Hindawi Publishing Corporation ISRN Education Volume 2013, Article ID 936191, 10 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/936191 Research Article Comparison of Shared Reading versus Emergent Reading: How the Two Provide Distinct Opportunities for Early Literacy Stephanie M. Curenton and Symonne Kennedy Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Stephanie M. Curenton; curenton@rutgers.edu Received 28 February 2013; Accepted 9 April 2013 Academic Editors: B. W. Baldwin, R. Martens, and M. Recker Copyright © 2013 S. M. Curenton and S. Kennedy. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. his study examined mother-child interactions across two types of reading interactions—shared reading versus emergent reading— in order to determine (a) if mothers and children provide the same amount of language input across the two interactions, (b) if the socioemotional quality is consistent across the interactions, and (c) if the language input and socioemotional quality across the two interactions are diferentially associated with children’s scores on early literacy assessments. Twenty-ive mother-child dyads participated in both interactions. Children were given a standardized test of early reading and an emergent reading score based on a rubric designed particularly for the book they were reading. Results indicated that during the shared reading mothers provided more language input (i.e., they talked more), but children increased their amount of talk during the emergent reading, making such input efects null. Overall, socioemotional quality was consistent across the two interactions, except mothers provide more literacy feedback during shared reading. Both language input and socioemotional quality were associated with higher scores on early literacy assessments, but the contribution of these factors varied depending across the type of reading interaction. Results are discussed in terms of education implications for literacy practices at home and school. 1. Introduction Before young children can actually read, they possess a body of knowledge pertaining to reading and writing that teachers, developmental psychologists, and researchers refer to as early literacy skills. hese skills include meaning-based and code-based skills related to vocabulary, morphosyntax, listening comprehension, print awareness, and phonological awareness (for a detailed discussion of skills see [1]). Early literacy skills are developed through repeated exposure to language and literacy activities at school and home, and two of the activities we explore in this study are typical shared reading and emergent reading. In this study, typical shared reading between a parent and child is characterized by a one-on-one interaction in which an adult reads a story to the child and encourages the child to be actively involved by asking questions and allowing him/her to share their ideas and opinions about the story. In comparison, we deine emergent reading as a one-on-one interaction between a parent and child in which a child uses the pictures of book, along with what they remember about that book, to retell the story perhaps with guidance from the parent in the form of questions and encouragement. Both typical shared reading and emergent reading have been shown to be signiicant predictors of children’s later literacy skills, namely their reading and narrative comprehension [2–7]. Work by Kaderavek and Sulzby [8] has compared emer- gent readings and oral narratives, but to date, no study has compared typical shared versus emergent readings in terms of how parent-child interaction might difer across the two reading contexts, speciically as it relates to the language input provided by each participant, how the socioemotional quality of the interaction might vary across the readings, and how the two might be uniquely related to children’s early literacy skills. he purpose of this small-scale descriptive study was to com- pare these two reading interactions and to provide evidence of the quantitative and qualitative diferences between the two interactions.