Martine van der Pluijm

176 Chapter 6 using stimulating strategies. The three final Steps of AHL can be used to provide parents with the required knowledge and experience that can increase the quality of the parent-child interaction and the quantity and quality of language that dyads use. Teachers are advised toprovide explanations of the importance of the informal nature of parental roles at home and the benefits of warm sensitive behavior for child language development [Step 5: Stimulate parental role development ]. Teachers who participated in our studies facilitated the exchange of beliefs and practices by organizing additional sessions for parents without children to illustrate how children develop language. Particularly lower-educated parents may lack this knowledge that can help to stimulate child language development within their possibilities at home (Rowe et al., 2016). It is important that these sessions remain related to parental experiences, for example, by looking back on examples of successful parental support that increased child language use during parent-child activities in the classroom. Using video or photos to illustrate this support is highly recommended to provide visible clues for parents for applying strategies that stimulate children to use language. Teachers are advised to use Step 6 [Prioritize the use of language] and emphasize a process- oriented approach towards children and consequently model this type of behavior that engages children actively. This process-oriented approach fosters enjoyable interactions, while a performance-oriented approach hampers parental responsive behavior and decreases child initiatives (Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007) . Teachers are recommended to arrange parent-child activities that stimulate the process-oriented approach during specific types of parent-child activities. Examples are forms of role-play that are closely related to parental knowledge (e.g., playing doctor, ordering in a restaurant, or buying groceries) or using the senses (e.g., blindly tasting different sources or feeling different objects). Our studies (Chapter 5) showed that repeated explanations and modeling of strategies by teachers can improve parental responsive behavior (e.g., scaffolding) and the quantity and quality of language. One final recommendation for teachers in this stage, is to select parent-child activities that facilitate the use of language that is not related to the immediate context (i.e., decontextualized speech), by using Step 7 [Expand children’s language]. Empirical research shows that this type of language fosters the development of strong language and literacy skills (Curenton, Craig, & Flanigan, 2008; Rowe, 2012; Van Kleeck, 2008). Talking during prompting boards can contribute to the quality of speech in dialogues in lower-educated families, as shown by the recent research of De la Rie, Van Steensel, Van Gelderen, & Severiens (2020). Additionally, activities that use prompting boards can deemphasize the need for parents to lead the activity and to increase child initiatives. However, during recent explorations (Van der Pluijm, 2019), we found that parents with low literacy skills can also be involved in shared reading activities without decreasing child involvement. In this case, teachers need to deemphasize the importance of