Enhancing young children’s language acquisition through parent–child book-sharing - A randomized trial in rural Kenya

Jul 19, 2026

Worldwide, 250 million children under five do not meet developmental potential due to insufficient nutrition and limited cognitive stimulation in early childhood. While parent support programs help, many are costly and resource intensive. This study tests a scalable, cost-effective dialogic reading–based intervention using culturally and linguistically appropriate local-language storybooks in rural Kenya via a cluster randomized trial with five arms. Parent training with book provision increased reading frequency, improved interaction quality, and raised storybook-specific expressive vocabulary, with benefits for both illiterate and literate caregivers' children.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time30 min

Introduction

Book-sharing as a “vocabulary acquisition device”

Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Early Childhood Research Quarterly 50 (2020) 179–190 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Early Childhood Research Quarterly | Enhancing young children’s language acquisition through parent–child book-sharing: A randomized trial in rural Kenya | | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Heather A. Knauer a, 1 , Pamela Jakielab , Owen Ozier c,∗ , Frances Aboudd , Lia C.H. Fernald a a University of California, School of Public Health, Berkeley, United States b Centerfor Global Development, United States c The World Bank, Development Research Group, United States d McGill University, Department of Psychology, Canada | | | | | a r t i c l e i n f o | | a b s t r a c t | | | Article history: Received 1 March 2018 Received in revised form 12 December 2018 Accepted 5 January 2019 Available online 30 April 2019 | | Worldwide, 250 million children under ﬁve (43%) are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support programs have shown signiﬁcant beneﬁts for children’s development, but the programs are often expensive and resource intensive. The objective of this study was to test several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents and improve emergent literacy skills in children. The intervention was a modiﬁed dialogic reading training program that used culturally and linguistically appropriate books adapted for a low-literacy population. We used a cluster randomized controlled trial with four intervention arms and one control arm in a sample of caregivers (n = 357) and their 24-to 83-month-old children (n = 510) in rural Kenya. The ﬁrst treatment group received storybooks, while the other treatment arms received storybooks paired with varying quantities of modiﬁed dialogic reading training for parents. Main effects of each arm of the trial were examined, and tests of heterogeneity were conducted to examine differential effects among children of illiterate vs. literate caregivers. Parent training paired with the provision of culturally appropriate children’s books increased reading frequency and improved the quality of caregiver-child reading interactions among preschool-aged children. Treatments involving training improved storybook-speciﬁc expressive vocabulary. The children of illiterate caregivers beneﬁted at least as much as the children of literate caregivers. For some outcomes, effects were comparable; for other outcomes, there were differentially larger effects for children of illiterate caregivers. © 2019 . Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. | | | Keywords: Dialogic reading Word gap Early childhood Local-Language storybooks Primary school readiness | | | | 1. Introduction Poverty has signiﬁcant and lasting consequences for children’s cognitive and language development (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). In low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), 43% of children under age ﬁve do not reach their developmental potential (Black et al., 2017). Even in Kenya, oneof the best-educated countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 30% of third graders can read at the second-grade level (Piper, 2010), and 34% of pre-school children are “on track” for language and numeracy development (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2013). The lack of adequate literacy preparation is a key risk factor for poor performance in primary school worldwide (Behrman et al., 2006). ∗ Corresponding author at: 1818 H Street NW, Mail Stop MSN MC3-311, Washington, DC 20433, United States. [E-mail address:](E-mail address: oozier@worldbank.org)[ oozier@worldbank.org](E-mail address: oozier@worldbank.org) (O. Ozier). 1 Present address: University of Michigan, School of Social Work, United States. One reason children living in poverty do not achieve their potential in te

FAQs

研究的主要目的是什么？

检验一种可扩展且成本效益较高的干预变体：通过训练家长进行对话式阅读，并提升儿童的认知刺激与早期识字相关能力。

干预在肯尼亚农村是如何设置的？

采用聚类随机对照试验，设置四个干预组与一个对照组，招募照护者357人及其24至83个月儿童510名。

干预带来了哪些主要效果？

家长接受配套故事书与对话式阅读训练后，儿童的阅读频率提高、照护者-儿童互动质量改善，并提升与故事书相关的表达性词汇；且文盲照护者的儿童至少受益相当。

Jul 19, 2026

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