Shared Book Reading: Parental Goals Across the Primary Grades and Goal-Behavior Relationships in Junior Kindergarten

Two studies are reported. The first investigated goals for reading with their children held by 294 parents in a cross-sectional sample from junior kindergarten through Grade 3, how these goals are related to parent beliefs about the development of literacy skills, and how these goals may differ across the primary years. The second examined how goals relate to parent behavior. From a different sample of 119 parents completing the same goal survey and observed in shared book reading, a subsample of 42 parents with contrasting goals was selected for analysis. Findings indicated 5 distinct parent goals for shared book reading—Stimulate Development, Foster Reading, Bond With Child, Soothe Child, and Enjoy Books—with the goals of enjoying books and bonding with the child rated the highest and equally highly at each grade. These were followed by fostering reading, stimulating their child's development, and lastly soothing their child. The goal of fostering reading was more highly rated by parents of Grade 1 children than by parents of children in any other grade. Only a modest relationship between goals and beliefs was found. Finally, parents who rated fostering reading high as a goal engaged in more print-referencing behaviors and echoed more reading than did parents with contrasting goal profiles.     

Self,Space and Place: Youth identities and citizenship

This paper is concerned with questions of identity, citizenship and social change as these are experienced by young people in the UK today. In the course of recent changes to the context and content of youth transitions the notion of citizenship has come to the fore as a means of discussing young people's move into independent membership of society. Debates about citizenship in the UK currently encompass a range of complex themes - competency, responsibility and active (community) participation which go beyond an understanding of citizenship as a simply technical or legal term. In this paper we adopt a broad conceptualization of citizenship in order to explore the identity work that young people engage in as they negotiate their way through to social majority. In particular, we consider how young people's need for space, and their emergent sense of place, are aspects of a citizenship identity which young people 'learn', work at and negotiate over in their leisure time.