Spontaneous Utterances: Are They Helpful?

I recently read an interesting article that examined the correlation between children’s spontaneous utterances during a book reading and their ability to comprehend and retell the story later. Many people, myself included before I began my pre-service teacher training, tend to think that teaching literacy to young children consists only of phonics work in the classroom. While phonics plays an important role in literacy at a young age for students, the ability to retell a story also has a function in their literacy learning.

In her article, The relationship between children’s spontaneous utterances during joint bookreadings and their retellings, Young-Suk Kim documents a study done by herself, Jennifer Y. Kang, and Barbara Alexander Pan. The study consisted of mothers that would read a picturebook to their pre-kindergartner and researchers then documented the utterances by both the mother and her child during the bookreading. The child would then be asked later to retell the story to the researchers. This study piqued my interest because of the fact that other studies have shown that maternal solicitation and interactional styles of children likely influence their interaction during a bookreading; however, the child’s own contribution or ‘child effect’ has seen very little research.

The study found that the more spontaneous utterances a child had during the shared reading, the more likely he/she was to retell the story accurately and with more details. The children that could retell the story with the greatest accuracy usually linked the story to their own lives. This is interesting because it demonstrates how children are not seeing books as a chance to practice vocabulary as much as a chance to make meaning and connect to their background knowledge.

While there were limitations to this study and a need for much more data, it is apparent that children’s interactions during a joint bookreading are extremely important to their comprehension of the story. Parents and educators should acknowledge these utterances and reinforce this type of interaction during joint bookreadings. This study is quite eye-opening for a pre-service educator that is trying to decide how much interaction during a joint bookreading is useful. The answer seems to be as much “on topic” interaction as possible.