The link between preschoolers’ phonological awareness and mothers’ book-reading and reminiscing practices in low-income families

Leyva, Diana, Sparks, Alison, & Reese, Elaine. (2012). The link between preschoolers’ phonological awareness and mothers’ book-reading and reminiscing practices in low-income families. Journal of Literacy Research, 44(8), 426-447.


This study debunks the often-held belief that the homes of low-income families cannot be good environments for nurturing young children’s literacy development. Yes, programs like Head Start (where this study was implemented) can help, but there is much that parents can do, too, if you accept Leyva et al’s findings here.

We often think just in terms of parents reading to children when we think of family literacy. While family book reading is undeniably something we want to promote in all homes (not just low-income ones), Leyva et al’s study points also to the value of a certain kind of talk between parents and young children. Specifically, they documented parents’ discussions of past events with their children. They found that the quality of these discussions, which they called “reminiscences” seemed to be related to scores on phonological awareness measures for the Head Start children studied here (N = 54 parent-child pairs). Phonological awareness (which was operationally defined here as pretest and posttest comparisons on measures of phoneme blending and deletion) in turn has often been linked to later reading achievement measures.

Here, “quality of reminiscences” was defined by ratings based upon the proportion of open-ended versus closed (e.g., yes-no) questions parents asked when they were videotaped discussing an event in the recent past with their children. Children whose parents asked more open-ended questions tended to have higher scores on the phonological awareness measures. The authors are careful to point out that the study does not determine that this kind of quality conversation between parents and children actually causes increased phonological awareness; this study was by no means an experiment, and only showed relationships. Still, the finding is intriguing from a number of perspectives. As a literacy educator who has been involved in family literacy outreach projects, I often hear the laments from teachers that low-income children come from “disadvantaged” homes, and if parents themselves do not read well, then the school has to shoulder the entire responsibility for those children’s literacy development. Levya et al’s study shows us that low-income parents can and often do participate in practices that can build literacy development in their children.

If parental talk has an effect on factors that contribute to literacy, as the study here seems to indicate, that is something we could easily work with, building upon the relationships families already have with their children as strengths. Anyone who spends time with children could benefit from learning some relatively simple ways to improve the quality of talk with children. I know teachers who do not ask enough open-ended questions, and they could learn from the findings here as well. Literacy educators could provide demonstrations and support (perhaps even in accessible non-print formats) showing how to provide the kind of high-quality talk between adults and children that the researchers were trying to document here. The researchers provide one helpful, authentic, but brief example of a typical parent-child discussion from the study data. I appreciated the example, but would have liked to have seen a few more transcripts.

I was especially drawn to this article because it attempts to discover strengths that low-income families may already possess. High-quality conversations with children require a certain level of engagement with children to succeed. The authors here explore a number of hypotheses about why high-quality, open-ended talk with children seems to have some promising possibilities. I suspect that the power of the kind of true, authentic engagement that such parent-child talk requires is the key.