南投的好地方~ Jodie英文繪本故事屋

Preschoolers' Communicative Functions During Shared Book Reading with Mothers and Fathers

Purpose of the Study: This study examined whether the communicative behaviors of preschoolers during shared-reading interactions differ according to child age or parent gender.

Participants: 30 Italian preshcoolers and their parents partcipanted in this study.

Research Findings: The findings showed that older children produced significantly more requests with fathers than with mothers but significantly more assertions with mothers than with fathers.

I paused on the words "requests" and "assertions." What do they mean by that?

Then I found out "requests" was referring to demanding the provision of information, for instance, "What is this?" "Where is the cat?" whereas "assertions" referring to naming or describing objects, actions, persons, events, states. For instance, "this is a cow." "Right!" "Look where they are going to wallow."

"According to these studies, during conversation fathers do not manage to follow their childrens's interest and level of knowledge as efficiently as mothers do. They tend to lose the thread of conversations more easily and they have shorter dialogues with their children. In contrast, mothers seem to adapt their speech to characteristics of the child's conversation more effectively. It appears that fathers were less able to anticipate the interests and the curiosity of their older children. Therefore, fathers did not use Assertive utterances to introduce the text of the book, as mothers did; rather, they waited for the child's questions." (Barachetti & Lavelli, 2010, P. 608)

"A possible explanation of fathers' behaviors is that fathers are altogether less involved than mothers in taking care of their children, especially when the children are very young and need more support; in other words, fathers are less used than mothers to scaffolding their children's activities and conversations." (P. 608)

"Mothers were more able to tune the conversation to their children's capabilities." (P. 608)

"Mothers provide their children with more support by introducing Reading utterances through the use of Directives (i.e. requests for actions that strengthen joining attention on the book) and Assertive utterances (i.e., descriptions, statements, and comments that foster understanding of the topic and the child's engagement in the conversation)." (P. 609)

It also ocurred to me that the way mothers speak and act was calmer and softer than fathers. Take Wu, my friend's 1.8 years old son as an example, when they came for a visit, Wu and I "hit" for each other. We played and chased cats. But Wu would only "looked" Hero in the eye when Hero was holding Milco, our cat.

原來還是媽媽對育兒比較投入啊!

哈 爸爸只是應付應付...