Enhancing Question-Asking during Shared Reading in Immigrant Latino Families

Asking questions about a text enhances comprehension whether the questions are self-generated by the reader or asked by another. Previous parent training studies have focused on Latino parents with low-income and low-levels of formal education and have noted that during shared reading, immigrant Latino parents ask few questions. In contrast, we examine shared reading for Latino immigrant parents who are relatively highly educated, specifically in relation to their question-asking behavior with their older children. The parents in our study spoke Spanish at home and their 3rd and 4th graders had at least 2 years of formal schooling in English. We conducted two studies. In Study 1, without training, no parent asked any conceptual questions. Study 2 showed an increase in question-asking after parents were given a 45-minute training. For the most part, this increase was maintained at the 5-week delayed follow-up (in the second study) with numerically large positive effects. These findings help us understand question-asking practices among immigrant families with school-age children.