What is Dialogic Reading?
Literacy experts recommend reading with children often as it strengthens relationships, builds healthy brains and prepares them for school . Except for the first reading of a book, it’s good to read a book using the following approach on many pages.
This approach is called dialogic reading and the PEER sequence. Reading Rockets describes dialogic reading as “having a dialogue around the text they are reading aloud together.” Using this approach can help kids build vocabulary and verbal fluency skills and understand story structure and meaning early on in life.
PEER Sequence:
Prompt your child to say something about the book.
Evaluate your child’s response.
Expand your child’s response by rephrasing it and adding information to it.
Repeat the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion.
Here’s an example of how that might look:
Imagine that adult and the child are looking at the page of a book that has a picture of a fire engine on it. The adult says, “What is this?” (the prompt) while pointing to the fire truck. The child says, truck, and the adult follows with “That’s right (the evaluation); it’s a red fire truck (the expansion); can you say fire truck?” (the repetition).
There are five types of prompts that are used in dialogic reading to begin the PEER sequence. You can remember these prompts with the word CROWD.
Completion prompts: You leave a blank at the end of a sentence and get the child to fill it in. These are typically used in books with rhyme or books with repetitive phases.
Recall prompts: These are questions about what happened in a book a child has already read. For example, you might say, “Can you tell me what happened to the little blue engine in this story?”
Open-ended prompts: These prompts focus on the pictures in books. For example, while looking at a page in a book that the child is familiar with, you might say, “Tell me what’s happening in this picture.” Open-ended prompts help children increase their expressive fluency and attend to detail.
Wh-prompts: These prompts usually begin with what, where, when, why, and how questions. Like open-ended prompts, wh- prompts focus on the pictures in books. Wh- questions teach children new vocabulary.
Distancing prompts: These ask children to relate the pictures or words in the book they are reading to experiences outside the book. For example, while looking at a book about animals, you might say something like, “Remember when we went to the zoo last week. Which of these animals did we see there?” Frequent use of distancing and recall prompts should be limited to four- and five-year-olds.
Source: Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Ph.D., Director, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
