1. Dialogic Reading: A Reading Strategy for Preschoolers

2. What is Dialogic Reading?
A systematic way to engage children in conversation about a storybook to build children’s language and vocabulary.
The teacher works with a small group of children at a time so that each child can see the pictures in the book and the teacher can engage in conversation with each child.
Dialogic reading techniques guide the teacher to engage in “dialogue” about the pictures and stories in books.
Dialogic reading is based on the idea that “How we read to children is as important as how frequently we read to them.”

3. What’s the difference?
When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens.
In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story. The adult becomes the listener, the questioner, the audience for the child.
Children learn most from books when they are actively involved.
No one can learn to play the piano just by listening to someone else play. Likewise no one can learn to read by just listening to someone else read.

4. Dialogic Reading Works
Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development.
Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.
Over a third of children in the U.S. enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills that are required to do well in school. Children who start behind generally stay behind – they drop out, they turn off. Their lives are at risk.
Source: Read Together, Talk Together by Whitehurst
Before we learn about the strategy, let’s reflect on why it is important to incorporate vocabulary and language instruction into the classroom. As you can see, the research shows that it is a very effective method of increasing the size and diversity of children’s knowledge about the world and the words we use to describe it.

6. Dialogic Reading Framework
Dialogic reading uses a scaffolded method of assessing and supporting children’s vocabulary and language development. As the child becomes increasingly familiar with a book, the adult uses higher-level prompts to encourage the child to go beyond naming objects in the pictures to thinking more about what is happening in the pictures and how this relates to the child’s own experiences.
The acronyms PEER and CROWD can help teachers prepare for dialogic reading and remember the sequence and types of prompts to use. First the teacher would use a prompt, by using one of the CROWD questions. Then the teacher would evaluate and expand on the responses, and then repeat the prompt to see if the children had more to add.

7. The fundamental reading technique in dialogic reading is the PEER sequence.
Prompt
What is animal is this? E
Evaluate
That's right! It is a bear.
Expand
What color is the bear? R
Repeat the prompt
Good job! It is a brown bear . That’s called a Grizzly bear. Can you say Grizzly bear?

8. Five Type of Prompts for PEER Sequence
Completion
"Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you ___" R
Recall
"What are some animals we meet in this book?” O
Open Ended
"What's your favorite animal? What do you like about it?" W
Wh- prompts
Ask who, what, where, why questions, such as "what animal is this, where does it live, what sound does it make?" D
Distancing
"Have you been to the zoo? What animals did you see at the zoo?"
There are five types of prompts that are used in dialogic reading to begin PEER sequences. You can remember these prompts with the word CROWD.

9. Completion Prompts
You leave a blank at the end of a sentence and get the child to fill it in.
These are typically used in books with rhyme or books with repetitive phases. For example, you might say, “Brown bear, brown bear what do you ____," letting the child fill in the blank with the word see.

10. Recall Prompts
These are questions about what happened in a book a child has already read.
Recall prompts work for nearly everything except alphabet books. For example, you might say, “What are some animals in this book?”
Recall prompts help children in understanding story plot and in describing sequences of events. Recall prompts can be used not only at the end of a book, but also at the beginning of a book when a child has been read that book before.

11. Open-ended Prompts
These prompts can focus on the pictures in books. It should generate more than a single word response
For example, while looking at a page in a book that the child is familiar with, you might say, “What is your favorite animal? What do you like about it?"
Open-ended prompts help children increase their expressive fluency and attend to detail

12. Wh- Prompts
These prompts usually begin with what, where, when, why, and how questions.
For example, you might say, “What animal is this?" while pointing to the picture in the book. “What sound would it make? Where would it live?”
Open-ended prompts help children increase their expressive fluency and attend to detail

13. Distancing Prompts
These ask children to relate the pictures or words in the book they are reading to experiences outside the book.
For example, while looking at a book with a picture of animals on a farm, you might say something like, "Remember when we went to the farm. Which of these animals did we see there?"
Open-ended prompts help children increase their expressive fluency and attend to detail

14. How Do I Implement Dialogic Reading?
The following readings are in a small group ideally no larger then six students.
Depending on what works best for your classroom, it’s important to plan what the other students will be doing.

15. What kind of books work best?
Books that
have clear pictures
have a simple story
are not too long
have pictures of things that are familiar to your class
show action and detail in the pictures
are interesting to your class

16. Building Your Prompts
Write prompts on post its and place throughout your selected book.

17. Activity Time Start your reading dialogue today!

18. Have FUN!
Dialogic Reading is having a conversation with students about books!
Start your reading dialogue today!

19. References Reading Rockets
Books Build Strong Vocabulary- Reading Rockets
Whitehurst,G. (1992), Dialogic Reading: An Effective way to read to preschoolers.
Michele Sprague and Angela Wilmett at