Martine van der Pluijm

167 General discussion activities stimulating parents to prioritize the use of language may be important ingredients for achieving gains in cognitive support, quantity, and quality of language. Therefore, Activity 2 may be more suitable for developing this type of behavior than Activity 1. In conclusion, our findings show that both activities contributed to a better quality of interaction. Activity 2 contributed to improved parental cognitive support, quantity, and quality of language but was dependent on good teacher guidance (e.g., emphasizing the importance of the interaction process instead of child achievement). Activity 2 provided opportunities for parents to develop this behavior by the challenging nature of the activity. Activity 1 can be adapted to make it more suitable for more language support, for example, by asking both parent and child to think of a family member and taking turns to guess who it is (like the game: Who am I?). The two talk and play activities are examples of the types of activities that we encourage teachers to use based on our review (Chapter 2). They are fun, easy for parents to do (i.e., requiring no literacy skills), require turn-taking, and are closely related to parental knowledge. Other examples include talking about the taste of different types of food, about a self-made family book with their own photographs, or about grocery shopping. Teachers were given guidelines to design their own parent-child activities. Some teachers started using easy play activities that were available in their classroom (e.g., Memory, Who am I?) or self-made versions to ensure that all dyads had a game to play. These activities were also useful and feasible for explaining and modeling interaction strategies. Clearly, teachers needed to stimulate parents to prioritize the quality of verbal interaction instead of giving the correct answers. However, occasionally teachers reverted to shared reading activities, encouraging dyads to use books from their collection in the classroom. In such cases, some parents were too directive (i.e., reading the book and ordering the child to listen). We observed this behavior, especially when interaction was related to schoolwork (e.g., a worksheet), with parents emphasizing that children provide the correct answers. Perhaps some teachers preferred these activities because they believe that parental attention for shared reading and schoolwork is beneficial for child language development and thus for parent-child activities with lower-educated parents. This is a reasonable assumption, considering that teachers are generally encouraged to involve parents to contribute to the school curriculum (Sheridan et al., 2019). Changing the focus of teachers to one that acknowledges parental sensitive behavior during fun interactions requires them to change their customary role. This transformation requires embeddedness in school vision and policy and team support. However, this process of change in school vision on parental involvement has not yet been accomplished. Sufficient supportive school policy was lacking in the schools that participated (see Chapters 3 and 4). Literature underlines the need for embedding innovations in school policy to stimulate the sustained use of innovations in practice (e.g., Epstein & Sanders, 2006; Van Veen et al., 2012).