Children can lack skills that are critical to school readiness and enter school unprepared. They lack the vocabulary, sound structure, the structure of stories and language, continued attention, the desire to learn, and so on. Preschoolers need the nourishment of books just like they need food, shelter and love.
Dialogic reading is an interactive technique which encourages adults to prompt children with questions and engage them in discussions while reading to them.
When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens. In dialogic reading, the adult lets the child become the storyteller. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child. No one can learn to play the guitar just by listening to someone else play. Likewise, no one can learn to read just by listening to someone else read. Children learn most from books when they are actively involved.
Follow the PEER sequence to improve the interaction between a child and the adult. The adult:
- Prompts the child to say something about the book
- Evaluates the child’s response
- Expands the child’s response by rephrasing and adding information to it, and
- Repeats the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion
For example, imagine the parent and the child are looking at the page of a book that has a picture of an airplane. The parent says, “What is this?” (the prompt) while pointing to the fire truck. The child says, plane, and the parent follows with “That’s right (the evaluation); it’s a red airplane (the expansion); can you say airplane?” (the repetition).
It is recommended, except for the first reading of a book to children, PEER sequences should occur on nearly every page. Occasionally you can read the written words on the page and then prompt the child to say something; however, for many books, gradually read less and less of the written words in the book and leave more to the child.