Bookstart Around the World 1
Bookstart Around the World The evaluation of Bogs
tart in Denmark shows that many parents were not in the habit of reading with their children or visiting the library. However, the library staff felt that many parents and guardians were interested in their message and the books. During their second home visit, practitioners got the impression that the families had made use of the books they had been given (Espersen, 2006). Logan et al. (2019) calculated children’s exposure to words. They worked out the difference in the number of words that children are exposed to, based on how often someone reads to them. They find a considerable gap in potential vocabularies between children who do and who do not have someone to read for them at a young age. They emphasise that this can have major consequences on these children’s continued language development. The more literacy activities a child participates in, the more opportunities they have for developing their language skills and abilities. The home language environment creates the circumstances for this. In the next section, we will first take a closer look at research on the link between the home environment and actual language development, which will be followed by a description of the studies that have been made on the actual effect of bookgifting programmes on language development. 4.2.2 The impact of the home environment on language development Promoting literacy activities in the home and creating a good home language environment requires insight into the aspects that play an important role in laying the foundation for language development in young children. These correlations have also been seen in some studies. In one study involving a large sample of participants (n=2581), Raikes et al. (2006) showed the links between the amount that parents read with their children and the language development in those children, measured using language tests. The results show that children whose parents are involved in language activities (reading aloud, for example) have better results than children whose parents are not. The authors describe this as a snowball effect, in that regular reading and a child’s language development are related to each other. This effect is also supported by other researchers who describe their findings as a snowball effect (Berg, 2015; Bondt, Willenberg & Bus, 2020). Another study also shows that reading aloud in the home at an early age (2–3 years) affects school results (8–9 years) because the children’s language and other cognitive abilities are more developed (Shahaeian et al., 2018). This effect can also be described as a ‘Matthew effect’ for reading: ‘Children who read better than their peers read more, thereby becoming even better at reading. Children who do not read as well read less, causing them to fall even further behind.’ (Andersson, 2015, translation ours). This can be considered the basis for efforts to promote early reading. Children who learn decoding early on have a greater tendency to create a reading identity, to associate reading with something positive and therefore also read more, which gives them greater practice. The opposite is true for children who are late in their reading development. Andersson (2015) establishes that early efforts to promote reading therefore have a considerable effect on children’s positive relationship with reading. Such a snowball effect, the Matthew effect, or the use of a literacy tree to reason on a child’s language development (Fast, 2015) thus all show that bookgifting programmes that have succeeded in stimulating language activities for children in the home also actually foster their language development. In order to be able to determine the effect of these programmes, several studies have focused on attempting to measure the way that the programmes affect the actual language development in children. This is often measured by using various language tests that measure the children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary. There are many indications that bookgifting programmes have a positive impact on language development in young children. We now turn our attention to the studies that have researched the impact of bookgifting programmes on language development in children. 25/52