Martine van der Pluijm

146 Chapter 5 parent-child activities from pretest to posttest. In addition, our comparison of dyads in the high delivery group ( n = 15) and those in the lower delivery group ( n = 4), shows an increase in the development of dyads in favor of the high delivery group on one aspect of the quality of interaction (i.e., cognitive support), on all aspects of the quantity of interaction (i.e., number of used words by child and parent, turn-taking), and on two aspects of the quality of language (i.e., decontextualized and other type of language). This effect was only found for Activity 2 and not for Activity 1. The results of our studies show that AHL contributes to SFPs in support of oral language development and to the number of home language activities conducted by the lowest educated parents. Our first study shows three notable findings. First, high numbers of both lower-educated parents and higher-educated parents participated in a whole classroom approach. High levels of parent participation (75% -100%) were also found in our design study and during our observations in classrooms (see Chapters 3 and 4). Our findings contrast with the results of recent studies of a Dutch family literacy program by De la Rie (2018) and Teepe (2018). These studies suffered from low participation of lower-educated parents during program activities and high attrition of parents at the posttest. The difference with the present study can be explained by the differences in teacher professionalization and child involvement during activities. AHL teachers were coached intensively on assessing the HLE and adapting their activities to lower-educated parents’abilities. These adapted parent-child activities taking place in the classroom probably motivated lower-educated parents to continue participating more than the fixed program activities evaluated by De la Rie (2018) and Teepe (2018) (e.g., explaining literacy activities to parents without children present, a fixed program for all parents). Another explanation for high parent participation in our study might be that many children invited their parents spontaneously and enjoyed their parents’ presence. Some teachers encouraged the children to invite their parents to join the activities. These child invitations might have played an important role in parents’ decisions to participate in our program (e.g., Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005). Second, parent ratings of their perceptions of the SFP in general and in support of oral language development, parental self-efficacy, and the HLE were remarkably high at the pretest and hardly allowed growth at the posttest. This might explain why we found no overall significant increases, nor differences in effects for quality of delivery in classrooms. We did find a move forward on the home language activities of the group of parents with the lowest education levels, which is the third finding we discuss. Only the lowest educated parents reported significantly lower ratings at pretest compared to lower- and higher-educated parents and improved their ratings at the posttest. An increase in home language activities is promising as the frequency of home language activities contributes to children’s language development (e.g., Leseman & de Jong, 1998; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2014).