share the story with their children, regardless of their literacy level or dominant language. In addition, the pictures provided a structure for a discussion of the content, while at the same time the wordless nature afforded participants with an opportunity to construct the story in their preferred style (Caspe, 2009). This task has been used successfully in a wide variety of research to elicit narratives from individuals of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, including middle-class mother–child dyads and children of all ages in the United States, Europe, the Middle East (see Berman and Slobin, 1994) and Latin America (Caspe and Melzi, 2008; Melzi et al., 2011), as well as with low-income populations in the United States (Caspe, 2009).

All interactions were transcribed at the utterance level using a standardized format (CHAT; MacWhinney, 2000) and coded in the original language(s) using a combination of coding schemes that have been used successfully with various Spanish-speaking samples (Caspe, 2009; Melzi and Caspe, 2005; Melzi et al., 2011). Caregiver discourse during the reading per se (i.e. excluding pre- and post-reading activities) was coded at the utterance level for pragmatic function, which included the following five codes: (1) Elaborative provision of narrative information, or any narrative utterance that provided new information in statement form; (2) Elaborative request for narrative information, or any narrative utterance that requested new information; (3) Narrative conversational, or any narrative utterance whose main function was to ensure optimal communication and maintain the flow of the conversation, but did not move the story forward; (4) Extratextual, or any utterance that was related to the sharing of the book but not the story, such as meta-linguistic and meta-narrative information, (5) Other, or any utterance that focused on the task itself, on behaviour management, or did not fit into the other categories. For the purpose of analysis, elaborative provision and requests were added to create one composite score of caregiver narrative elaboration. Inter-rater reliability was calculated on 20 per cent of the transcripts using Cohen’s kappa, with coders achieving near-perfect reliability (K = .95).

In addition, using pragmatic function codes as a guide, interactions were coded for caregivers’ participatory role, drawing on the findings of recent research regarding the narrative styles adopted by Latino caregivers during book-sharing interactions (i.e. Caspe, 2009; Melzi et al., 2011). First, narratives were segmented into speech events describing each frame (or page) of the book. Then, each narrative was read closely and speech events within each frame received a holistic score based on the extent to which caregivers served as the narrator (i.e. the provider of narrative information) or audience (i.e. the elicitor of narrative information and/or provider of conversational support). Participatory scores ranged from 0 to 3. A score of 3 was assigned when the caregiver served as the sole narrator for that particular speech event, providing all new narrative information, whether spontaneous or elicited. A score of 2 was assigned when both the caregiver and child contributed new narrative information (i.e. they co-narrated), but the caregiver provided more new narrative information, relative to the child. A score of 1 was assigned when the caregiver provided less new narrative information than the child. Finally, frames in which no new narrative information was provided by the caregiver (i.e. the caregiver acted as the audience as the child narrated) received a score of 0. Holistic scores were then computed for each caregiver; as narratives consisted of 24 frames,⁶ possible participatory role scores ranged from 0 (mother as audience) to 72 (mother as sole narrator). Inter-rater reliability was established between the two authors on 20 per cent of the transcripts using Cohen’s Kappa, with coders achieving near-perfect reliability (K = .96).

Children’s developmental baseline skills

As part of the regular protocol at the participating preschool centre, children’s skills were screened by their teachers using the Early Screening Inventory–Revised (ESI-R; Meisels et al., 1997) upon preschool entry. The ESI-R serves as an indicator of children’s competencies in key developmental areas, including language and cognition, and was used in the current study to provide information regarding children’s baseline skills.

Children’ language skills

Child oral-language skills were assessed in their dominant language (i.e. Spanish or English) using The Preschool Language Scale (4th edition; Zimmerman et al., 2004), a nationally standardized assessment developed simultaneously in English and Spanish, and an appropriate measure to assess the language skills of Latino children (Espinosa and López, 2007). The English version of the PLS-4 was normed on 1,564 children (39% from minority backgrounds). Using culturally appropriate items, the Spanish version of the PLS-4 was normed on 1,188 Spanish-speaking children in the United States. The scale provides an auditory (or receptive) comprehension score and an expressive communication score, both of which have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The test–retest reliability coefficients range from .82 to .95, and internal consistency coefficients range from .66 to .96, with most above .81 (Zimmerman et al., 2008).

Children’s narrative skills

As an observational measure of early literacy skills, children were asked to share the wordless picture book A Boy, a Dog, a Frog, and a Friend (Mayer and Mayer, 1971) with the investigator in the language(s) of their choice. This task has been used to elicit narratives from children from a variety of countries and socio-economic backgrounds (Berman and Slobin, 1994, Caspe, 2009). All narratives were audio-recorded and later transcribed and verified using a standard system (CHAT; MacWhinney, 2000).

Narratives were then coded (in their original language) for conversational autonomy, or the degree to which the child told the story without the assistance of the investigator (see Blum-Kulka, 2008). Conversational autonomy codes included (1) requiring detailed prompting in order to tell the story, (2) telling the story with neutral prompting, (3) telling the story with minimal prompting, and (4) telling the story independently. In addition, using the Tracking Narrative Language Progress coding system (Gillam and Gillam, 2010), narratives were coded for story grammar and literate language. Story grammar includes seven elements related to the narrative’s macrostructure: character, setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, action/attempt and consequence. Each element is scored on a scale of 0 (i.e. did not include the element) to 3 (i.e. included and integrated in a specific and related manner more than once into the narrative). A composite score for story grammar is calculated by adding together the scores in each of the seven areas. Literate language includes five elements related to the overall microstructure of the narrative: coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, mental/linguistic verbs, adverbs and elaborated noun phrases. Each of these elements is also scored on a scale from 0 (i.e. did not include the element) to 3 (i.e. there were at least three different ways in which that element was incorporated into the story). A composite score for literate language is calculated by summing the scores in each of the five areas. Inter-rater reliability (see Multon, 2010) was established for all three narrative codes: conversational autonomy (r = .90), story grammar (r = .88) and literate language (r = .87).

Children’s print skills

Children’s print skills were assessed through two tasks: letter recognition and concepts about print. The letter-recognition task consisted of a chart containing upper- and lower-case alphabet letters, presented in random order, which was placed in front of the child. The investigator pointed to individual letters on the list and asked the child to name the letter. The investigator always began with the first letter of the child’s first name, and then went back to the top of the chart, and continued to point to the letters in the order they appeared. Children were assigned one point for each letter correctly named. Past work has demonstrated that this task is reliable, with a Cronbach’s alpha of .95 (Clay, 1993). Concepts about print were assessed using an adaptation of the English (Clay, 1979) and Spanish (Escamilla et al., 1996) versions of Clay’s Concepts about Print task (Cronbach’s alpha = .78). As part of the task, Stones (Clay, 1979), a specially designed text-based picture book, was shared with the target child, with the investigator stopping on each page to ask the child a question about a print concept (e.g. reading from left to right). In all, 13 questions related to print were asked, and children were assigned one point for each question that was answered correctly. Following the methodology of Caspe (2009), scores on the two tasks were combined to compute a total composite score.

Children’s social-emotional skills

Children’s social–emotional skills were assessed using the PSRA (Smith-Donald et al., 2007), a 28-item scale that measures children’s attention/impulse control, as well as their emotion regulation, during testing (Cronbach’s α = .93).

Results

Preliminary analyses: Children’s school readiness skills

Overall, children’s language skills (in their dominant language) were within the normal range of 85–115 (M = 100, SD = 15), with a mean receptive language standard score of 97.39 (SD = 12.09) and a mean expressive standard language score of 103.28 (SD = 12.33). No significant differences were found across the assessment languages (i.e. children assessed in both English and Spanish fell within the normal range).

In terms of the children’s narratives, 51% of the children chose to share the book primarily in Spanish, whereas 49% of the children shared the book mainly in English. Across both languages, there was wide variability in the children’s conversational autonomy skills. Seventeen per cent of the children relied on detailed prompting from the investigator in order to share the story; 33% of the children told the story with neutral prompting, 33% with minimal prompting, and 17% shared the story without any prompting. Children’s story grammar scores ranged from 2 to 16 (out of a possible 21), with a mean score of 9.13 (SD = 3.75), and their literate language scores ranged from 0 to 13 (out of a possible 15), with a mean score of 6.78 (SD = 2.66).

Children’s print-related skills ranged from 0 to 62 (out of a possible 67), with a mean score of 26.74 (SD = 19.18). Finally, children’s emotion regulation scores ranged from 15 to 32 (out of a possible 32), with a mean score of 23.30 (SD = 4.04), and their attention/impulse control scores ranged from 30 to 70 (out of a possible 70), with a mean score of 62.37 (SD = 7.97).

Preliminary analyses showed that there were no gender differences in any of the children’s school-readiness skills, aside from children’s attention/impulse control (t(115) = −2.81, p < .01), where girls were rated higher than boys. However, as expected, the results showed that children’s print-related skills, expressive language skills, conversational autonomy, story grammar scores and literate language scores, as well as their attention/impulse control, were all positively correlated with both age and years in preschool (see Table 2). Because of the strong correlation (and, as a result, ensuing collinearity) between age and years in preschool (r = .71, p < .001), analyses were run controlling for age. The decision to control for age, rather than for years in preschool, was three fold. Correlations between child outcome scores and age were slightly higher than were correlations between child outcomes and years in preschool. Moreover, because age is a continuous, rather than a dichotomous, variable, it allowed for wider variability and was more robust as a control variable (e.g. children were labelled as being in their second year of preschool if they attended the preschool centre the prior year, regardless of whether they had attended for the full year or the final two months of the school year). Finally, age is a variable more commonly identified in past literature as playing a key role in children’s skills.

Table 2.

Correlations between demographics and children’s outcomes.

	Age	Years in HS	Caregivers’ age	Caregivers’ education	Household size
Print skills	.44***	.29***	.10	.16	−.21*
Receptive language	.03	.11	.09	.07	−.18
Expressive language	.20*	.21*	.13	.01	−.21*
Conversational autonomy	.37***	.32***	.05	.04	−.02
Story grammar	.41***	.31***	.11	.11	−.19*
Literate language	.35***	.23**	.11	.03	−20*
Emotion regulation	.25**	.18	.15	.15	−.16
Attention/impulse control	.25**	.26**	.04	−.10	−.16

p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

Children’s outcomes were also related to home and caregiver demographic variables (see Table 2). Correlational analyses showed, for example, that the number of people (adults and/or children) living in the child’s home was negatively correlated with children’s print-related skills (r = −.21, p < .05), expressive language skills (r −.21, p < .05), story grammar scores (r = −.19, p < .05) and literate language (r = −.20, p < .05). Moreover, print-related skills were correlated with caregivers’ language dominance (as measured by the language in which caregivers chose to share the wordless picture book with the child), such that children whose caregivers were English-dominant had higher print-related scores than did children whose caregivers were Spanish-dominant, t(116) = 3.15, p < .01.

The results of an exploratory ANOVA also showed that children’s print-related skills differed based on the caregiver’s country of origin. Specifically, children whose caregivers were born in Mexico had lower print-related skills (M = 22.13, SD = 18.24) as compared to children whose caregivers were US-born (M = 32.42, SD = 19.57), F(2, 112) = 4.05, p < .05. Children whose caregivers were from another Central or South American country did not differ significantly from the other two groups in terms of their print skills (M = 31.64, SD = 18.69). Children’s attention/impulse control varied by caregivers’ country of origin as well, with children whose caregivers were U.S.-born (M = 64.82, SD = 1.67) receiving higher scores as compared to children whose caregivers were born in a Central or South American country other than Mexico (M = 59.17, SD = 1.43), F(2, 110) = 3.82, p < .05. Children whose parents were Mexican-born did not differ significantly from either of the other groups (M = 63.02, SD = 1.00).

Print-related literacy practices in the home

Number of children’s books

As shown in Figure 1, there was wide variability in the number of children’s books available in the home, though, on average, caregivers had more books in English than in Spanish. More specifically, whereas 50 per cent of participating caregivers reported having 15 or more children’s book in English at home, 61 per cent of caregivers reported having five or fewer children’s books in Spanish. Because the majority of the families reported having few children’s books in Spanish, if any, all further analyses were run on the total number of children’s books in the home, regardless of the language in which they were written. The results showed that the number of children’s books in the home was correlated with the caregivers’ age (r = .24, p < .01) and the number of people living in the home (r = −.23, p < .05). In addition, caregivers who were unemployed reported having fewer children’s books in their home (M = 4.39, SD = 2.11), as compared to caregivers who were employed part-time (M = 5.67, SD = 2.27), F(4, 114) = 4.01, p < .05.

Next, analyses explored the relation between the number of children’s books in the home and child outcomes. The number of children’s books was correlated with children’s receptive language (r = .19, p < .05) and story grammar (r = .21, p < .05) skills, but there were no predictive relations after controlling for key demographic variables. By contrast, the number of children’s books was correlated with and predictive of children’s expressive language (B = 1.50, p = .01, ΔR²= .06), literate language (B = .24, p < .05, ΔR²= .04), and emotion regulation (B = .34, p < .05, ΔR²= .03), after controlling for demographic variables (e.g. baseline developmental skills at the start of preschool, children’s age, household size).

Library visits

The majority of the caregivers (62%) reported never visiting a library with the target child. Twenty-one per cent of caregivers reported visiting the library once or twice a month, and 16 per cent of caregivers reported visiting the library once or twice a week. Library visits were correlated with caregiver’s level of education (r = .27, p < .01), with caregivers who attained higher levels of education taking the child to the library more frequently than those who had fewer years of formal schooling.

The frequency of library visits was correlated with children’s print (r = .21, p < .05), receptive language (r = .22, p < .05), expressive language (r = .23, p < .05) and story grammar (r = .20, p < .05) skills. However, only the relations between library visits and receptive (B = 2.83, p = .06) and expressive language (B = 3.08, p < .05) were significant after controlling for key demographic variables, with the frequency of library visits accounting for 4 per cent of the variance in each language outcome.

Frequency of book reading

The overwhelming majority of the caregivers reported that their preschool child was read to by a caregiver in the home either on a daily basis (45%) or once or twice per week (54%). Not surprisingly, caregivers who were more educated read to their children more than caregivers with fewer years of education (r = .26, p < .01).

Follow-up analyses showed that, after controlling for the necessary demographic variables, the frequency with which books were read to the target children both correlated with and predictive of children’s print-related skills (B = 7.17, p < .05, ΔR²= .04) and expressive language skills (B = 6.11, p < .01, ΔR²= .06), as well as their emotion regulation (B = 1.48, p < .05, ΔR²= .04).

Features of book-sharing interactions

Sixty-nine per cent of caregivers (n = 87) shared the picture book primarily in Spanish, while the remaining 31 per cent used mainly English during the book-sharing interaction.⁷ Regardless of the language used to share the book, there was variability in the length of the stories, with caregivers contributing between 33 and 377 utterances (M = 127.15, SD = 63.39).

Caregiver narrative elaboration

There was wide variability in caregiver elaborativeness during the book-sharing interaction (range = 15–204 elaborative utterances). On average, however, caregivers included approximately 82.73 elaborative utterances when sharing the wordless book (SD = 35.04). More specifically, as can be seen in Figure 2, the majority of the information caregivers included in the narratives was in the form of elaborative utterances provided to the children.

Analyses showed that elaboration was correlated with caregiver education (r = .29, p < .001), such that caregivers with more years of formal education were more elaborative when sharing the book with their child. Nevertheless, although there was much variability in the degree to which caregivers were elaborative during the book-sharing interaction, elaborativeness was not related to any of the child outcomes.

Non-elaborative talk

Although, on average, caregivers engaged in very low levels of extratextual talk (M = 5.12, SD = 7.38, range = 0–39 utterances), there was a strong trend towards significance in the predictive relation between the amount of extratextual talk and children’s expressive language skills (B = .46, p < .01, ΔR²= .07). However, no other significant relations were found between extratextual or conversational utterances and child outcomes.

Participatory role

In contrast to elaboration, there was very little variability in caregivers’ participatory scores. Out of a possible score of 72, caregivers, on average, scored 60.71 (SD = 13.68) for participation. Moreover, a score of 72 was the mode for the current sample of caregivers. In other words, the overwhelming majority of caregivers adopted a strong participatory role, serving as sole narrators who provided narrative information to their children. In turn, the children acted as an attentive audience, actively listening to the story.

Not surprisingly, given the lack of variability in the participatory role, follow-up analyses suggested that participatory role was not related to any child outcomes.

Non-book, print-related activities

Most caregivers reported engaging with the children in non-book, print-related activities (i.e. environmental print) – such as pointing out letters and words on food labels and signs on the street, engaging in conversation about recipes while cooking, and asking children to ‘write’ their name or other words – on a regular basis. More specifically, 66 per cent of caregivers reported engaging their children in such activities at least once or twice a week, if not daily, whereas 33 per cent of caregivers reported doing so at least once or twice a month. Interestingly, the frequency of these activities differed by children’s gender, t(125) = −2.74, p < .01, such that caregivers tended to engage in fewer activities with sons than with daughters.

Analyses showed that, after controlling for children’s baseline skills at preschool entry, as well as other demographic variables, the frequency of these non-book, print-related activities was correlated with and predictive of a wide range of school readiness skills, including print-related (B = 2.23, p < .05, ΔR²= .04), expressive language (B = 1.70, p = .01, ΔR²= .06) and story grammar (B = .35, p = .05, ΔR²= .03) skills, as well as emotion regulation (B = .76, p < .001, ΔR²= .13) and attention/impulse control (B = .91, p < .05, ΔR²= .05).

Discussion

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the print-related practices used by caregivers of Latino preschoolers and to explore the relation between these practices and children’s school readiness outcomes at the end of the preschool year. Unlike past research that compared Latinos to other cultural/ethnic groups, the current study sought to examine the print practices of a low-income Pan-Latino sample in one community in the northeastern United States.

Perhaps as a result of this approach, our descriptive analyses suggest that the children’s school-readiness skills (as assessed in their dominant language) were comparable to those typically seen in preschool-aged children. For instance, children’s receptive and expressive language skills in their dominant language (i.e. Spanish or English) were within the normal range. Moreover, their print-related scores were comparable to those found among preschoolers in past research (e.g. Diamond et al., 2008; Powell et al., 2010). This is not surprising in light of research (e.g. Bialystok et al., 2000; Reyes and Azuara, 2008) suggesting that children exposed to two languages demonstrate strong emergent literacy skills, and in particular, print skills. Finally, the participating children demonstrated age-appropriate narrative skills, as well as strong self-regulation skills, specifically insofar as their emotion regulation and attention/impulse control were concerned.

As all children were recruited from one bilingual Spanish-English preschool centre, the age-appropriate school readiness competencies might be attributed to the children’s exposure to two languages (see e.g. Barac et al., 2014) as well as the support the children and their families received at preschool. At the same time, the findings suggest that these skills are also a result of print-related practices in the children’s home. For example, the number of children’s books in the home, visits to the library and the frequency with which children were read to were predictive of children’s language, literacy and social–emotional school readiness skills at the end of the preschool year. Interestingly, in contrast to past work which suggests that Latino families have few books in their homes (e.g. Raikes et al., 2006), the results of the current study showed that families had, on average, about 20 children’s books, though there was much variability across families. Yet, even among Spanish-speaking families, the majority reported having few Spanish-language children’s books in their home (i.e. fewer than five children’s books in Spanish as compared to 15 in English). This is not surprising, given the paucity of high-quality Spanish children’s books available, even in large, urban cities in the United States with high percentages of Spanish-speaking Latino families (Hoff and Rumiche, 2011), such as the one from which the participants in our study were drawn.

Furthermore, results of the study appear to lend support to past work showing that Latino families residing in low-income, under-resourced neighbourhoods are less likely to have access to a library (Reese and Goldenberg, 2008). Not surprisingly, the majority of the participating families in the current study reported that they did not frequent libraries on a regular basis, or even occasionally. Past work has suggested that this might result from a lack of access which, in turn, might explain, at least in part, why low-income Latino children are not read to by their caregivers on a regular basis (e.g. Reese and Gallimore, 2000). Notably, though, the lack of children’s books in Spanish and the limited visits to libraries notwithstanding, the children in the current study were read to on a regular basis (i.e. at least once or twice a week, if not daily), typically by their mother (or mother figure), or both their mother and father. This finding tallies with recent research showing that low-income Latino mothers of preschoolers report reading to their children at least three times per week (Husley et al., 2011) and might be reflective of the protective factor preschool plays in encouraging parents to engage in book-sharing interactions with their children.

Past work has shown that shared book-reading is integral to children’s developmental skills (e.g. Haden et al., 1996), and culturally-specific storytelling patterns have been found in the book-sharing styles used by Latino caregivers (e.g. Caspe, 2009; Melzi and Caspe, 2005; Melzi et al., 2011). Thus, a second focus of the current study was on the discourse features present in caregiver–child book-sharing interactions. Although there was wide variability in the degree of elaborativeness across participants, on average, caregivers provided the majority of the information to their children and asked few questions of them. In other words, rather than co-construct the story with their children, caregivers tended to adopt a participatory role in which they served as the primary, if not sole, narrator of an engaging story. These findings are akin to those of past research, which have shown that Latino caregivers tend to share elaborative and engaging stories with their preschoolers, but provide this information to their children, rather than elicit it from them (e.g. Caspe, 2009; Melzi et al., 2011) in a manner aligned with their cultural preference for a situation-centred approach to child-rearing.

Overall then, the results both support and extend past research by highlighting that exposure to book-related print at home is important for low-income U.S. Latino children’s school-readiness. As has been found in past research with diverse populations (e.g. Raikes et al., 2006; Sénéchal et al., 2008), the number of books in the home (regardless of language) and the frequency of library visits were predictive of children’s oral language skills, whereas the frequency of book-sharing was predictive of both expressive language and print knowledge. Interestingly, the results of the current study also show that exposure to books supports children’s emotion regulation, as well. This finding aligns with recent research (e.g. Adrián et al., 2007; Dyer et al., 2000; Farver et al., 2006) that suggests that book-related practices in the home are supportive of preschoolers’ social–emotional competencies. Explanations for this relation include the prevalence of emotion-related themes in children’s books, as well as the caregiver–child bonding that ensues during joint book-reading interactions. Moreover, in the current study, the children probably gained active listening and, in turn, emotion regulation competencies, as a result of the seeming expectation that they adopt the role of an attentive audience during book-sharing. In other words, in a manner akin to the cultural ways of learning through close observation common in Latin-American communities (see e.g. Paradise and Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff, 2014), book-sharing might serve as an important context for Latino children to learn the academic and social–emotional skills inherent in becoming bien educados (Reese et al., 1995).

Furthermore, the results suggest that caregivers’ inclusion of extratextual talk (albeit in small amounts) during book-sharing interactions was predictive of children’s expressive language skills, supporting the findings of Haden et al. (1996) regarding the importance of meta-narrative talk. Unlike findings from studies of non-Latino groups, however, the specific styles adopted by low-income Latino caregivers when engaging in book-sharing interactions with their preschool-aged children do not seem to be as important for children’s school-readiness skills. In other words, neither narrative elaboration nor participation related to any child outcomes. This finding is probably driven by the lack of variability in the overall style adopted by participating caregivers. As most caregivers adopted a sole-narrator role in which they provided the information to the children – who, in turn, served as an attentive audience-analyses comparing those with a strong participatory style to those who adopted a more co-constructive role were not feasible. What is particularly notable, however, is that adopting this sole-narrator role did not appear to be detrimental to child outcomes, in that the children, on average, demonstrated age-appropriate language, emergent literacy and self-regulatory skills.

A final, key contribution of the current study, and one that has not been the focus of past enquiry, is the significance of environmental print for children’s development of both emergent literacy and self-regulation competencies. Participating caregivers reported frequent practices related to environmental print, namely pointing out letters and words on food labels and signs, discussing recipes with children, and encouraging the children to ‘write’ their name or other words, thus highlighting the importance of non-book-related print. Encouraging the use of non-book-related environmental print might, thus, serve as a particularly critical protective factor for members of low-income, under-resourced communities who might not have access to books.

The findings of the current study cannot be extended to Latino families from all backgrounds. Although all participating families were low-income, the majority of caregivers had attained at least a high-school diploma, whereas only 10 per cent of caregivers had less than an elementary school education. These statistics are representative of the educational level of Latino families in the city from which participants were drawn (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009). However, they might not represent the educational level of Latinos across the United States. Moreover, half of the caregivers were immigrants from Mexico, close to a quarter of the caregivers had emigrated from other Spanish-speaking countries (e.g. the Dominican Republic, Ecuador), and the remaining caregivers were born in the United States. Imbued in each Latino community is a distinct cultural heritage, replete with unique cultural practices. Thus, additional research is needed to explore whether the current findings can be extended to a larger range of Latino families.

Overall, however, the current study has highlighted the importance of access to print – rather than adopting a co-constructive, dialogic book-sharing style – in predicting positive outcomes among low-income Latino preschoolers in the U.S. Undeniably, however, findings based on self-reporting measures, such as the one used in the current study, need to be interpreted with caution, as issues of social desirability might lead individuals to select responses that might not accurately depict their everyday activities. Yet, this limitation notwithstanding, for this demographic of Latino preschool families, the specific styles used during book-sharing interactions might not be as critical in building preschoolers’ school readiness skills as is simply exposing the children to books and forms of environmental print on a regular basis.

Print-related practices in the home are an important contributor to children’s development of school-readiness skills. However, the home is only one of many contexts in which young children have opportunities to develop language and literacy skills. Nonetheless, beginning with a close understanding of home-literacy practices is essential to highlighting those resources that children bring to school (Weisner, 2005), so that a strengths-based approach can be taken to support the school-readiness of Latino children in the United States. As the current study has demonstrated, low-income Latino children from both Spanish-dominant and English-dominant homes are exposed to a variety of print-related experiences on a regular basis. Seeking ways to build on these practices would be far more advantageous than striving to modify or change them, in an effort to support the school-readiness skills of low-income Latino children.

Footnotes

Funding

The study was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (Grant # 90YR0034). The authors would like to thank Silvia Niño for her invaluable assistance with data collection, transcription and coding.

Notes

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