Martine van der Pluijm

52 Chapter 2 than shared reading and read and write activities. Second, the combination of oral language and responsive communication strategies seems effective. Third, an adaptive mode of delivery is important for our target group. Finally, child involvement during parent training seems an effective mode of delivery. Below, we discuss possible explanations for each of these findings separately. Talk andplay appear to be themost effective activities for promoting oral language development of the children of lower-educated parents. As argued in our introduction, having conversations with children at home is a natural way for young children to be involved in language use and to learn using it. The richer the language used, the more children’s oral language will benefit from these conversations. Talk and play activities are effective if we assume that these activities directly connect to lower-educated parents’ daily lives and therefore enrich the language exchange between these parents and their children. Coaching parents to elicit rich dialogues by using narratives, conversations, and storytelling in which print does not play a central role are examples of talk activities. Avoiding printed material may be important because lower-educated parents may find literate activities such as shared book reading difficult, and may therefore prefer print-free talk activities (Boyce et al., 2010; Reese et al., 2010a). Play activities seem to be easily accessible as well, especially forms of social play that do not require specific knowledge and reading skills (Landry et al., 2008; 2012). In addition, this type of play (such as “I spy”) is fun and challenges participants to enrich the dialogue by asking questions and by eliciting varied vocabulary. It is not just the nature of the activity itself that may be decisive for the effectiveness of the intervention. The strategies used for eliciting oral communication are equally important (Mol et al., 2008). Both the talk and play and the shared reading studies used a combination of oral language and responsive communication strategies, through which cognitive support is supplemented by an emotional component. This means that parents recognize the child’s needs and follow the child’s interest, and give the child enough time to think and talk, and at the same time challenge the child by using appropriate (open) questions intended to elicit decontextualized language (cognitive support). Research into child-parent dialogues has shown that lower SES parents often use a directive style of communication (Hart & Risley, 1995). The combination of oral language and responsive communication strategies may support parents in changing their communication style to one in which the child becomes a partner in an open discussion or even takes a leading position as opposed to a style in which the adult leads the conversation and the child follows the adult. This challenging role for the child may be an important ingredient of interventions directed at children’s oral language development. When parents use stimulating questions that help children enrich their language use (Swain, 2000), children are stimulated to produce oral language expressing their thoughts in words, which