Reading books to build your child's language: dialogic reading and more

Reading books with your child is one of the simplest and most well-supported ways to build language. The key is how you read, not how many books you own. Reading that invites the child to talk, called dialogic reading, has been shown to accelerate vocabulary and expressive language compared with reading the words straight through. This guide explains the method, how to choose books for each age, why repetition helps, and what Ontario libraries offer for free.

Why shared reading builds language

Books expose children to words they rarely hear in everyday conversation. A picture book about a farm introduces “trough”, “harvest” and “scurry” in a single sitting. Books also offer repeated, predictable sentence structures, a slower pace than conversation, and a shared focus that makes it easy for a child to connect a word with a picture.

The research is consistent. Whitehurst and colleagues (1988) trained parents of two-year-olds in a specific interactive reading style and found that, after a month, the children had made larger gains in expressive language than children whose parents read in their usual way. A meta-analysis by Mol, Bus, de Jong and Smeets (2008) pooled later studies and confirmed that dialogic reading adds value over ordinary reading, with the largest effects for younger preschoolers. Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002) followed Canadian children over five years and found that shared storybook reading in the preschool years predicted vocabulary and listening comprehension, which in turn predicted reading in Grade 3.

The Canadian Paediatric Society encourages parents to read, speak and sing to their baby every day from birth, and Ontario’s Preschool Speech and Language Program agencies routinely teach book-sharing strategies to families.

Dialogic reading: PEER and CROWD

Dialogic reading turns reading into a conversation. The adult gradually becomes the listener and the child becomes the storyteller. Two acronyms from the Whitehurst research make it easy to remember.

PEER is the sequence for each exchange:

• Prompt the child to say something about the page.
• Evaluate their response, warmly.
• Expand it by repeating what they said and adding a little.
• Repeat the prompt so the child can try the expanded version.

Imagine a two-year-old looking at a page with a dog. You point and say “What is this?” (prompt). The child says “Dog.” You say “Yes!” (evaluate), “A big brown dog” (expand), “Can you say big brown dog?” (repeat).

CROWD lists five kinds of prompts, so you do not ask “What is this?” on every page:

Start with completion and wh-questions for toddlers. Add recall, open-ended and distancing prompts as your child moves through the preschool years. The aim is a few good exchanges per book, not a quiz on every page. If your child wants to just listen some nights, that is fine too.

Choosing books by age

The right book is one your child will engage with. A rough guide:

Birth to 12 months. Board books and cloth books with high-contrast or simple pictures, faces, and rhythmic text. Your voice matters more than the story. Let your baby mouth and hold the book.

12 to 24 months. Sturdy books with one clear picture per page, first-word books, animals, vehicles, everyday objects. Lift-the-flap books invite pointing and naming. Short rhymes and songs in book form work well. This is the age when the toddler word counter can help you track the new words that come from books.

2 to 3 years. Simple stories with repetition and predictable lines, such as cumulative tales and “what happens next” plots. Books about routines (bedtime, potty, a new sibling) give language for real events. Children at this age enjoy completing lines and finding details in busy pictures.

3 to 5 years. Longer narratives with a problem and a solution, characters with feelings, and humour. Alphabet and counting books support early literacy. Non-fiction about things your child is interested in, from dinosaurs to garbage trucks, builds rich vocabulary. Wordless picture books are excellent for letting the child tell the story.

School age. Keep reading aloud after your child can read. Chapter books read aloud expose children to language above their own reading level, and the conversation around the story still matters.

Your public library’s children’s staff can suggest titles for any age and interest, and borrowing is free, so you can try a lot of books before buying any.

Why repeated reading helps

Parents sometimes worry when a child demands the same book every night for weeks. Repetition is doing useful work. The first reading is mostly about following the plot. By the fifth, the child knows what comes next, can fill in the lines, and has mental space to notice new words and details. Research on vocabulary learning from storybooks consistently finds that children learn more new words from repeated readings of the same book than from the same number of readings of different books.

You can keep repeated readings fresh by changing your prompts. Read it straight through once. The next night, pause for completion prompts. Another night, ask your child to tell you what happens before you turn each page. Let your child “read” it to a younger sibling or a stuffed animal. Pick one new word per reading to talk about.

Print awareness

Books also teach children how print works, long before they read. Justice and Ezell (2002) showed that when adults point to and talk about print during storybook reading, preschoolers’ print awareness improves. Simple habits include:

• Running your finger under the words as you read, now and then
• Pointing out the title and the author’s name
• Noticing letters your child knows: “That is an S, like in Sam”
• Showing which way the words go and where the page starts
• Talking about print in the pictures, such as signs and labels

A few of these per book is plenty. The story and the conversation should stay the main event.

Bilingual reading

If your family speaks a language other than English, read in that language. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s guidance on learning two languages is clear that a strong first language supports the second, and that children do not become confused by exposure to two languages. Reading in the home language builds vocabulary, story understanding and print awareness that transfer to English at school.

Practical ideas:

• Borrow books in your home language from the library; many Ontario library systems carry collections in dozens of languages.
• Tell the story in your language even if the book is in English. Describe the pictures and ask prompts in the language you speak most comfortably.
• Use dual-language books if you like, but do not feel you must translate every page.
• Let each parent read in their own language if the household has two.

Our guide to bilingual children and speech delay addresses the common worry that two languages cause delay. They do not.

Ontario library programs

Public libraries across Ontario run free early literacy programs that model exactly the kind of interactive reading described here. Look for:

• Baby, toddler and preschool storytimes, usually weekly, combining books, songs, rhymes and movement. Watching the librarian use prompts and gestures is a good way to pick up the technique.
• The TD Summer Reading Club, a free national program run through public libraries each summer for children of all ages, with reading logs, activities and events.
• Library cards for children, free and often available from birth. Many systems have no late fees on children’s materials.
• Multilingual collections and storytimes in larger systems.

EarlyON Child and Family Centres, which are free and found across the province, also run drop-in programs with books, songs and parent information, and some are located inside libraries. The Ontario government’s EarlyON finder lists locations.

What you can do at home this week

Pick one book your child already likes. Read it once as usual. The next time, try three prompts from the CROWD table and expand whatever your child says, even if it is a single word or a point. Keep it to ten minutes and stop while it is still fun. If your toddler is between 18 and 30 months, note any new words that show up in play afterward with the toddler word counter, and compare with the ages in our milestone checklist.

Reading alone does not replace assessment if you have a concern about your child’s language. Our guides on how many words a toddler should say and everyday strategies to help your child talk explain what to watch for and when to ask a registered speech-language pathologist for an assessment.