Dialogic Reading

Caroline Erdos, Literacy Expert

Dr. Erdos is a consultant for the Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board in Quebec and a speech-language pathology advisor for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Canada. Prior to this, she was ALDI Coordinator (Advancing Learning in Differentiation & Inclusion) for the 10 English school boards in Quebec, Canada, where she supported resource teachers through various professional development initiatives. Caroline has over 20 years’ experience as a pediatric speech-language pathologist in a tertiary care centre and has worked as a language and literacy consultant and a legal expert in speech-language pathology. Her areas of expertise include bilingualism and multilingualism, reading impairment, oral language impairment, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and craniofacial disorders. She has guest lectured at Université de Montréal, McGill University, and the McGill University Health Centre. She has also given workshops at numerous conferences across North America and has written and collaborated on several publications.

Dialogic Reading

In my last blog, I highlighted the importance of engaging in conversational exchanges with your child as a way to help build vocabulary and grammar. Dialogic reading is a way to ensure that conversational turn-taking also happens during book reading. To avoid getting stuck in a barrage of “What’s this?” questions, you can use these helpful acronyms devised by Grover J. Whitehurst: PEER and CROWD. These acronyms can help you remember how to diversify your questions and comments during book reading with your child. They go as follows:

PEER

Prompt your child to say something about the book,

-         Adult: Oh look! What’s happening? (while pointing to the straw house falling apart)

-         Child: He blow

Evaluate your child's response,

-         Adult: You’re right. The wolf is blowing.

Expand your child's response by rephrasing and adding information to it,

-         Adult: The wolf blew the house down.

Repeat the prompt to make sure your child has learned from the expansion.

-         Adult: What’s happening?

You may prompt your child in various ways. There are the 5 different types of prompts (from the PEER sequence above) that you can use. These prompts can be represented by the following acronym:

CROWD

Completion prompt

Leave a blank at the end of a sentence for your child to fill in. Completion prompts work best with simple, repetitive texts.

-         Adult: He huffed and he _______

Recall prompt

Ask a question about what happened in the book. This can only be used with a book that your child has already read.

-         Adult: Do you remember what the third house was made of?

Open-ended prompt

For example, ask “What do you think is happening in this picture?”. These prompts work well when there are detailed illustrations.

-         Adult: What do you think the pig will do with all that wood?

Wh- prompt

Ask questions that begin with what, where, when, why, and how. These prompts are usually related to pictures in the book.

-         Adult: Why is the pig using bricks instead of straw?

Distancing prompt

Prompt your child to relate something about the story to something they have experienced or to another story they have read.

-         Adult: Do you remember when we built a treehouse together last summer?

Variety is key in language stimulation. PEER and CROWD sequences will help ensure that you change it up. You can find more information as well as videos featuring Grover J. Whitehurst himself here.