In a pre-registered cluster randomised controlled trial, 85 lower SES families and their 3- to 4-year old children from 10 different preschools were randomly allocated to take part in The Reader’s Shared Reading programme (intervention) or an existing ‘Story Time’ group at a library (control), once a week for eight weeks. Three outcome measures were assessed at baseline and immediately post-intervention: (i) children's language, (ii) caregivers' attitudes to reading, and (iii) caregivers' behaviours during naturalistic book reading. The current study is part of a wider multi-disciplinary multi-institutional project called ‘How to promote children's language development using family-based shared book reading’. The aim of the project as a whole is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development and use this knowledge to make it an effective language boosting tool for children across the whole socio-economic spectrum. Shared reading interventions have the potential to impact positively on preschool children’s language development and on their caregiver’s attitudes/behaviours towards reading. However, a number of barriers may discourage families from participating or engaging with these interventions, particularly families from lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds. We investigated how families from lower SES backgrounds responded to an intervention designed to overcome these barriers by, in particular, emphasising the enjoyment of reading, rather than its educational value. The most cost-effective way to tackle the root causes of many social and educational problems is to intervene early in children's lives, before the problems have had a chance to entrench. Key to this strategy is improving children's language development in the early years. Children who enter school with good language skills have better chances in school, better chances of entering higher education, and better economic success in adulthood. Reading is very effective at boosting children's language. Children who read regularly with their parents or carers tend to learn language faster, enter school with a larger vocabulary of words and become more successful readers in school. Because of this, local authorities often commission services to promote family-based shared book reading (e.g. the Bookstart programme). However, recent studies suggest that shared book reading interventions work less effectively for children from disadvantaged backgrounds than originally thought, particularly when their parents have lower levels of education. This means that there is a danger that the benefits of shared reading will be restricted to children from more affluent homes and not get through to those who need them most. To solve this problem, we need to develop a better understanding of how reading interventions work, and of how parents use them. We need to identify what parents do and say when reading aloud with their children and why this makes reading so effective at boosting children's language. We need to find out whether differences in how parents read mean that parents from disadvantaged backgrounds use these language boosting behaviours less frequently. We need to determine how to design interventions that increase the use of these behaviours in all parents, especially those with lower levels of education. Then, once we have identified how reading interventions work, we need to determine how to help parents use them successfully in their daily lives. The aim of this project is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and use this knowledge to make it an effective language boosting tool for children from all social and economic backgrounds. In Work Package 1, we will identify what language boosting behaviours parents use in shared reading, and will determine how parents from different social/economic backgrounds use these behaviours during shared reading. In Work Package 2, we will create four targeted interventions, each focussed on a particular language boosting behavior, and investigate how they are implemented by parents from different backgrounds, and how they affect children's language development. In Work Package 3, we will explore what influences parents' decisions to read or not to read with their children, in order to work out why parents may be unwilling to read with their children and to identify how to make reading a more enjoyable experience. We will also evaluate the benefits of a new intervention, designed by national charity The Reader Organisation, to promote reading for pleasure. Across the project, we will study a range of language skills, covering the core language abilities that are essential for learning to read and write in school.

We recruited primary caregivers and their 3- to 4-year old children from 10 nursery schools in lower SES regions of Liverpool (as measured by indices of multiple deprivation). In a pre-registered cluster randomised controlled trial, 85 lower SES families and their 3- to 4-year old children were randomly allocated to take part in The Reader’s Shared Reading programme (intervention) or an existing ‘Story Time’ group at a library (control), once a week for eight weeks. Standardised vocabulary measures (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-preschool-version 2 and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale-Third edition) were used to assess children's language at baseline and immediately post-intervention. A series of questionnaires were used to assess caregivers' attitudes to reading. Finally, in a smaller sub-sample (n = 6 families) caregivers' and their children were video recorded during naturalistic book reading and their utterances were transcribed using a programme called Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN).