‘Better Beginnings has made me make reading part of our everyday routine’: Mothers' Perceptions of a Family Literacy Program Over Four Years

Abstract

THIS PAPER EXPLORES THE Better Beginnings family literacy program over a period of four years through the eyes of mothers of young children from four diverse communities. It focuses on their reported perceptions of the program and related practices. Better Beginnings, which involves strong cooperation between health professionals, local government and public libraries, was developed by the State Library of Western Australia to encourage parents to share books, songs and rhymes with their babies and young children. The mothers responded to four annual surveys, in which they were asked about their perceptions of the program and its influence on literacy practices and beliefs. Overall, results showed that these mothers reported that they were highly positive about the program; were confident in and valued book-sharing activities; shared books on a regular basis, as did some other family members; and that their child was actively involved in book sharing and related activities. Of particular interest were the mothers' reports of their changing practices as their child matured over the four years of the study and also their child's language-and literacy-related behaviours. Many mothers attributed these changes in practices and behaviours to the Better Beginnings program and gave valuable evaluative feedback for modifications to the program, which has informed its further development.

Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study of a Primary Care–Based Intervention Promoting Shared Reading During Infancy

“…In addition to reading more often, parents in the intervention group reported significantly greater comfort reading to their infants relative to the control group, and also assigned higher importance to shared reading at this age. These findings are consistent with our hypothesis and also with existing literature that has documented increases in both maternal confidence 46 and assigned importance 13 to shared reading following a shared reading intervention during the first 4 years of life. We speculate that the driver of differences found in this study may be attributable to opportunities for more frequent shared reading practice and consistent, clear anticipatory guidance provided by trusted clinicians across the 6-month intervention.…”

The effects of shared storybook reading on word learning: A meta-analysis.

“…confirm their novelty (e.g., forlorn, Beck & McKeown, 2007), sophisticated words selected to ensure their relative novelty for the target age range (e.g., departed for 4-or 6-year-olds, Houston-Price, Howe, & Lintern, 2014), or completely novel pseudowords (e.g., manu, Horst et al, 2011). Studies that used confirmed unknown words (e.g., forlorn) included pretests or pilots to determine baseline word knowledge before storybook reading (e.g., Abel & Schuele, 2014; Wilkinson & Houston-Price, 2013) and therefore did not include non-storybook reading control groups.…”

“…Shared storybook reading provides several benefits to young children including parent-child bonding (Barratt-Pugh & Rohl, 2015;Schwartz, 2004), fostering a love of reading later in life (Bus, 2001;Pillinger & Wood, 2014) and learning to sustain attention (Lawson, 2012). Much of children's developing lexicon is encountered through everyday conversation (Weizman & Snow, 2001), but shared storybook reading provides a complementary source of vocabulary (Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015).…”

Early Storybook Reading with Babies and Young Children: Parents' Opinions and Home Reading Practices

“…Another study using a similar approach to the 'Let's Read' program is the 'Better Beginnings' program (Barratt-Pugh & Rohl, 2015). The 'Better Beginnings' program in Western Australia provided 300 parents of young babies (six to eight weeks old) with a reading pack through their child health nurse (Barratt-Pugh & Rohl, 2015). Parents from varying socioeconomic backgrounds participated.…”