Effects of coaching on educators’ vocabulary-teaching strategies during shared reading

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an emergent literacy professional development program enhanced educators' use of vocabulary-teaching strategies during shared reading with small groups of pre-schoolers. METHOD: Thirty-two pre-school educators and small groups of pre-schoolers from their classrooms were randomly assigned to experimental or comparison groups. The 15 educators in the experimental group received four in-service workshops as well as five individualized classroom coaching sessions. The comparison group received only the workshops. Each educator was video-recorded reading a storybook to a small group of pre-schoolers at pre-test and post-test. The videos were transcribed and coded to yield measures of the vocabulary-teaching strategies and children's vocabulary-related talk. RESULT: The findings revealed that the children in the experimental group engaged in significantly more vocabulary-related talk relative to the comparison group. A non-significant trend in the data indicated that educators in the experimental group used more vocabulary-teaching strategies at post-test. The educators' familiarity with children's authors and book titles at pre-test was a significant predictor of their outcomes. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that an emergent literacy professional development program that includes coaching can enhance children's participation in vocabulary-related conversations with their educators.