Psychological Society of South Africa. All rights reserved. South African Journal of Psychology, 42(4), 2012, pp.

617-627
ISSN 0081-2463

Dialogic reading and child language growth combating

developmental risk in South Africa
Zahir Vally
Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Winnicott Research Unit, University of Reading, UK
zahir.vally@uct.ac.za

The issue of inadequate child cognitive stimulation requires immediate remediation given its wide-
spread prevalence in developing countries. Dialogic book-sharing is now recognised as a potent
means for stimulating the development of a range of important early cognitive and language skills in
children; including receptive and expressive vocabulary, abstract language, the syntactic quality and
complexity of sentence construction, emergent literacy skills, literal and inferential language, and oral
narrative skills. This article is a review of the current research base on sharing books with young
children. It reveals widespread application of this sort of intervention in the developed world, with
programmes having been run by training individual parents or as groups in classroom settings. While
implementation in poor, developing countries remains scant, there is a clear rationale for testing the
applicability of dialogic reading in Africa as there is established evidence that South African children
are at a clear cognitive disadvantage to their peers in developed countries. The dialogic reading pro-
gramme, its components, and implementation issues are discussed with a review of the major
empirical findings. It is further argued that this type of intervention poses much potential for addressing
the documented loss of developmental potential in South Africa (SA).

Keywords: Africa; book sharing; children; dialogic reading; language development; paired reading

Concern for the more than 200 million children younger than 5 years in developing countries who
fail to meet their developmental potential is growing (United Nations, 2005). These children, pre-
dominantly from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia face a multitude of detrimental environmental factors
that threaten their cognitive, motor, and social-emotional development. In particular, the widespread
prevalence of abject poverty is said to impact child survival rates, health, nutrition, cognition, and
education completion which in turn are linked to later earnings (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007).
This failure of children to attain their developmental potential, attain satisfactory levels of education,
and become economically competent members of their societies contributes to the perpetuation of
the cycle of poverty and its continued entrenchment from one generation to the next.
The issue of inadequate cognitive stimulation requires immediate remediation given its wide-
spread prevalence in developing countries. In particular, there is substantial evidence to suggest that
South African children are at a significant cognitive disadvantage, certainly more so than elsewhere
in the world. Recent reports on the quality of early education in SA paint a gloomy picture. With each
year that has passed, there has been an observed trend of consistent deterioration of achieved grade
scores, especially for the key skills of reading and literacy. For example, a recent government report
revealed that for learners in Grade 3 (children aged 9 years), 58.1% of learners did not achieve the
acceptable and requisite performance level (Department of Basic Education, 2011). Consistent with
this finding, in the Performance in International Reading Literacy Study, an international review of
literacy skills amongst 910 year old children, of the 40countries assessed SA ranked last (Twist,
2007). Also, De Witt (2009) reports that only 35% of Grade R learners in South Africa meet the
minimum criteria for early literacy development.
Furthermore, it is estimated that only 1041% of parents provide cognitively stimulating mate-
rials to their child, while only 1133% of parents actively involve their children in cognitively stimu-
lating activities (Walker et al., 2007). It is arguably this lack of cognitive stimulation that contributes
most to the continued economic deprivation and the intergenerational transmission of poverty, given
its importance for educational and occupational success and, ultimately upward social mobility.
Moreover, there is consistent evidence that providing children with increased cognitive stimu-
618 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012

lation and exposure to learning opportunities significantly increases both cognitive and social-emo-
tional competence; gains which persist well beyond the conclusion of the intervention (e.g. Eickmann
et al., 2003; Klein & Rye, 2004; Magwaza & Edwards, 1991; Powell & Grantham-McGregor, 1989;
Sharma & Nagar, 2009).
Despite the compelling evidence outlining the developmental consequences of this risk factor,
the documented extent of the issue in the developing world, and the potential gains that stand to be
made through intervention, governments in these countries have been slow to respond. Only a hand-
ful in SA have responded to the call for the development and conduct of interventions that promote
child development and ameliorate the loss of developmental potential in the millions of disadvan-
taged children in impoverished countries who are cognitively under-stimulated (e.g. Seabi & Amod,
2009; Seabi, 2012; Skuy, Mentis, Arnott, & Nkwe, 1990). Interventions such as these that support
children during the critical pre-school years are essential in combating the psycho-social threats of
poverty, deprivation, and illiteracy so prevalent in SA. Dialogic interventions in particular are well
suited for meeting these needs given that it is affordable to develop and deliver, can be easily dis-
seminated in communities by lay individuals, or indeed be offered as an adjunct to existing parent-
awareness, remedial, or psychological services.

Shared book-reading
With the recognition of pervasive cognitive under-stimulation in developing countries, we have
recently moved toward a growing rejection of deficit models of literacy in favour of broader con-
ceptualizations; including a rekindled interest in early literacy situated in cognitive stimulation
activities such as book-sharing, sometimes referred to as shared or paired reading (Schuele & Van
Kleeck, 1987; Van Kleeck, 1998; 2003).
The now considerable research into shared reading with young children spans almost three
decades. The resulting and overwhelming positive evidence has led to interactive book-sharing being
advocated as an essential cognitive stimulation activity bearing a multitude of benefits for childhood
development. Bus, Van IJzendoorn, and Pellegrini (1995) conducted a meta-analysis of these studies
and conclude that book-sharing in the first 6 years of life is related to outcome measures like
language growth, emergent literacy, and reading achievement (p. 1). This research reveals that
parents engage in extensive labelling of objects, questioning, and commenting about the pictures
depicted in books during reading with their children, more so than in any other context. These
parental behaviours during picture-book reading maximize childrens exposure to novel vocabulary
and concepts that are rarely used in everyday conversations or those beyond the realm of their daily
experience (De Temple & Snow, 2003). Often parents engage in decontextualized talk during
book-sharing, a discussion that extends beyond the pictorial representations in the book to include
additional new and unfamiliar concepts. This talk during book-sharing is often more complex com-
pared to other parent-child interactions (e.g. free play or meal-time settings) and serves to enhance
comprehension, vocabulary, and emergent literacy (De Temple, 2001). Empirical enquiry confirms
that measures of parental mean length of utterances, responsive replies to child utterances, and
abstraction are higher in book reading contexts than elsewhere (e.g. Crain-Thoreson, Dahlin, &
Powell, 2001).
Early book sharing explorations took the form of case studies designed to elucidate the beha-
vioural interaction of parent and child during storybook reading. For example, Snow and Goldfield
(1983) examined the exchanges between a mother and child dyad about the content of a book over
the course of 11 months. In this case, the act of shared book reading became an accepted and expec-
ted part of a routine that, they claim, facilitated language acquisition. Similarly, Ninio and Bruner
(1978) claimed that participating in a ritualized dialogue, rather than imitation, represented a major
mechanism through which labelling was achieved. Phillips and McNaughton (1990) examined the
changes that occurred within the book-sharing interactions of 10 mother-child dyads reading the same
storybook and found that most of the verbal contributions to the interaction on the part of the parent
focused directly on the content of the page being read; but parents tended to change their verbal
 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012 619

contributions to the book-sharing interaction across time, as the target book became more familiar.
Further analysis revealed that parents used significantly more clarifications and explanations of text
than anticipations or predictions of future events on the first reading. But this changed with time.
Mothers made fewer clarifications during the last reading than on the first, and with time seemingly
withdrew from the interaction and allowed the child opportunity to take on more responsibility for
initiating the book-related interactions (Phillips & McNaughton, 1990). Also considering such group
differences, Haden, Reese, and Fivush (1996) found that maternal book-sharing styles were not
consistent across types of books as mothers tailored their styles and extra-textual comments accor-
dingly, depending on whether the book was familiar or not.
These early observations support the notion of maternal scaffolding behaviour, a concept
frequently cited in the book-sharing literature, and illustrates that parents tailor their support and
guide childrens participation and engagement during book-sharing sessions. In exploring the scaf-
folding interaction between adult and child, most research in this area has adopted a Vygotskian
framework. Vygotsky (1978) posits that childrens language learning and consequent cognitive
development occurs within the context of a social interaction with a knowledgeable other, and is
particularly aided by the language exchanged during this social interaction. Parents scaffold their
childrens mastery of language by utilizing books and their contents (pictures and basic words) to
initiate, support, and encourage the acquisition of new words.
Ninio and Bruners (1978) seminal study of book reading cites the following interchange
between mother and child to illustrate typical adult scaffolding in a book-sharing situation:

Mother: Look!
Child: (Touches picture).
Mother: What are those?
Child: (Vocalizes and smiles).
Mother: Yes, they are rabbits.
Child: (Vocalizes, smiles, and looks up at mother).
Mother: (Laughs). Yes, rabbit.
Child: (Vocalizes and smiles).
Mother: (Laughs). Yes.

This example represents an early book-sharing situation with a pre-literate child, occurring
before the child is capable of basic recognisable speech. However, the mother engages with her
childs vocalizations as if it were, encouraging her attempts to contribute to the exchange. She guides
her child in the language learning process by initiating exchanges and interactions and elaborating
on a topic.
Vygotsky (1978) also explored the distance between what children know and what they can
come to know through assistance from someone more knowledgeable. The distance between know-
ledge displayed independently and knowledge displayed with guidance was termed the zone of
proximal development. In scaffolding books with a preliterate child, adults appear to operate in the
childs zone of proximal development, adjusting their book-sharing interactions to the childs chang-
ing cognitive and linguistic abilities as the child develops (Van Kleeck & Beckley-McCall, 2002).
This is an important micro-skill to acquire when sharing books with children as adults must structure
the session in a manner that displays sensitivity to the childs current developmental level but also
provides a degree of challenge so as to allow the child maximal potential for growth. So to be
effective book-sharers, adults must operate within this zone of proximal development. It seems that
many parents who regularly read to their children are already able to intuitively adjust or fine-tune
their facilitation of a book-sharing session according to their childs zone of development without
instruction. This is supported empirically as described above in Phillips and McNaughton (1990) and
Haden et al. (1996). Also, De Loache and De Mendoza (1987) found that mothers increased their
language learning demands upon their children as the children got older. Significant increases in
620 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012

requests for the child to say or do something, their questions, and their use of feedback to connect
the text with the childs life were noted (ibid.).
In a similar vein, theories of cognitive modifiability have informed the conduct of child cognitive
interventions particularly those aimed at remediation of language delays; these employ mediated
learning experience (MLE) strategies (Isman & Tzuriel, 2008). MLE is defined as an interactional
process, in which parents, substitute adults, or peers, interpose themselves between a set of stimuli
and the learner, and modify the stimuli for the developing child (Tzuriel, 2001). Feuerstein, Rand,
and Hoffman (1979) describe an individuals propensity to learn from exposure to new experiences
and novel learning opportunities and the consequent change this exacts to their cognitive structures.
Cognitive growth is said to occur as a result of both direct exposure to stimuli in the environment and
MLE. Mediation is carried out by different strategies such as arranging, organizing and sorting out
of stimuli, giving them meaning and expansion so they can be absorbed and assimilated by the child.
According to this model, the development of higher cognitive functioning is a product of mediation
processes. Mediated learning interactions contribute to childrens learning of principles for the
purpose of adapting to new circumstances, an ability to change cognitively, and transfer cognitive
competencies and patterns learned in the past to new situations (Tzuriel & Shamir, 2007). Child
interventions based on these concepts have proven to be enormously successful in aiding cognitive
development both in SA (Seabi & Amod, 2009) and abroad (Isman & Tzuriel, 2008; Kozulin, 2010).

Experimental investigation of book-sharing programmes

Experimental research demonstrates that young children learn increased vocabulary from shared book
reading. Whitehurst and colleagues, in a series of influential book-sharing studies, were among the
first to test experimentally whether improved child language development could be accomplished by
training selected parents to engage in desirable patterns of interaction while book-sharing. In the first
of these studies, Whitehurst et al. (1988) demonstrated that the language skills of a sample of middle-
class, typically developing children (n = 30) could be substantially enhanced via a one-month long
home-based parent-facilitated intervention. Their developed intervention programme termed dialogic
reading, which has been adapted and used by many since, was designed to rapidly accelerate young
children's language development. It rests on the assumption that practice, feedback, and appropriately
scaffolded interactions facilitate language development. The programme teaches adults specific
techniques to use when reading picture books with preschoolers. Rather than simply reading the text,
the adult provides models of language, asks questions, provides feedback, and elicits increasingly
sophisticated descriptions from the child, thus gradually teaching the child to become the teller of the
story.
There are three classes of parental behaviour during book reading that have been consistently
linked with language development and it is these behaviours that form the basis of the dialogic
programme. (1) Evocative techniques encourage children to take an active role and talk about pictures
rather than remaining a passive recipient during the reading process. For example, asking a child a
what or where question is preferable to simply reading to or asking the child closed-ended
yes-no questions or to merely point at objects. This principle is based on evidence that active
learning is preferable to passive learning and that language proficiency, like other skills, greatly
benefits from practice. (2) Parental feedback, when maximally informative, provides the child with
information about language through the incorporation of expansions, praise, and corrective modelling
that highlight differences between what the child has said and what he/she could have said as an
alternative response. (3) Parental behaviours that progressively change over time and are sensitive
to the childs developing abilities over time are thought to be important for encouraging further
progression in the child's language skills. For example, a child should possess knowledge of an
objects label in a book before the child can be asked about the objects function, attributes, or
relations. Several studies have demonstrated such a naturally occurring progression in interactional
patterns (e.g. McDonnell, Friel-Patti, & Rosenthal Rollins, 2003).
Whitehurst et al. (1988) operationalized these concepts in the form of a comprehensive month-
 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012 621

long training programme detailed below. Sessions involved verbal explanation of the book-sharing
techniques, watching the experimenter and an assistant demonstrate the technique and finally the
parent herself/himself would participate in a role-playing session with the experimenter giving
feedback about the parents performance. Each training session endeavoured to impart a particular
set of skills and techniques that would build upon each other. The parent would then be instructed
to practice these skills at home with their child during the two week period between their next visits.

During the first training session, the following seven principles were taught:
1. Ask "what" questions. When children practice language they develop their language skills, and
when parents ask "what" questions they evoke speech from the child. Such questions more
effectively elicit language than does either pointing or asking yes/no questions.
2. Follow answers with questions. Once the child knows the name of a pictured object, parents
should ask a further question about the object. Examples include attribute questions, which
require the child to describe aspects of the object such as its shape, its colour, or its parts, and
action questions, which require the child to describe what the object is used for or who is using
it.
3. Repeat what the child says. Parents should repeat the child's correct responses to provide
encouragement and to indicate when the child is correct.
4. Help the child as needed. Parents should provide models of a good answer and have the child
imitate these models.
5. Praise and encourage. Parents should provide feedback and praise when the child says some-
thing about the book, for example, good talking, That's right, or nice job.
6. Shadow the child's interests. It is important for parents to talk about the things that the child
wants to talk about. When the child points at a picture or begins to talk about part of a page,
parents should use this interest as a chance to encourage the child to talk.
7. Have fun. Parents can make reading fun by using a game-like, turn-taking approach. Parents
should keep the procedures in proportion by simply reading to the child part of the time.
Then during the second training session, parents were taught:
1. Ask open-ended questions. Parents should ask less structured questions that require the child to
pick something on the page and tell about it, for example, What do you see on this page? and
Tell me what's going on here. These questions are more difficult than specific questions, and
at first the child might be able to say very little when asked these questions. Parents should
encourage any attempts to answer and provide models of good answers. Additional open-ended
questions can be asked about the same page. When the child runs out of things to say about a
page, one more piece of information should be added.
2. Expand what the child says. Parents should model slightly more advanced language by repeating
what the child says with a bit more information or in a more advanced form. For example, if the
child said Duck swim, parents should say something like Right, the duck is swimming. If
the child said Wagon, the parent should say something like, Yes, a red wagon. The best
expansions add only a little information, so that the child is able to imitate them.
This relatively short training programme demonstrates that altering the frequency and timing of
parents child-directed speech during book-sharing is capable of exacting appreciable effects on
language development. Post-test scores of the experimental group were ahead of the control group
(in which children were read to in the usual fashion) on two measures of verbal expression;
approximately 8.5 months ahead on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA; p = .0005)
and 6 months ahead on Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT; p = .009). While
differences on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) favoured the experimental group these
were not statistically significant (p = .0655). Nine months later at the follow-up assessment, the
experimental group still exhibited a six-month advantage on the two expressive tests but post-test
differences on the PPVT were no longer apparent (Whitehurst et al., 1988). These results provided
some of the first empirical evidence supporting the widely-held assumption that reading activity with
622 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012

children contributed to their language development. Of particular interest, this study shows that
parents usual reading behaviours are not optimal, even within this motivated, middle-class, suburban
sample. The conclusion then is that even typically developing children stand to benefit from this low
cost programme by modifying their parents reading behaviours and child-directed speech further
enhancing their existing linguistic skill-set.

Dialogic book-sharing interventions with low-income families

What of those children who are at risk for language delay and at the mercy of poverty and depri-
vation? The dialogic reading programme first piloted in Whitehurst et al.s (1988) original study has
been applied and tested to some extent with low socio-economic status samples in the United States
and Mexico. This was borne from the realization that children raised in poverty suffer from dis-
proportionately high rates of illiteracy and other reading deficiencies which are in turn a function of
home environmental variables such as differences in shared-reading activity and the availability and
use of printed materials in the home (McCormick & Mason, 1986). Can the benefits obtained via
book-sharing as evidenced in a middle-class sample be extended to impoverished populations else-
where to counteract these deficiencies in the homes of low-income parents?
A number of studies demonstrate that a brief dialogic programme can produce incremental
improvements in the expressive language skills of children from low-income backgrounds when
delivered in either individual or group formats. Valdez-Menchaca and Whitehurst (1992) extended
the techniques of shared picture book reading used by Whitehurst et al. (1988) to a sample of twenty
2-year-old children of low-income parents attending a public day-care facility in Mexico. Analysis
of test score data revealed a significant group effect with better performance by experimental group
children compared to the control on the PPVT (p = .019), for EOWPT (p = .007), and for the ITPA
(p = .003). Also, experimental group children displayed significant differences in the quantity and
quality of the language produced during a 7-minute book-sharing session; analysis indicated that
these children produced a greater number of utterances than their counterparts in the control group,
F (1,18) = 4.7, p <.001. They were also producing longer, F (1,18) = 4.1 (p = .001), and more
complex sentences, F (1,18) = 4.7 (p = .001), than children in the control group reflecting speech of
a higher syntactic complexity. These findings have been successfully replicated elsewhere in
low-income populations (e.g. Whitehurst et al., 1994). An important caution though; while inter-
ventions with the combined efforts of both teachers and parents resulted in the largest effects on child
language outcomes, schools were unlikely to continue with the small group book-sharing format
citing personnel shortages and time constraints as issues. It is therefore important to address the issue
of the relative effectiveness of parents versus teachers in implementing such a programme. Parents
appear to be more influential in increasing their childrens descriptive use of language.
Lonigan and Whitehurst (1998) suggests that group reading interactions may not be sufficient
to produce broad improvements in children's oral language skills, even if the groups are small and
the type of interaction is optimized. In situations involving one-on-one home reading interactions
parents may be better able to tailor their use of questions, feedback, and expansions to their childs
current skill level. The group format approach in classrooms contains 5 or more children with 5
individual levels of ability and so teachers are less able to tailor questions and feedback to each child.
The result is that some children with more advanced abilities may not be sufficiently challenged be-
cause children with less advanced abilities require teachers to limit the type of questions and feedback
to a level consistent with their abilities. And for others, the interaction may be at a level higher than
is tolerable and beneficial for children with less advanced abilities. If this is the case, then it appears
that the group format may impede the scaffolding process and result in interactions that occur beneath
or beyond a given childs zone of proximal development. Furthermore, children would be less active
and have less opportunity for practice and feedback than in a one-on-one interaction. Deprived
environments such as South Africa where classrooms are overcrowded, under-staffed, and under-
resourced may not be conducive settings for implementing classroom-based dialogic interventions
with the required precision and fidelity.
 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012 623

Numerous studies (e.g. Cadieux & Boudreault, 2005; Lonigan, Anthony, Bloomfield, Dyer, &
Samwell, 1999; McNeill & Fowler, 1999; Pollard-Durodola et al., 2011) highlight an important
benefit of reading dialogically; that children who exhibit language delays, or those who are at in-
creased risk for developing such difficulties, can be assisted to narrow the gap and attain some mea-
sure of skill closer to that expected of their chronological age. This is possible with a reasonably
simple intervention over a short period of time. Hargrave and Snchal (2000) showed that sharing
books in a dialogic manner may be a feasible endeavour in settings with typical teacher-to-child ratios
and with language-delayed samples. However, in severely resource-deprived settings, classroom
application of this kind of intervention, let alone in large groups of 8 children as is usually suggested,
may prove impossible. The difference between the pre- and post-test measure of expressive vocabu-
lary in their study corresponds to an increase of 4 months. This is large considering the 13-month
delay evidenced at pre-test and the fact that development that would normally occur over a 4-month
period was now nurtured after just 4 weeks of intervention. The extent of the language delays seen
here are similar to that seen elsewhere in typically developing low-income samples (Morgan &
Goldstein, 2004). By extension then, the benefits seen here may similarly apply to children from
impoverished environments where language delays are an expected result of their experienced
deprivation.

Dialogic book-sharing programmes in the developing world

It is recognized that children who are raised in contexts of economic hardship lag behind their more
fortunate counterparts on measures of school readiness, vocabulary, and literacy. Furthermore,
children in the developing world experience less exposure to literate environments, libraries, reading
materials, and the practice of story reading is often discontinued when children reach preschool age
(Aboud, 2007). It is therefore surprising that the application of dialogic book-sharing programmes
in the developing world appears scant. Besides the Valdez-Menchaca and Whitehurst (1992) study
in Mexico, this literature review revealed only one other dialogic reading intervention conducted in
a developing country context with a preschool-age or younger population.
In this sole study, Opel, Ameer, and Aboud (2009) examined the efficacy of a 4-week dialogic
reading intervention with a sample (n = 153) of rural Bangladeshi preschoolers. Here, the improve-
ments resulting from the dialogic reading intervention were large; post-test scores yielded a signi-
ficant effect, F (1,152) = 220.87, p < .0001 with an effect size of d = 2. Students in the control group
had an adjusted post-test mean of 80.00 (SE = 4.64) and those in the intervention group an adjusted
mean of 180.12 (SE = 4.74). This study demonstrates that dialogic reading can indeed be effective
in improving expressive vocabulary skills in a low-literacy and low-resource environment when
implemented by teachers in quite large groups. This was not the case in previous studies. In many
of the studies previously reviewed, dialogic interventions favoured the development of receptive
rather than expressive vocabulary. These prior findings also suggested the application of small group
or individual dissemination of interventions, raising a number of concerns and difficulties with group
dialogic interventions in school settings. Seemingly, these difficulties were minimized in this study
by using longer sessions allowing for extensive elaboration and discussion and making use of picture
cards of the new vocabulary words which children were able to view and manipulate during reading
sessions. Wasik and Bond (2001) also integrated additional tangible materials in their dialogic read-
ing intervention, with the intention of enhancing the dialogic experience and reinforcing the voca-
bulary introduced, by providing multiple opportunities to interact with the words in the form of props
and activities related to the content of the books. Here, children who received this experimental
condition showed significant improvements on both measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary
with post-test mean scores of 37.85 (treatment) and 28.09 (control) and 81.30 (treatment) and 72.10
(control), respectively (Wasik & Bond, 2001).

DISCUSSION
There is a clearly established rationale and need for exploring whether there might be simple, low
624 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012

cost strategies directed specifically at stimulating child cognitive development. Of the few cognitive
interventions that have been employed locally, these have been based on Feuerstein et al.s work
(1979) and have shown encouraging results (e.g. Seabi, 2012). But one potential strategy that does
not appear to have been systematically explored in the developing world, particularly in SA, is the
promotion of early and interactive book-sharing between carers and their infants. It is surprising that
literacy initiatives in SA have not more readily employed this dialogic method as it possesses the
potential to alleviate much of this countrys psychosocial burden. For example, the link between
literacy and other indicators of development such as poverty is clear. The demonstrated rate of return
on investments for literacy initiatives in Africa is great; Plonski (2012) reports that for every 10%
increase in literacy, a commensurate increase of 0.3% in annual growth can be expected. Fur-
thermore, South African households are characterised by a lack of learning materials and educational
toys, high rates of parental illiteracy, and nonchalant parental attitudes towards reading that are often
a function of the prevailing cultural norm. Book-sharing is an ideal means for aiding literacy de-
velopment in a context such as this, as we know that the mere presence of books in the home already
exacts some change, and exposure to storytelling and narrative discourse in the context of sharing
books occurs without being dependent on parental literacy (Bornstein & Putnick, 2012).
Some studies, acknowledging the importance of this kind of intervention for impoverished
children at risk of developmental delay, have endeavoured to test dialogic reading with low-income
samples (Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Wasik & Bond, 2001; Whitehurst et al., 1994). The
results here concur with findings in middle-class samples; that dialogic reading can indeed result in
favourable literacy and language outcomes for the poor and to some extent buffer the environmental
impact of deprivation on childrens loss of developmental potential. This is encouraging, especially
when considering the plight of children in SA. Based on the work reviewed here; this sort of
intervention poses much potential for addressing the documented loss of developmental potential in
developing countries.
On the back of an extensive list of empirical programme evaluations, book-sharing is now recog-
nised as a potent means for stimulating the development of a range of important early cognitive and
language skills in children; including receptive (Snchal, 1997) and expressive vocabulary (Opel
et al., 2009; Whitehurst et al., 1994), abstract language (Van Kleeck, Gillam, Hamilton & McGrath,
1997), the syntactic quality and complexity of sentence construction (Valdez-Menchaca &
Whitehurst, 1992), emergent literacy skills (Lonigan et al., 1999), literal and inferential language
(Van Kleeck, Van der Woude & Hammett, 2006), and oral narrative skills (Lever & Snchal, 2011).
Dialogic book-sharing appears to be most effective when implemented individually with children and
via a combination of school and home-based inputs with teachers and parents combining forces to
reinforce the same lessons in both contexts. Some have found favourable results when reading in
small groups to children at school. This extension of individual dialogic reading to small group
applications was borne from the recognition that to increase the interventions reach to those in need,
schools posed a potential point of contact for large groups of children in impoverished areas. This
small group methodology worked well in schools but with some reservations, many of which would
hold true for African contexts. Most children of preschool-age and younger in SA do not attend
schools or day-care centres, as many parents are unemployed and cannot afford to pay for such a
luxury or for those parents who are employed, these opt to leave their children in the care of extended
family members such as grandparents during working hours. The frequency of the behaviours that
are central to the dialogic ideology; active responding, questions and expansions, sensitivity to the
childs evolving interests and abilities, must surely diminish as the ratio of adults to children becomes
larger, as would be the case in the overcrowded classrooms so common in SA. While schools and
educators are an obvious point of contact for disseminating these kinds of interventions, a skills-
transfer model in which parents and carers are trained in dialogic skills would, to some extent,
remedy some of the obstacles to implementation mentioned above. This review reveals that im-
provements in both maternal and child outcomes is possible via delivery of a relatively brief,
reasonably low-intensity training intervention. Parents who receive this training should be encouraged
 South African Journal of Psychology, Volume 42(4), December 2012 625

to transfer this knowledge to acquaintances informally, but better yet through formal peer-led groups
of their own.
This intervention should not only be considered pertinent to educators. Psychology practitioners
who work with scholastic/ psycho-educational issues or, indeed, mother-infant mental health may
also find these methods beneficial. Many psychologists also work in rehabilitation services with
learners who present with complex learning issues or developmental delays often in the presence of
significant language difficulties. The dialogic programme could be thought of as either a stand-alone
module or perhaps as a valuable adjunct to existing literacy or remedial programs disseminated
from community centres or primary health care clinics. Elsewhere, psychology practitioners who
work with improving the quality of maternal-child relationships and the emotional health of both
mother and child will find the empirically demonstrated benefits of increased maternal sensitivity,
emotional well-being, and enhanced relational bonds between mother and infant compelling reasons
for adopting the approach (Bus et al., 1995).
These implementation strategies are all directed at using the home/parent/adult-relationship as
the agent of change. Dialogic reading is a deceivingly simple but powerful method for exacting
multidimensional change across parent and child outcome measures. Its greatest strengths are that
it can be easily disseminated, it does not require an inordinate degree of funds or human resources,
and the impressive results are obtainable independent of parental socio-economic status or literacy
level.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Zahir Vally is currently supported by a Felix Fellowship and a UCT/Carnegie Research Development
Grant.

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