Journal Article

Cross-cultural differences in mother-preschooler book sharing practices in the United States and Thailand

ROCHANAVIBHATA, Sirada, MARIAN, Viorica

2021

Overview

Cross-cultural differences in book sharing practices of American and Thai mother-preschooler dyads were examined. Twenty-one Thai monolingual and 21 American-English monolingual mothers and their four-year-olds completed a book sharing task. Results revealed narrative style differences between the American and Thai groups: American mothers adopted a high-elaborative story-builder style and used affirmations, descriptions, extensions, and recasting more than Thai mothers. Thai mothers adopted a low-elaborative story-teller style and used more attention directives and expansions than American mothers. American children produced longer narratives than their Thai peers, whereas Thai children repeated their mothers’ utterances more than their American counterparts. Maternal and child narrative styles were associated. These results suggest that maternal scaffolding styles differ across cultures and influence children's developing narrative skills.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Caregivers / Child / Children & youth / Cognitive Processes / Comprehension / Cross Cultural Studies / Cross-Cultural Comparison / Cultural Context / Cultural Differences / Cultural factors / Culture / Dyadic interaction / Early literacy / Emergent Literacy / Evidence / Female / Females / Foreign Countries / Gender differences / Humans / Interpersonal Relationship / Language / Language Acquisition / Males / Metacognition / Monolingualism / Mother-Child Relations / Mothers / Narratives / Parent Child Relationship / Parent-child relations / Parents & parenting / Preschool Children / Reading Aloud to Others / Reading Instruction / Reading Strategies / Scaffolding (Teaching Technique) / Shared reading / Sharing / Socialization / Storytelling / Thai language / Thailand / United States / Utterances / Verbal communication