Sharing is Caring - Shared Book Reading

Sharing is caring, especially when it comes to books!

Shared book reading (SBR) is a literature-based language intervention. This intervention is an effective way of teaching client's language and literacy skills. Speech-language pathologists use this intervention to focus on underlying language. In therapy, we can use a story book as a therapeutic tool to improve language knowledge and use. This can be done by using the text and illustrations in a book as a source of language stimulation. This intervention includes reading books aloud while commenting, asking questions, and responding to questions. Shared book reading allows meaningful interactions to happen while reading.

The best thing about SBR is that anyone can use this intervention to help a child's language. Research has shown that children whose parents used a shared book reading approach with them show a much higher expressive vocabulary, rhyming abilities, and literacy skills than a control group that didn’t use SBR (Sim & Berthelsen, 2014).

Overall, SBR is something that parents/caregivers, teachers, and SLPs can do with children to help boost language skills. Using this intervention can help increase spontaneous speech, improve expressive vocabulary, rhyming abilities, literacy skills, attending to short-term task, and overall language production. Implementing SBR into your daily routine will not only be a lot of fun, but it can also help expand your child's language ability!

-Shaylee Garrett, M.S., CF-SLP

References

Pollard-Durodola, S., Gonzalez, J., Saenz, L., Soares, D., Resendez, N., Kwok, O., . . . Zhu, L. (2016). The effects of content-related shared book reading on the language development of preschool dual language learners. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 36, 106-121.

Sim, Susan, & Berthelsen, Donna. (2014). Shared book reading by parents with young children : Evidence based practice. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 39(1), 50-55.

Lavelli, M., Barachetti, C., Majorano, M., Florit, E., Brotto, C., & Miottello, P. (2019). Impacts of a shared book-reading intervention for Italian-speaking children with developmental language disorder. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 54(4), 565-579.