Promoting Emergent Literacy and Social-Emotional Learning Through Dialogic Reading

Although teachers face increasing pressure to focus on academics in kindergarten, research indicates that promoting school success in young children involves integrating skills in multiple domains. For example, by using dialogic reading—a well-researched shared-reading technique—and books with strong social-emotional content, teachers can emphasize the overlapping areas between emergent literacy and social-emotional learning to create a more powerful learning experience in both domains. Dialogic reading includes strategic questioning and responding to children while reading a book. It involves multiple readings and conversations about books with children in small groups. Studied for a decade in diverse settings of 2- to 6-year-olds, dialogic reading has been shown to have a positive effect on oral language development, a cornerstone of emergent literacy. In the small-group setting of dialogic reading, children also benefit from the social experience of listening to others, taking turns, and getting to know their peers. Using dialogic reading with books with social-emotional content, teachers can follow the readings with related activities where social-emotional skills are modeled, coached, and cued. Numerous suggestions for how to begin using dialogic reading, incorporate social-emotional learning, and involve families are discussed.