Effects of parents’ questioning and feedback strategies in shared reading on Children’s language development

This study aims to compare the effects of questioning with minimal evaluation (PE) and prompt-evaluate-expand-repeat (PEER) used in dialogic reading (DR) on children’s language development. This study included 119 typically developing (TD) and 107 Chinese children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by using a pre- and post-interactive DR intervention design. The children were randomly assigned into three groups (the PE, PEER and control groups) and were tested on language skills immediately before and after the 12 weeks intervention. Overall, the findings indicated that using DR prompts had positive effects on the children’s receptive vocabulary, character reading and listening comprehension development. Moreover, mutual feedback with expanded responses was particularly useful to fostering expressive vocabulary and the affective aspects (i.e. reading interest) of language learning in both TD and children with ASD. These findings explain the extent to which prompt and feedback strategies contribute to language skills and affective factors (i.e. reading anxiety and reading interest) in children’s language learning process.