Congrats to the Read Lab’s class of 2024! While our seniors are moving on to their next chapters,
the projects in the lab that they’ve been leading are just beginning to blossom.
Here are Irene, Ella, Elsa and Sophie presenting their findings from our “Book Types & Reader Goals” study at the Alumni Science Conference
And Sarah and Natalia presenting their first round of findings from our “Reading Bilingual Books with Bilingual Learners” study at the Alumni Science Conference
The Read Lab is trying something new. We’re inviting dual-language learners who are working on their Spanish and English and their grown-ups to read bilingual books with us over zoom.
We’ve missed getting to be together in person with kids and families, but we’re still working hard to understand how different types of storybooks can help support language learning for many types of learners. So, we (like everyone!) are trying something virtual.
If you know a 3-6 year old Spanish/English learner who likes animal books and is willing to try some reading over zoom, let us know! Here is a link to an interest form – if you fill it out, we’ll get back to you with more information about this study and details about how to participate.
Hi friends, research collaborators and families. It may come as no surprise that we haven’t had an opportunity in the last couple of months to update our blog with the tidal wave of changes that we’re all experiencing right now. But, we want you to know that we are still here, and we are working (a little slower than usual) behind the scenes to find new ways to share the work that we finished earlier this Spring, and to reimagine the studies we were starting and planning in new formats. Hopefully, our labs will be able to share with you very soon some creative online adaptations of our shared reading, language play, and social cognition studies that will allow for wider and more accessible participation.
Stay tuned!
It’s been a busy year of growth and development in 2019… not just for the kiddos that we’re studying but for the Read Lab too 🙂 Here are some highlights:
And, now a holiday break before the next year of reading, adventure, and language learning kicks off…
It’s summertime in the Read Lab, which means strolls around the quiet campus and lots of project planning for the coming fall. While we gather ideas, we have a few questions for parents (and kiddos) to help us get a sense of what our young storybook listeners are noticing and commenting on when they share a book with a grown-up. If you have a child in your family (aged 2- to 6) who you like to curl up and read with, and you’ve got 10 minutes to spare we’d love to hear from you. You can take our quick online survey here:
Shared Reading Survey for Parents
And, happy summer!
With the new year upon us, the Read Lab is exploring a new question about the benefits of shared reading. In a study lead by Honors Student and Research Assistant extraordinaire, Ellen Kruse, we are looking at whether 4- and 5-year-olds really pick up on the “lessons” that some children’s books are meant to impart.
Lessons can be complicated (e.g., what’s going on in The Giving Tree??) but also simple (e.g., “sharing is good”), and there may be some aspects of the books themselves that make the lessons easier or harder for children to relate to (e.g., how much is the main character really like me?). So Ellen is tackling this with a new storybook study in our lab, and if you have a 4-year-old who likes to hear new stories and who might want to tell us what they think of ours, let us know and we’ll be happy to share our study with you!
Hear Dr. Read’s (one minute!) podcast from last week on WAMC’s “The Academic Minute” and find out what we’re learning about the utility of rhyme and strategic pauses for helping highlight new words in storybook reading!
The Read Lab is wrapping up our 2-year study of which types of bilingual books best help Spanish and English learning children of different ages and stages grow their vocabularies. If you live close to Santa Clara and you’ve got a 3- to 5-year-old at home who like learning Spanish and English words, let us know! (email: childresearch@scu.edu)Â We’re giving bilingual books away to our volunteers, but only for one more month!
We’ll be spending the winter analyzing all the data that our junior scientists have been helping us with on this project.. so stay tuned this Spring for a summary of our findings, and in the meantime.. tell us what your favorite bilingual book is!
We just got back from the biennial International Mind Brain and Education Society conference in Los Angeles and wanted to follow up with some of our key take-aways.
Recently the Read lab conducted a preliminary survey of local parents who are raising young English and Spanish learners to find out more about the choices parents make when sharing books with their young dual-language learners that support both languages. We discovered that categorizing children’s home language and shared reading experiences is not an “either/or” (or “esto/aquello”) dichotomy, and that locally there are many different flavors of what it means to be a bilingual family!
Parents of varying proficiency themselves in each language helped us with the survey. And, while there were no overall differences in the amount of shared reading parents do with their children based on their primary language at home, and no differences in the variety of regular readers or the likelihood that it is usually mom who is the primary reader (go madres!). Parents in primarily English speaking or primarily Spanish speaking homes reported reading with their kids much more frequently in their own more proficient language. However (this is the fun part), parents who identified their household as equally bilingual reported reading in their less proficient language more often than the other two groups, often commenting that they did so in an effort to bolster their child’s dual-language learning, even if it meant challenging themselves or making mistakes in front of their child. Also, we found that in each group, parents’ attitudes and rules about language mixing also ranged from a strict policy of non-mixing (e.g., “we only Speak Spanish at home, no English allowed!”) to frequent and enthusiastic translating between Spanish and English.
The results from our survey so far are already interesting, as they spark new questions about how cross-language shared reading and mixing and translating may all be influencing what young children learn from stories in dual-language learning homes!
We will be presenting some of these findings at the Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco in May, and also at the Jean Piaget Society Meeting in Amsterdam in June – so stay tuned for what our academic colleagues think of this work 🙂
But in the meantime, the survey responses we have collected are also helping us with the Spanish/English storybooks study we are just getting started here at home in San Jose. Knowing more about the language practices and preferences of parents who read with their preschool-aged dual-language learners will help us find the right books for the right kinds of learners in our local community.
If *you* are raising a dual-language learner (of any language pair, not just Spanish and English) what do you think? How do you use storybooks to support either or both of your child’s languages? Do you have strategies that involve translating, mixing, or immersion? Let us know! And also, if you’d like to participate in the Spanish/English storybooks study, send us an email and we’ll tell you more about it: childresearch@scu.edu