Effects of Interactive Book Reading for Increasing Children’s Knowledge of Instructional Verbs

Interactive book reading (IBR) has proven effective for increasing children’s lexicons with most of the results based on students’ learning of nouns. Little is known about the application of IBR to instructional verbs (i.e., words used during the instruction of academic content). To address this gap, 122 prekindergarten children were recruited from seven elementary schools. Each school was randomly assigned to the intervention group or the control group. Children in the intervention group were taught 12 instructional verbs across a 3-week period using interactive book-reading strategies. Children assigned to the control group only received implicit exposure to instructional verbs during teacher talk. Children in the book-reading group knew significantly more words on a receptive picture identification task than children in the control group both at posttesting and at follow-up testing in the fall. No significant group differences were noted at spring testing.