Key Project
Book Language: Promoting Literacy and Oracy in the Early Years via Structured Experience with Written Language
Project Team: Nicky Dawson, Kate Nation
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Parents and caregivers are encouraged to read with their children from an early age. But what do children gain from these shared book reading experiences?
Funded by The Nuffield Foundation, the aim of this research project was to explore what is unique about the language of children’s books and to measure what children learn through systematic exposure to ‘book language’ in a shared reading context.Â
Some our findings are summarised below. Interested in finding out more? Follow the links to our papers below, and click on the document opposite to read and download the project's Main Public Report.Â
To cite the report: Nation, K., & Dawson, N.J. (2024). Book language: Promoting literacy and oracy in the early years via structured experience with written language. https://readoxford.web.ox.ac.uk/our-research/book-language.
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Children learn from the language they hear. Growing up in a rich language environment can support children’s oral language development and lay the foundations for the emergence of literacy. Before children start school, much of the language they hear comes from caregivers and people in their immediate environment, but everyday talk is not the only type of language children might encounter. Often caregivers will read to their children, and this offers many potential benefits for children’s learning and development. One reason why reading to children might be so important is because the language of books is very different to the language of spoken communication.
The first part of our project involved finding out how 'book language' differs from the language children hear via day-to-day conversation. To do this, we analysed large datasets consisting of child-directed speech (records of caregivers speaking to 0-6 year-olds) and child-directed text, that is, the language content of children's books written for young children to hear in the context of shared reading. We then compared the two types of language input, focussing on both lexical and syntactic factors.
Our research shows that even picture books targeted at very young children contain a wider range of words, which also tend to be more abstract and sophisticated, compared to child-directed speech. What’s more, we found that book language provides access to types of sentence structures that are rarely encountered in speech, but which are important for children’s own developing literacy skills. This means that reading (or being read to) provides children with the opportunity to experience language that they otherwise wouldn't encounter.Â
Some of the differences between children's book language and conversational language are summarised in the infographic below. In our recent review paper, we describe and discuss these differences, and consider the implications of 'book language' for children's language, literacy and emotional development.Â
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Results from the first part of our project suggest that reading books to children might be important for children’s own language development. In the second part of the project, we wanted to address this proposal directly by measuring changes in children’s language use and understanding following repeated exposures to books containing rich and diverse vocabulary, as summarised in the infographic above. We created eight short illustrated stories (e.g., ‘The Wrong Snack’, extracts shown below), which we read to children across three sessions. One version of the stories contained more advanced and varied vocabulary; the second version contained advanced (but less varied) vocabulary; the third contained more basic and less varied vocabulary. In our study, we asked children to retell the stories each time they heard them so we could look at the language they use in their retellings and measure how this differs across the three versions of the stories and across the three sessions. We also investigated whether children learn something about the vocabulary in those stories after hearing them three times.
This part of the project was run as a Registered Report. It has been accepted in principle for publication in the Journal of Child Language, and you can read our Stage 1 Registered Report here. This provides a full Introduction and Methods section along with a detailed analysis plan. Data collection is complete and analyses are underway. We are looking forward to submitting our Stage 2 Report soon, but in the meantime, preliminary analyses are reported in our Main Public Report.
Stories by Nicky Dawson, illustrations by Neil Usher. From Dawson et al. Effects of lexical richness in storybooks on children's narrative retellings and word knowledge.
