Word Teaching Strategies in Story Reading for Preschool Children

Abstract Shared book reading (SBR) as a teaching practice produces significant effects on development of verbal repertoires in children, especially when associated with strategies of explicit vocabulary teaching. This study aimed to test the cumulative effects of using word teaching strategies, during SBR sessions, on word learning by preschool children. Three sessions of SBR of the same story and a session of complementary activity about the words of the story read were carried out in a class of 13 children aged 4 to 5 years. It was identified significant children’s gains, between pre and post-test, in matching-to-sample tasks for nouns and in naming tasks, both for nouns and for verbs. The results confirm the effectiveness of using word teaching strategies during SBR and their feasibility in the natural classroom context.